CONNECT: Michael McDowell doesn't do "cool". His televised sermon to teenagers about alcohol showed him trying this week, but he failed as abjectly as a drunk with the shakes attempting to thread a needle.
He told his audience - correctly - that the lifestyles portrayed by "MTV and Ibiza Uncovered" weren't "cool". However, he instantly blew the gig by decreeing that being "responsible" enough to resist such ugly hedonism was really "cool".
Big mistake, Mick: dictating to kids what's cool is utterly uncool. The Minister for Justice does ambitious, arrogant and authoritarian with gruesome conviction. He also does argumentative, self-righteous and, in fairness, resilient. But the thunderous self-belief underlying these traits, while politically and socially advantageous, is damning. Michael McDowell has formidable professional qualities, but the sum of them screams "fogey".
Attempts to define "cool" are, of course, uncool. Definitions, being more school than cool, guarantee that. Nonetheless, it does seem that attitude is the primary and inescapable determinant of "cool". It's a mercurial quality, of course, and while it has an aesthetic dimension, "cool" surely has less to do with look - the commodification of the condition by McDowell's worshipped market - than with attitude.
Anyway, that's enough uncool abstractions about "cool". There is, however, a concrete point to them: the attitudes of adults in power can't be divorced from the attitudes of teenagers. Certainly, teenagers may affect to ignore advice from powerful figures. (Many of them may even confuse that with being "cool".) But it's not just the teenagers' fault if they refuse to take seriously Michael McDowell or Mary McAleese.
Politicians generally talk, at least publicly, in a different register from most people. When they pronounce, as McDowell did to the teenagers, their intentions may appear reasonable. But their advice will be heard by psyches undergoing dynamic changes. Driven by raging hormones and collective peer pressure to conform and individuate simultaneously, teenagers naturally resent imperious and fogey-ish attempts to appropriate their world.
It's not only politicians who consistently use a futile register with teenagers. Even long-sober members of Alcoholics Anonymous, who periodically visit schools to warn youngsters, often doubt the effectiveness of their talks. Although such people have deep experience of alcoholism and can recount chilling "drunkalogues", they too generally fail to deter the teenagers most at risk of emulating them.
It's telling that much public "debate" after Mary McAleese's remarks in the US focused on whether she was right to air, if you'll excuse the metaphor, dirty Irish linen abroad. Such a petty reaction, though maybe it deserves minimal consideration, is evidence of the fogey-ness that perpetuates many of the problems it addresses.
Then there's the media. Teenagers and young adults, while acknowledging problem drinking among their ranks, typically dismiss most recent coverage as over-blown. Certainly, some of it has been cartoon-ish, depicting a hedonistic or despairing alienation among Irish youth that is wildly exaggerated. It is serious, but it is not apocalyptic, as though all our under-25s were morphing into a gigantic Manson family.
Meanwhile, the market's lobby groups move to apportion blame. Publicans are arguing that it is exclusively the personal responsibility of all drinkers not to over-indulge. Sure, there is individual responsibility involved, as stressed by "Cool McDowell". But there is collective responsibility too, and a ban on, or at least a serious curbing of, drink advertising would diminish problems far more effectively than any authoritarian identity-card scheme.
But most fundamentally of all, it would surely help if teenagers were asked why they liked getting stupid drunk. Clearly, those who do so like the "buzz" and the annihilation of inhibitions. Serious problem drinkers, of course, won't know the underlying reasons for their problems. But, at least, teenage whingeing about "nothing to do" and "alienation" from adult society and politics could be examined.
Instead, however, what we witnessed with McDowell's utterly uncool performance was an inept attempt to appropriate language that thrives because it is off-limits to people like him. An authoritarian teenager - they exist too - would sound equally absurd, but no more so. Face it, Michael, even the reference to Ibiza Uncovered, a 1990s effort, exposed your fogey-ish concept of "cool".
It is not, of course, as if that will matter to the Minister. After a certain age, even the coolest decline into, at best, "cool limbo". But growing old with some grace can preserve something of the spirit of "cool" and the ability to hear younger voices. Politicians - at least, almost all of them - seem to have been born old. Certainly, it's impossible to imagine that even the young Michael McDowell was ever cool.
He is too vehement and insufficiently understated. If you were 15 or 16 and you witnessed his performance, its false notes might be funny. But they could be grating, for their "I know best" sermonising carries a hiss, albeit faint, of dismissal too. There you are, feeling dorky and projecting a persona to mask your doubts. Alcohol is now an issue in your life and a grinning Minister treats you like a simpleton.
For power-driven Michael McDowell, "cool" may be only skin deep, but for most teenagers, "uncool" goes straight to the bone.