Joe Kernen of CNBC's morning business show Squawk Box had a choice when his ignorance was exposed in that interview with the IDA's Martin Shanahan. His astonishment that Ireland was neither in the sterling area, nor on the same island as Scotland was not the problem; plenty of fine people sail on serenely oblivious to our political and geographical arrangements.
However, a more secure person could have made it a learning moment for himself and his viewers – after all, we’re the sprats who nearly brought down the euro zone, so we must be of interest even to the most dead-eyed market folk.
Instead he bulldozed over Shanahan’s sanguine explanations: “Oh my God, you guys gotta get it together over there.” Days later, the keen golfer was still tweeting the IDA’s press man: “Tell me the truth – could I pay for the green fees with pounds?”
The trouble with Joe and his ilk is not the ignorance; it’s the shamelessness.
It’s not a trivial point once you accept that the key to good decision-making is not knowledge but understanding, as Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out.
Irish Water
Into that bullish vacuum falls Irish Water. Its birth – despite various attempts to rewrite history – was unambiguously announced in December 2010 in the IMF’s memorandum of understanding. The then government was directed to begin the process of transferring water services to a national utility “with a view to start charging in 2012/2013”.
All of four years later, Gerry Adams set out to explain why, in just 23 days, he changed his mind about paying water charges, about why on October 13th he said: “Yes, I will be paying”; and on November 5th, he said: “I’m not paying. I’m entitled to change my mind.” We all do it. As John Maynard Keynes put it: “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”
So what was the new information that triggered the radical change in Gerry Adams’s conclusions?
He had had “an engagement with people in Co Louth” – where he has been a TD for over three years, mind, not three weeks – and “was taken by the fear of some of the people of getting those bills”. And after that surprisingly large march, he had a “sense that [the anti-charges campaign] is only going to continue”. In other words, the facts didn’t change; it was his “sense” of the scale of the popular uprising that changed.
He told Morning Ireland last week that all would be grand if the Government would only admit it could easily afford to absorb the €300 million revenue it would have collected from domestic water charges. But the Government said that figure was going to be €800 million, said Gavin Jennings. He then asked if Adams could explain Eurostat's (the EU statistics agency) market corporation test? "No, I can't," came the reply, swiftly buried in a rush of populist verbiage ending with: "The Government . . . should tell the EU to bugger off."
As with CNBC Joe, there is no shame in not knowing the answer to a question (unless you choose to pontificate on the topic, in which case, shouldn’t Mary Lou – an EU specialist – be front and centre?). The shame lies in the patronising assumption that the viewers/voters don’t care.
A serious reality gap was exposed in the man who would be Taoiseach. Instead of acknowledging this, he banged on about “intimidated, threatened and frightened” people to the point where constituents just tuning in might have envisaged a kangaroo court coming through the door instead of a bill from an accident-prone utility.
“The responsibility of those who exercise power in a democratic government is not to reflect inflamed public feeling but to help form its understanding,” said US Supreme Court judge and founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Felix Frankfurter, more than 50 years ago. What might he have said to Adams last week? That a responsible leader would have stopped and teased out the conundrum in Jennings’s question? That, like it or not, some listeners might have learned something from the exchange?
Who benefits from the status quo?
Learning moment
Still, on the upside, we haven’t been dazzled by an Irish incarnation of the charismatic, new messiah, Russell Brand. Yet. The British comedian’s revolutionary “do not vote” advice to his enormous young following has gained him access to the most prestigious media top tables.
Swooping onto BBC Two's Newsnight a few weeks ago, a show with Britain's political and business elite among its panellists and viewers, he could have harnessed it into a learning moment.
Instead he refused to look at a blindingly clear graph (which partly made his point) displayed by the Oxbridge-educated interviewer and blustered: “I ain’t got time to look at a bloody graph . . . It’s a lovely graph, mate, well done, this is the kind of thing that people like you use to confuse people like us.”
He may be right. But what did we learn?