You can imagine Colm Keaveney standing at the door of each radio studio on Tuesday evening, muttering mantras as he waited for his cue.
When they ask about the past, I talk about the future.
Auction politics, auction politics, auction politics.
Government is odious.
Fianna Fáil has shown humility.
Don’t get those two mixed up.
Keaveney appeared on the three main evening shows that day. For PR purposes, it was a necessary buffeting, requiring him to hold a line while clinging to the safety of prepared responses. He would say the same thing three times, went the idea, but listeners would hear him only once.
Listened to back to back, though, they amounted not just to an increasingly tiresome lesson in the discipline of media management but also to an entertaining comparison of how rival presenters – Mary Wilson on RTÉ Radio 1, Matt Cooper on Today FM and George Hook on Newstalk – squared up to the same challenge.
Ding-ding: round one
Wilson sounded weary. Then again, many current-affairs broadcasters sound weary. It is the industry standard, as if they are worn out by cynicism, exhausted by too many spins on the political merry-go-round. But Wilson sounded really weary, the final words of each question collapsing in a heap.
Her interviews with Keaveney were topped and tailed by reports from Tuam and Leinster House, reminders of RTÉ’s reach and its adherence to the old-fashioned report.
Whereas Cooper would later ask Keaveney what his constituents thought, RTÉ could actually pin a few of them down.
As for Keaveney, he retreated to the safety words from the off. Maturity. Humility. Solemn and faithful commitment. Odious. “Auction politics, I call it,” he told Wilson, as if he had coined the phrase. It was the language of mediocrity, not ideology. “What are my politics?” he said. “Mine is the politics of fairness.” With an interviewer too busy racing through the bullet points, that surface was left unscratched.
Ding-ding: round two
If Wilson sounded weary, Cooper, on The Last Word, brought cynicism laced with a touch of amusement at the fun in store. "Why Fianna Fáil, Colm?" Cooper asked. It was a simple question but one whose final words were again tossed off a cliff of despair.
“Humility,” said Keaveney. “Odious . . . Auction politics.”
“Evidence, please,” said Cooper.
Wilson had mentioned clips in which Keaveney had disparaged Fianna Fáil, but Cooper wheeled one out.
Apart from that prepared attack, it was a freewheeling interview, in which Cooper went hunting for answers while toying with Keaveney rather than going straight for the kill.
Cooper was lawyerly, knowing when to ask a question that he, and his listeners, already knew the answer to. “Are you a gullible person? Are you naive? Do you remember the 1980s?”
Which allowed Keaveney to fall back on a phrase so obviously practised beforehand that, with only minor variations, he would use it four times between Cooper and Hook. “I can’t undo the decisions of the past. I was elected for the decisions of the future.”
If Keaveney had a media handler, they would have punched the air at that moment. For everyone else, a facepalm was the appropriate response.
Ding-ding: round three
A flight of stairs separates George Hook from Matt Cooper. Keaveney appeared on The Right Hook only minutes after The Last Word.
Hook: “I’m delighted to welcome . . .”
Keaveney: “It’s a pleasure as usual . . .”
There ended the civilities.
If Drivetime is about being RTÉ, and The Last Word is to an extent about not being RTÉ, then The Right Hook is most definitely about George Hook. He used no clips of Fianna Fáil bashing, and he opened not with a question but with a statement of his own view. From there, he met Keaveney's fallbacks – "odious', "humility", "auction politics", "elected for the future" – with increasingly entertaining derision. "Ah, come on. Come! On!"
Ideology briefly broke out. “You’re a socialist,” said Hook. “No, I’m a social democrat. There is a distinction,” replied Keaveney. Frustratingly, we didn’t find out what it was.
Where Cooper had mentioned the 1980s, Hook reached back to the Fianna Fáil of the 1970s. Where Cooper had been dogged, Hook was dogmatic. He delivered a tour de force of harrumphing, his sighs like the revving of an engine until he was unable to take it any more.
Hook dismissed Keaveney's claim that he cared about fairness by battering him with a controlled tantrum: "No, you don't really. No, you don't. No, you don't care. No you don't care. This is opportunism the likes of which I haven't seen in 11 years on the radio."
And so on.
“You talk about a cynicism in Irish politics,” said Keaveney.
“Yeah, I’m looking at it. I’m looking at it.”
“I respect your views; you’re just going to respect mine,” said Keaveney.
“But I don’t.”
And so it ended.
One man and his soundbites in an evolving bout across three presenters. Each of his challengers was combative, but with varying styles.
The result? Three rounds. Two knockouts. Several badly beaten catchphrases.
shegarty@irishtimes.com
@shanehegarty