OPINION: The problem with Fianna Fáil is not poor communications skills. They simply cannot plead ineptitude or shyness
IT IS interesting that the Government puts its disastrous showing in the local and European elections down to its failure to communicate with the rest of us.
God knows that not many of our national virtues bear too close an examination. Our hospitality, for example, has been beaten into a cocked hat by our greed. But it would take an irredeemable cynic to argue that the Irish are not good communicators. The content of our communication may need work, but we can certainly communicate with the best of them.
And Fianna Fáil, particularly, are masters of communication. Funny, lively, clever and great gossips – oh yeah, that is in private. But I would have said, in my limited experience of it over the years, that the Fianna Fáil press machine is second to none for its efficiency and flair.
The thing is that when a good communicator, like Fianna Fáil, fails to communicate as we all know it can, the rest of us get suspicious. They simply cannot plead ineptitude or shyness – we know they’re locked in Government Buildings with their knees knocking.
It’s a shame about the Taoiseach, though. In his rare excursions away from his scripts, he comes across as a witty and down-to-earth type of man who can be quite disarming. When accused of hiding from the press during the election, he replied that the press had managed to find him when he was on his summer holidays last year.
This was a rare burst of humanity in an otherwise calamitous campaign. And even if it was untrue it made you like him, although it did not alter your conviction that he was being brought in and out of Government Buildings in a sealed train, like a plague bacillus.
It seems amazing that Fianna Fáil, who like to think of themselves as the street-fighting men of Irish politics, don’t have the heart to let the Taoiseach off the leash.
It is surprising that the Taoiseach, who was always presented as Bertie’s Rottweiler, and famed for his intelligence – when he was eventually promoted to glory we rapidly became sick to death of being told how intelligent Brian Cowen was – does not insist on a bit of freedom for himself.
Everybody knows that he was a lousy Minister for Finance. But now he’s the leader of the country, and we all have to get on with it. It’s kind of insulting when your government hasn’t got the energy to lie to you any more. Or even to jolly you along a bit.
It’s not an Offaly thing, either. Over in America, they can’t stop Barack Obama communicating, even if they wanted to.
The United States is not without its problems, yet Obama seems to be producing handwritten personal notes for just about everybody.
Last week he met a girl who had taken the day off school in order to attend a town hall meeting with the president in Wisconsin. Kennedy Corpus – now there’s a name to conjure with – is only 12. The president wrote: “To Kennedy’s teacher: Please excuse Kennedy’s absence. She is off with me. Barack Obama.”
Obama doesn't just write notes for members of the American public. In yesterday's Observer, the BBC's Washington correspondent, Justin Webb, revealed that, following an interview with the president recently, he came home with a note for the three Webb children "signed by the president himself".
The note encouraged the Webb children to dream big dreams – and indeed was uncontroversial in all respects. But its very existence shows that even macho journalists are as starstruck as the rest of us. And that Obama, a cautious and analytical man, is not suspicious when it comes to dealing with the public or even, to a certain extent, with the press.
Obama does not wonder whether his notes are going to be held up to ridicule or to analysis, or even to the blazing light of eBay. He does not worry that he might make a mistake, or be seen to be having fun.
It is true that the US president is more like a king, and granted a degree of reverence that would be unthinkable for a European premier.
In Ireland, that level of reverence was traditionally reserved for popes and high-ranking officers of the Catholic Church – and that hasn’t worked out too well.
In Britain the prime minister seems to be regarded as some sort of head prefect – Winston Churchill once said that the British were the only people in the world who liked being given bad news.
We have never responded well to the head prefect approach. But we do respond well when our politicians talk to us as if we were adults.
Give us bad news, tell us you made mistakes, stop blaming other people. A bit of graveyard humour would not go amiss either.
The Irish were once famous for their charm. We bottled it, we flogged it, we sold our charm as hard as we could.
Now it is time that our Government, and particularly our Taoiseach, tried a bit of charm at home.
We’ve had enough of a government in a blue funk. It’s time they came out swinging, or singing or, preferably, both.