It's all the fault of Yoplait, perhaps. Way back in the 1970s, when tinned salmon was the height of sophistication and we thought pesto was an insect repellent, a smart young marketing consultant persuaded Waterford Co-op there was a way to sell lots of surplus milk. You lash in a lot of bacteria, wait for it to turn sour and lumpy and then add a dash of fruit. You put it in a tiny plastic cup and wait for the public to sweep it off the shelves. Just to add to the scepticism, you keep the weird brand name of the French franchise you've secured. Honest.
It worked thanks to the skills of a marketing consultant called Peter Prendergast. Having persuaded the Irish people they liked yoghurt, he went on to the more challenging task of persuading them they liked Fine Gael. Garret FitzGerald hired him as the party's national organiser. Together with a team of media, PR and marketing experts - Ted Nealon, Joe Jennings, Pat Heneghan, Shane Molloy - he sold the party so well that, for a time, it threatened to overtake Fianna Fail as the State's leading political brand.
The same process was happening in most democracies, of course, as American marketing techniques were applied with success to the promotion of parties and candidates. But it never went quite as far in Irish politics as it has done in the last week. The significance of the coup against John Bruton is that it marked a shift in the relationship between marketing and politics. For the first time, priorities were reversed. Instead of creating a political platform and then using marketing techniques to sell it, this time marketing is the politics.
Anyone reading or listening to Jim Mitchell and Michael Noonan last week could not avoid the language of the market place. In the way they articulated their cause, they were as much a symptom of as a solution to the decline of Irish politics. By slipping into metaphors drawn from industry, trade and commerce, they presented more starkly than ever the transformation of politics into marketing and, by extension, of citizens into consumers.
On Monday last, writing in The Irish Times, Jim Mitchell claimed that "for a very long period we have been in the same position as a government defending a weak currency. You can do it for so long but in the end the market dictates and devaluation becomes unavoidable. Regretfully, John Bruton is like a weak currency which can no longer be propped up."
In their joint statement to the previous day's press conference, he and Michael Noonan compared Bruton to a corporate CEO: "The chief executive of any company or the manager of any football team that had endured such persistently poor results would have voluntarily resigned by now." Mitchell also called Fine Gael "a company that's doing badly". He later told Morning Ireland that Fine Gael's problem was that "we are losing market share". Most alarmingly, Michael Noonan told Pat Kenny "integrity" was a Fine Gael "brand".
A currency, a brand, a company, market share, the dictatorship of the market - these are the images of politics that seemed to come most easily to the minds of two men who would be Taoiseach. At a key moment for the future direction of Irish politics, with a system in crisis, a democracy that barely functions and a deep breach between the State and its citizens, what the would-be saviours have to offer is the language of a first-year marketing student. The Yoplification of Irish politics has moved to a new level.
THE sad part is that both Jim Mitchell and Michael Noonan are men of substance, whose move against John Bruton was, if anything, overdue. If they were smirking airheads, with nothing to offer but platitudes and pretty faces, the infiltration of marketing-speak would be neither surprising nor alarming. But here are two 50something veterans, men who served in cabinet. If they can't tell the difference between a political party and a product, a political leader and a currency, public opinion and market share and a citizen and a consumer, things are even worse than they seemed.
Politics is not a business, and the political system is in crisis because some people treated it as if it were. The tools of the market place - market research, packaging, advertising - are certainly useful and arguably indispensable in contemporary democracies. But even in business, no amount of marketing genius can sell a product that's no good. The problem for John Bruton and for the system is that the basic product - democracy - is in trouble.
The essence of that trouble, moreover, is precisely that citizens are being treated as consumers. The more you have to spend, the more the system has to offer. Precisely as Jim Mitchell puts it, the market dictates.
The challenge, though, is to create a political system in which the market does not dictate. Democracy has to afford each person equality of citizenship rather than the power and powerlessness of consumerism. The constituency for change to which any alternative Taoiseach must appeal is made up of that large swath of the population that sees integrity as more than a brand image and democracy as more than a market place. If Michael Noonan and Jim Mitchell want to talk to that constituency they will have to learn a new language.
fotoole@irish-times.ie