Terry prone:
VB: What would you have done, before the leadership heave, to save John Bruton from his image?
TP: You don't overcome an image problem in a month.
VB: How long would it take?
TP: Would vary with the individual, but wouldn't start with the individual. It is not appreciated how television has changed how people view politicians. Previously, politicians were remote figures on a platform some distance away. Now they are in one's living room, we have almost a oneto-one communication with them. For one-to-one communication to work there has got to be a sense that you are the only person in whom the politician is interested at the moment. Bill Clinton had that capacity - the capacity to go through a room of 100 people and leave each one of them with a sense that for the moment that he talked to them, they were the only person he was concerned about.
That might seem irrelevant to television but it is not. When Al Gore is on television you are left with the impression that he is distracted, that the interview is an interruption from what he should be really about. But with Clinton, there is the sense that he is fully engaged with what he is doing on television, giving a press conference or an interview or whatever, that he is enjoying it.
Bertie Ahern conveys that sense as well, of being fully engaged and of wanting to be there and not somewhere else, anywhere else.
But Mr Bruton sometimes conveyed that he believed he should be about something more important. In one sense, he was absolutely right. Except that the "something more important" can't be achieved any more without actively using - and enjoying - the mass media conduits. VB: What would you advise Fine Gael to do about its image problem?
TP: To start with realities, not image. The central issue right now is that people feel disregarded, disrespected, not listened to. That feeling's not helped by the insulting phrase politicians all seem to use during elections, when they keep talking about "ordinary people". Respect and meet the needs of your audience. Listen to them. It's a key lesson I learned in the theatre. I remember, as a student actor, being a prompter in the wings of a production where an actress, every night, cried on stage. I'd watch the real tears wondering if I'd ever be able to do that.
One night, another actor, Ray McAnally, noticed me. He took me by the shoulders, turned me so I was watching the audience, bent down and whispered a question: "Are they crying?" And of course they weren't. They were witnesses to an actor enjoying herself. It moved them not. That's arguably the central understanding politicians need about media - it isn't about performance. It's about connection.
You also have to disabuse people of current favourite myths, like the one over the past few weeks and months that if Fine Gael could only find a charismatic leader, its problems would be over. Look, at the moment, media priority is on entertainment and celebrities. Remember the day Liam Lawlor "escaped" from Mountjoy? There were dozens, if not hundreds of TV cameras, photographers and reporters outside the jail, all working the idiotic non-issue of what vehicle he was going to exit in. It wouldn't have mattered if the most important policy statement ever issued were presented on that day by a politician with an oversupply of charisma. It would have got no attention. It had nothing to do with news, this was entertainment.
VB: So what should Fine Gael do to make itself more entertaining, even a little bit entertaining?
TB: There is a recurring pattern in politics, not just in Ireland but overseas that when any political party hits a slump, it's all because of communications, that if only they communicated their message better they would recover in the popularity stakes. The reality is that it's usually the content of what's being communicated, rather than the manner of communication, that's the problem. Governments in midsession, for example, always want to communicate their achievements, their delivery on their promises. Doesn't matter how well you communicate that stuff, nobody wants to hear it. Parties need to home in on what is agitating the public at a given time. Only by doing that will they capture public attention.
Fine Gael has mountains of ideas and policies and good people. The good people need to prioritise crisp, vivid, witty inputs and lose the assumption that solid worthiness will make them popular. Publication of policy documents should be much lower in their scale of planned public communications.
Each member of the Parliamentary Party should have a personal and media development plan worked out with them, be given the training to support it - and the technology - and be given feedback. TDs have a lonely life, backbenchers a particularly difficult lonely life. They need management support, contact - same way the outlying branch of a major company needs to be integrated, made part of the centre. It also helps if whoever's working with them has an instinct for what the next big national whinge is going to be.
VB: Where is the next whinge going to be?
TP: I'm not going to tell you but I will tell you where not to look. Forget about young people. There is a lot of talk at present about Fine Gael's lack of appeal to young people and that they need a young, sexy, charismatic leader to inspire young people to support Fine Gael.
The first point about that is that young people don't vote, or a large proportion of them don't vote. They express their opinions the week before the election and then they go to the pub the night the election is on. The people who do vote are older people. The older people are fairly consistently being insulted by almost every political party and it's a mistake. The only way to get young people to vote is by requiring them to do so (in Australia there is a legal requirement to vote). If you want to have the benefit of television you have to pay per view or pay for the television licence, if you want the benefit of democracy you have to vote.
There is another factor. Politics has always been local and it is now possible, because of computerised data, to tap into local concerns and issues and that is the way that politics has to go. Until there's radical reform and restructuring of the TD's role and means of election, they have to be both legislators and a sort of local service industry.
VB: How do you think Michael Noonan will fare as leader of Fine Gael?
TP: I think that Michael Noonan is a well-bred, witty, cultured, man of integrity.
VB: Oh God, that's what they said about John Bruton.
TP: There is also luck, which should not be underestimated in politics. And then there is how you handle bad news. How that is done can be more important than how good news is presented.
VB: Explain that. When you're arrested on a balcony on the 16th floor of a hotel in Florida, doped out of your mind and you have two prostitutes in the bedroom behind you, what do you do?
TP: You do precisely what he did. He managed the bad news superbly. Hands up, yes, I did it, I've been hooked and I'm sorry and I'm working on retrieving my relationship with my family. The art of the unconditional apology is something I would love to teach every politician and so few of them can manage it. There is always a "but" after the apology and after the "but" a justification for that which they are ostensibly apologising for.
VB: I hate unconditional apologies. Who has been the most impressive politician that you've dealt with professionally?
TP: I won't answer that. I've dealt professionally with politicians of all the political parties and I am not going to single out one as the most impressive.
VB: OK, the most memorable encounter, the most memorable professional encounter?
TP: Probably the encounter I remember most would have been with Padraig Flynn. I hadn't met him previously. There was this big man, one of a Fianna Fail group of politicians who came in. I thought he had the potential to give a much better speech than the back-of-the-lorry thing he'd delivered, and so I asked him to identify someone he was close to in his life. "Dorothy," he said. I took the script away and said "Tell it to Dorothy and the first time I hear you saying stuff I don't believe you'd say to someone close to you, I'm stopping the tape." It was mesmerising... Faltering, a little clumsy, but infinitely gentle, infinitely thoughtful. Chills up the spine.
VB: Did you advise him before he went on The Late Late Show two years ago and brought the house down on himself?
TP: I am not saying.
VB: Why are you not saying?
TP: I am not saying why I'm not saying.
VB: What do you do when a politician comes to you and says: "I'm making a mess of things, I'm not communicating my message." What do you do for them?
TP: The first thing that you have to do with anybody, never mind whether it's a politician or not, is to find out what makes them different. What makes them tick.
VB: They are born that way.
TP: What do they dream about, what are their ideals, what do they read, what are the influences on their thinking, what do they want to do in politics, not just that they want to get elected, but what do they want to change?
VB: Are many of them able to answer that question?
TP: No.
VB: What do you do when they have no message?
TP: Send them away. I've actually a couple of times told them that they shouldn't go on television or radio, because they don't have any core. That's the great thing about the work we do, I don't have to share your political beliefs. I don't give a sugar what your belief is, as long as you have something that you believe in, as long as you have some passion to do something.
VB: Do many of them have passion about something?
TP: A fair number of them have it. Probably fewer now because I don't think that politics is a desperately attractive profession any more. In the past, it was the place to go if you wanted to make a difference. I think people who want to make an impact now very often go into law or into journalism and, of course, there is now much greater focus on becoming rich. So very often, whether it's younger politicians or the middle-aged ones now, the first thing that they hope for when they come is "tricks". And it's the last thing that they're ever going to get from us. They want to be told the rules of what to wear, that sort of thing.
VB: What do you tell them?
TP: There is one canard that keeps surfacing and I wish that somebody would nail it to a wall somewhere. This garbage that says that when you go on television 70 per cent of what people remember is about how you look.
People remember how you look in direct relationship to how uninteresting you are. If you are fascinating, people don't have a clue what colour tie you were wearing. But if you give a speech that is completely boring of course they'll begin to concentrate on what you are wearing and on how you look.
VB: On the web-site of Carr Communications there is the following bumph: "Every week we're presented with a new challenged by someone, somewhere in the world. We pull our MBAs, psychologists, journalists and broadcasters together in a unique process called a `meitheal' to address the new challenge and develop fresh, innovative solutions rooted in solid research". Is this for real?
TP: Yes, we do have all such people working for us and we can bring them together on various projects.
VB: Masters of Business Administration? Did you let MBAs loose on John Bruton? Is that what happened to him? Or was it the psychologists that did it?
TP: My son describes the best of what we do as "epiphany training". The kind of training where at some point, the trainee gets hit with a new understanding of the whole communication process, gets new insight - and is bright enough to develop a vast range of skills arising from that flash of insight. It's the most rewarding thing in the world, to watch. But there's increasingly a demand from large organisations for a much more didactic, task-specific, kind of training, and in their evaluation of preferred suppliers of that kind of training, academic qualifications are of much more importance than they are in our view.
VB: You also teach listening skills. What's that? I never heard of that.
TP: This is my obsession. Most organisations start communications training with presentation skills training, whereas they really should start with listening skills. Listening is the essential, pivotal skill, and most people in Ireland don't have even the basics of it. We may be great talkers, but we're such lousy listeners, half the nation now has to pay counsellors in order to get anybody to listen to them. I know this isn't new - Seneca predicted he was going to die in the wilderness of inattention because nobody would listen to him for as much as two minutes, but it's becoming more and more central. If you can't listen, you can't negotiate, motivate, brief, survive media or be even half bloody-well decent as a human being or family member.
VB: I missed that, could you repeat it again?
