Politicians and journalists spend half their time telling each other how to do their job and not being listened to, said the Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, at the Association of European Journalists last week. He will present his first budget on December 3rd, brought forward to harmonise with the EU, but the hacks were as keen for a hint of what is coming as he was determined to stay mum. Although he let slip that rural areas could expect some revitalising special treatment, Charlie abandoned his script on EMU and instead spoke about something that had fascinated him all his life and which would certainly keep his audience awake - the relationship between politicians and the media.
"I think giving out to journalists has a much better payoff than being nice to them . . . If I don't have a go at The Irish Times every three weeks, I actually get withdrawal symptoms. I must remember to talk to my good friend Fergus Finlay about this. He recently announced that he was giving up on The Irish Times because he was cross with the paper. I'll have to explain to Fergus that this kind of once-off attack is not advisable; you have to attack the media early and often. That's the way to be really liked by journalists.
"The great myth about PR is that you have to suck up to journalists. In my view, sucking up to journalists is like keeping a lion in the back garden as a pet." In the beginning there will be grand times and you and the lion may even develop a deep and meaningful relationship, he said, but "when the lion gets a bit peckish, it'll eat you alive. Good journalists will always eat a politician if the longing is on them. Indeed good journalists should eat politicians, if the politicians do things that make them edible. But when we're not on eating terms, we should be a claw's-length from each other."
Nowadays, he suspected, some politicians spent a quarter of their time feeding the lions in the back garden. "I think that's an awful waste of time for both sides. If you don't handfeed a lion, it lies around for a while, but then it gets up and goes hunting and that's what it should be doing. And if a politician gets rid of the lion out of the back garden, the politician can get on with the day job."