Bertie Ahern’s aide-de-camp at the funeral of Katy French

Katy’s story

THE deaths of men and women from drugs overdose is something that most active republicans will be familiar with, having campaigned against this cancerous threat to their communities down the years.
Against this background, it is difficult to read the crass effort to transform the late Katy French into some sort of Irish Princess Di simply because she was blonde, physically attractive and middle class. One cannot but sympathise with Ms French and her family but the reality is that the hundreds of fatalities caused by drugs have not attracted the same attention and Katy’s story has been told in the wrong way for the wrong reasons.
There was little that was glamourous about the deaths of Ms French or the two young Waterford men, Kevin Doyle and John Grey, who died from drugs overdoses a fortnight earlier and who did not, of course, attract the same attention from the media or from An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, who sent his aide-de-camp to the funeral of Ms French.
The cocaine culture that has eaten into Irish society in the last ten years or more is different to the heroin epidemic that was confined to working-class areas. Cocaine is seen today as being smart, cool, even clean and harmless, a drug taken by middle-class kids as well as others.
Some media attempted to delve into the realities of the drug, its effects, its victims and its perpetrators. But the Sunday Independent and even John Waters of The Irish Times wrote about Ms French as if she were Marilyn Monroe. Waters will wince in the near future whenever he is reminded of his recent column on Katy French during which he wrote: “She had a beauty that suggested itself as emanating from an infinity within... She was a child of Ireland in the time of its rebirth... a meteorite of desire plummeting through the Irish zeitgest...” and much more twaddle besides in a column that reached a melodramatic crescendo with the confession: “I am crying, writing this.”

BRENDAN O’CONNOR, of the Sunday Independent, the newspaper that created French when it launched her into the mid-alphabet range of celebs less than a year ago, was, if anything, more embarrassing and even more self-indulgent in his reminiscences of Katy.
In a contrived effort to show the soft, Woody Allen side of himself, O’Connor’s articles on Katy French could not rise above the the usual Sindo syndrome whereby its author becomes at least as important as the subject of his article, Ms French. As an aside, it should be said that O’Connor, whose newspaper created Katy French by photographing her draped across a restaurant table in her lingerie, revealed a total absence of any irony or any trace of humility when accusing other journalists of “hypocrisy” and “exploitation” when writing about the glamour model.
There is method to this pseudo-intellectual, editorial madness, however. O’Connor and his newspaper helped to create French and glorified the supposedly jet-set lifestyle that she and various other ‘beautiful people’ indulged in. The Sunday Independent was anxious to play down the blindingly obvious fact that French died from cocaine while all the other media stated the bald fact about the model’s drug habit and the presumption that she died from her habit. So, O’Connor and most journalists at his newspaper wrote of the young and beautiful model rather than the drugs epidemic in Ireland.
According to The Phoenix magazine, even Bertie Ahern  – who has entered the strangest and potentially most destructive relationship, with Harris and his newspaper – took his orders from Harris and sent his aide-de-camp to Ms French’s funeral, a gesture that is unlikely to be repeated in the event of others dying from a  drugs overdose, unless, that is, they are members of the Celtic Tiger glitterati.