Monday April 13th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
We moaned our way through the boom and forgot all about gratitude
EVEN if you didn’t do everything you planned, this Easter, you probably had a better holiday break than did Joe Duffy, who was minding his own business last week when a car reversed into him with enough enthusiasm to break his leg in two places.
He never saw it coming, since the car snuck up from behind him, reportedly in reverse.
Joe fell to the ground (as you will, when one of your key support systems is rendered inoperative) and did what one does in this situation. He yelled in pain.
According to a good source (Joe himself) while he was lying on the ground, presumably face-up, getting over the surprise and coping with the pain by yelling, at least one passerby came over, looked down at him and asked the obvious question: “Is that you, Joe?”
Oddly, Joe, when recounting this idiocy, seemed more bothered by his own yells of pain (“I’m a complete wimp,” he confessed) than by the daft inappropriateness of the question put to him.
Fortunately, as well as the passersby eager to make sure that they were gawking at the right man, another visitor to the scene happened to be a doctor, who, before the ambulance arrived, examined the broadcaster, briefly disappeared and came back with a syringe of something, perhaps morphine, to ease the excruciating pain.
When Joe, high as a kite on painkillers post-surgery, spoke to Marian Finucane at the weekend from his hospital bed, he got quite exercised over not knowing who the doctor was. Because he was grateful to him and wanted to express his gratitude in a more personal way than “Hey, you out there with the medical qualifications, wherever you are, thanks for reducing my misery.”
Not only was Joe grateful to the passerby doctor, he was grateful to St James’s hospital, where he swore that everybody around him, as well as himself, was getting great treatment. Excellent treatment. The best treatment in the world, in fact.
He was grateful to friends and strangers who had made their concern known to him and his wife June. He was grateful not to be in as bad a way as some of the other patients suffering around him. He was grateful. Full stop.
Now, the fact is that Joe Duffy, stuck in hospital over the long weekend, had good reason to be anything but grateful.
He was the victim of a random vehicular incident (as they’re now called.) He did nothing to provoke the car that ploughed into him and he will not like the sequel to the surgery the injury required. He’s a man who devotes time and energy to keeping fit and who loves activity. No matter how expertly the pins have been fitted in his leg, he’s going to be severely hampered for some time to come. Plus, he’ll be permanently scarred.
Yet he spent no time on any of that. No, he had to devote himself to delivering more gratitude. This time it was to Marian herself and to Gay Byrne, who had, Joe said gratefully, reminded him that nobody was indispensable. (Marian was a bit iffy about accepting his thanks on that one, denying she’d ever said anything so blunt.
It had the ring of Gay Byrne, though, in its tough, “look after yourself, life’s short” kindness.) Isn’t it ironic, that a man who spends his days provoking people into complaint would be so uncomplaining in response to such a personal setback?
He has carved out a niche, through the delivery of sympathetic moans, little sighing nudges and bored mutterings, for the whingers, the disaffected, the moaners, the outraged. Managers of companies in trouble would infinitely prefer to take their chances with Miriam or Mark on Prime Time than jump into the open grave that is Liveline.
Liveline is the radio version of Peig Sayers, rendered less boring than the Dingle Diva by Joe Duffy’s ruthless selection and juxtapositioning of his varied moaners.
The programme has no place for the contented or the appreciative.
You get the feeling that the entire staff of the show regard optimists the way a vampire views a crucifix: as a real and present threat.
They do not want the happy clappy. They want the moany groany. And they’re quite picky, even within that sobbing sub-group.
The programme doesn’t just take any old complainer. It seeks and finds people who are really good at complaining. People who can out-shout each other in the ferocity of their resentment.
Not that we have an undersupply of world-class complainers. During the Celtic Tiger years, we complained, night, noon and morning.
We moaned our way through the good times. Every minor issue that offered, we mole-hilled into a mountain. We became proficient at complaining because we confused complaint with analysis and confused whinge with gravity.
The phrases echo around the aural archive of that decade: “It’s just disgraceful.” “It’s an absolute outrage.” And, of course, “I’m gutted. Gutted.”
At the same time, we lost — if we ever had — the capacity to express gratitude or appreciation. To express gratitude for national or personal good fortune was seen as creetchy-crawtchy. There’s no doubt that we should have been more grateful, during those years.
The rising tide didn’t lift all boats equally, but it did lift an awful lot of boats, and the captains of those boats were never thankful for it. They felt they deserved it.
Which is a pity. Religion and folk wisdom have always seen gratitude and forgiveness as not just meritorious, but as essential for redemption, possibly because each of them tends to derive from a certain humility.
You cannot be grateful unless you have been in a damaged or subservient position and been helped.
You cannot forgive unless you have some insight into your unimportance in the greater scheme of things. (Lack of forgiveness is a trait of spiritually small people who misinterpret personal rigidity as strength of character.) Religion and folk wisdom are supported by modern psychological research, which suggests that gratitude and forgiveness are in our self-interest.
“Forgiveness is good not just for the person forgiven, but for the person who forgives,” observes Gregg Easterbrook, who extensively examined the twin emotions in his book, “The Progress Paradox.” “Similarly, positive psychology finds that people who take a grateful attitude toward life, counting their blessings rather than inventorying their complaints, tend to be healthier, happier and more successful than others. Again it appears to be the sense of gratitude that causes the happiness and health, rather than the other way around.”
Easter is all about the expression of gratitude, the renewal of hope, the sense of redemption.
This year, if we’re feeling economically hard-done by, we should perhaps follow Joe Duffy’s example and cop on that forgiveness and gratitude still apply. We’re alive at an exciting time. Warmth is coming into the sun. We live in a beautiful country.
And, in no time at all, Joe will be back, on crutches, to showcase lives even more miserable than our own.
Talk to Joe. Or, rather, moan to Joe.
He’ll be really grateful to you.
Monday April 6th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Native resilience could yet transform this disaster into an opportunity
Probably the best change of all is the rediscovery of shame.
During the boom years, shame disappeared, replaced by a nouveau riche urge for getting, spending and displaying. It wasn’t enough to keep up with the Jones’s. You had to be way ahead of the Jones’s
This newspaper last week ran a photograph right across the front page. A deeply sad photograph showing hundreds of people lining up in Church Street, Dublin, to get free food from the Capuchin friars. At first glance, the picture evoked those black and white photographs of Americans queuing at soup kitchens during the Great Depression.
But if you studied it, that photograph told a layered set of stories. The people in the queue were mostly male and relatively young, whereas the Depression photographs showed older men.
Or maybe they just looked older because so many of them wore fedoras. The members of the Church Street queue were hatless. They also didn’t hide their faces from the camera.
Queuing for a food parcel was not a shameful activity, as they saw it. It was just what you did in a recession. In a recession, you get pragmatic. Native resilience comes to the fore.
Resilience? Demonstrated by quiet, desperate queuing for food? Indubitably. According to Brother Kevin Crowley, who organises the food handouts, demand has doubled in a fortnight.
While that means people are poorer and hungrier, it also points to a good grapevine. People heard from other people where would be a good place to get something to eat, and got themselves lined up at the right time in the right place.
In similar fashion, construction workers throughout the country are coping by taking on the jobs they’d have been too busy to tackle during the good years. Mostly for cash.
Now, you may believe it’s dishonest that someone would take their (admittedly pathetic) dole money and then sneak off, do the odd plumbing or wiring or repair job, trouser a few €20 notes and pay no tax on it, but the hod-carrier who’s been laid off has a word for that kind of moral code. Po-faced, he calls it.
Just as the mantra, during the boom years, was “You hafta have a laugh” the current mantra is “you hafta survive,” and if that means breaking a few rules set by a bunch of legislators currently held in pretty universal contempt as overpaid, unrealistic and culpable, then those rules are going to be broken.
Most of the adaptive measures being deployed by the country in response to the turndown, even in advance of this week’s emergency budget, don’t involve rule-breaking. What they do involve is significant lifestyle change.
The fact that the traffic in our cities has eased, and that it takes less time to get from one point to another, is the result of so many people abandoning their cars.
Some of them are travelling by public transport, some by bike, some are walking. One man told me, during the week, he was on his way to his brother-in-law’s house in a rural area, to store his car for a couple of years.
“We’ve been a two-car family,” he shrugged. “Now, we have to make choices, and one of them is that we’re becoming a one-car family.
Takes a bit more planning, each day, but we’ll manage.”
It’s a funny thing. Whenever a seminally influential figure dies or a politician of significance retires, there’s always much talk of their departure representing “the end of an era,” which it never does. The ordinary people are never credited with ending an era or initiating another, yet that is precisely what’s happening, unsung and uncelebrated, at the moment.
Almost at a stroke, and certainly within a period of a few months, the majority of Irish citizens have relinquished the expectations, habits and possessions of the boom years.
During those years, the central theme in Irish life was one of entitlement.
That played out, in the construction sector, by an expectation, loudly and constantly expressed, that young couples had an entitlement to get onto the property ladder. (I haven’t seen a property ladder in ages.
Have you?) Stamp duty, which, up to that point, had been an eternal verity, suddenly became an unwarranted and unacceptable obstacle and anything less than a 100% mortgage, made available on the phone within an hour of application, an outrage.
All that has been sheared away and replaced with a new set of social realities. One of those realities is that of 20-somethings and 30-somethings returning to the family home, with all of the advantages (recreation of the extended family, greater contact between generations) and disadvantages (the friction inherent in too many people sharing a smaller space) that shift involves.
Even the pattern of dating among the single has been changed by the move back home.
But the changes are not just those of reduction and resignation to the inevitable. When a public body recently advertised two courses for public participation, one of them in rose-pruning, the other in vegetable-growing, hundreds signed up for the vegetable-growing.
Three signed up for the rose-pruning. Similarly, courses in how to rear chickens in your back garden are over-subscribed. No doubt some TV station with a bit of wit will soon re-run that sit-com series, The Good Life, from several decades back about a suburban couple trying to achieve self-sufficiency in their semi.
That programme is newly relevant, if only because something close to suburban self-sufficiency is easier and cheaper now than it was then. Composters and GreenCones can radically cut down the need to use the local authority waste-collection service. Wind turbines and solar panels can reduce the cost of energy.
Treble glazing and insulation can cut the need for fuel. A water bucket and a cheap mechanical device allows any committed environmentalist to make their own briquettes out of newspapers at the weekend.
Probably the best change of all is the rediscovery of shame. During the boom years, shame disappeared, replaced by a nouveau riche urge for getting, spending and displaying. It wasn’t enough to keep up with the Jones’s. You had to be way ahead of the Jones’s. And the Jones’s had to know it. Every advert played to the self-pander in us: “Because you’re worth it.”
Now, shame has come back into play, and even those who still have the money hesitate before spending it in an obvious way. Hence the scarcity of 09 registered cars.
People who could afford a new car don’t want to look like showoffs.
None of this is to suggest that national resilience can ameliorate the staggering impoverishment of older people dependent on bank shares, or offer anything to young people with cystic fibrosis.
But it can usher in a new era of improved personal health/fitness, where the environment gains much more than it would have in good times.
Dr James Reilly reminded this weekend’s Fine Gael Árd Fheis it was in 1948, standing in the wreckage of a World War, that Britain created a health service that became the envy of the world. He has a point.
Irish resilience could yet transform this disaster into an opportunity. Irish people could build a new era out of the wreckage of the old.
Monday March 30th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Don't confuse the best and the brightest with greedy self promoters
He’s an accountant. He’s a Corkman. He’s opinionated. He’s an old friend. So when he heard me, on RTÉ’s Drivetime, suggesting that Brian Lenihan should levy enormous taxes on the very rich, it bothered him.
He texted me to gently point out that, since I can just about add and subtract and am seriously challenged by multiplication and division, he understood why I would talk complete drivel, but that I should stop it. The professor on the panel had already crushed me on the same topic by saying it hadn’t worked for Harold Wilson.
The French have a great phrase for what had happened to me between the professor and the accountant. They call it “l’esprit de l’escalier.” Meaning that it’s only five minutes after you’ve had a fight with someone that you come up with the killer riposte to how they squelched you. I was halfway up the RTE radio centre stairs when the response to the professor came to me: “But that was in another country, and besides, the politician is dead.”
The original line “But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead,” comes from Marlowe and refers to fornication, but it would have worked. If I’d thought of it in time. Which I didn’t. So I ended up figuring that, with a professor on one side and an accountant on the other, each suggesting you shouldn’t be let out alone, it’s time to add finance to sport as one of the topics never, ever to be addressed.
Except that the two of them are wrong. Much of the argument against taxing the super-rich is akin to the argument about reducing what’s paid to top bankers. If you reduce them to the kind of money the less-than-super-rich get, this argument suggests, they’ll get insulted, sell off their big houses and get the money they deserve elsewhere. To which the answers have to be: a) we don’t care b) they’ll have hellish difficulty and lose a lot more money trying to flog their homes than taking a pay cut and c) where the hell will they go?
Since Barack Obama is putting a ceiling of roughly e375,000 a year on the compensation packages of America’s top bankers, the USA does not currently look that attractive. Canada’s banks are likely to look askance at lads from Irish banking, since they’ve managed, in their understated way, to keep their skirts clear of the rising tide of banking problems this side of the Atlantic. The global financial services world is not awash in competitive offers for Irish bankers, right now.
All of which ignores an even more important reality, which is that the brightest and best are never motivated by money.
The brightest and best are always motivated by the desire to create something, fix something, or turn an ordinary thing into an extraordinary thing. What the last decade in Ireland and the last couple of decades in the US did was confuse the brightest and best with a bunch of arriviste self-promoters given to driving Ferraris and spending a year in Italy to avoid paying tax on companies they sold at a time when Noddy and Big Ears could have sold a company for multiple millions.
This, by the way, is not a sideswipe at Gerry McCaughey, who’s a hell of an entrepreneur and who has merely fallen foul of the New Puritanism which condemns anybody who has any money and who ever took advantage of any completely legal tax reduction measure. Like all Puritanism, our new version is nasty, self-serving, punitive, unproductive and based on a desire to blame others for allowing/encouraging/permitting us to do outrageous things like take 110% mortgages and interest-only loans when, if they had refused us, we’d have had their guts for garters.
The second danger attributed to high income tax for the super-rich is that it will deflate our capacity to attract brilliant minds and encourage some of the existing brilliant minds to retire early. Which ignores the reality that it was a generation of brilliant, highly-paid folk, (in financial services particularly but not exclusively,) which got us to where we are, and where we are is not a good place to be. Not to mention the fact that, whenever a disaster carves off the top layer of commercial thinkers and operators, Cassandra-type predictions are made that it will take years to recover from the loss. It never does. Charles de Gaulle rightly observed that the graveyards are full of indispensable men. Carve off an entire generation of leaders and the next generation sprouts to maturity instantly.
It has to be accepted that bright greedy minds tend to find ways around high levels of income tax. They always have. During the time when Ireland had a ferocious level of tax, allied to DIRT which punishes you for saving money, many clever people in every townland in this country put money overseas. Some of them were later punished for it. But to argue that because a minority of people will find a way to subvert a good policy is a reason to abandon the policy is akin to suggesting that because some people develop blood clots after surgery, surgery should be abandoned. No, you just concentrate on ways of clot-prevention.
The financial equivalent of clot-prevention — the method of obviating long-term tax evasion by the rich — is finding ways to make the punishment temporary. When it comes to income tax, humanity has a poor record preventing permanence of punishment, given that income tax was initially brought in as a temporary measure allowing Britain to fund the war against Napoleon. And turned chronic, long after Napoleon was dead.
However, an interesting start has been made in the right direction, this weekend, by New York’s governor David A Paterson, who has agreed, with his state legislature, the largest increase in state income tax in recent history. According to yesterday’s New York Times, “the plan would raise $4 billion a year by creating two new tax brackets, the highest one affecting those who earn $500,000 or more.”
In New York, they’re already calling it “The Millionaires’ Tax,” despite the fact that it would hit people earning as little as $300,000 a year, which indicates a profound change in thinking about what constitutes the rich and the super-rich.
Let’s face it: in Ireland, over the past few years, many 20-somethings, when their basic salary, commissions, bonuses and dividends from cost-effectively-priced share options were added together, were earning close to that sum in euro. And, with luck, will do so again.
New York has other links with Ireland. The deterioration in its finances since its autumn budget is startlingly close to that of this country’s since Minister Lenihan’s last budget.
Paterson says the harsh new income taxes will last for three years. Our Minister for Finance should follow the governor’s example.
Such a temporary Millionaire’s Tax would give rise to none of the dire consequences of a long-term rise in taxes, keep us within borrowing limits, and prevent our grandchildren having to pay off money borrowed this year.
Monday March 23rd 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Holding fast to the family secrets: Motherhood in heroic terms
OUTSIDE of the Mafia, the family is the most effective repository of secrets, most of them bad.
I know of no family which doesn’t go purse-lipped when the name of a missing person is mentioned, or of a particular disease. TV and until relatively recently, cancer, were seen as bringing shame on a family.
But families still tend not to share the glad tidings that diabetes, psoriasis, epilepsy or depression run through their clan, sometimes skipping a generation only to come roaring back to strike a later generation.
Patrick’s grandmother, May Sweeney, brought up in Boston and of Irish descent, started to go strange in her 20s. She had six children in rapid succession, which might make any modern twenty-something feel a little challenged, but which, back then, was par for the course. After her sixth, however, her peculiarities and her withdrawal became more marked. So, when she dressed up particularly well one morning in autumn 1924 and disappeared without leaving a note, her husband became anxious as the day wore on without any sign of her.
Eventually, he saw her coming up the long driveway to their home in the gathering dusk, her shoes in her hand, her feet swollen from hours of walking. Her husband rushed out to greet her. She stood waiting for him, and when he arrived in front of her, smiled at him, revealing that every tooth in her head had been extracted.
“She had gladly paid for the dental surgery,” her grandson writes, “to stop the voices in her head. The voices had grown in power and strength until she could no longer bear them. The voices told her they would go, happily, if she would free them from her dental cavities. Whether extension of her mind or enemies in her head, these strange voices lied, though; they were still chattering, her empty gums still bleeding, as May collapsed into my grandfather’s arms and was carried inside to an old Victorian fainting couch.”
May Sweeney had schizophrenia, and spent the remaining 31 years of her life at the Rhode Island Institute of Mental Health. Her grandmother, who had left Ireland with her husband at the height of the Irish Famine, is believed to have stepped off the ship onto American soil already enmeshed by the same mental illness.
Patrick Tracey, who has written an account of his family’s secret entitled Stalking Irish Madness, grew up knowing about his grandmother, because his mother visited her every weekend. He grew up in a family of five children, two of his older sisters being non-identical twins. It was a reasonably happy family, despite his father’s fondness for drink and gambling. The children knew that some older members of the family were “unwell” but his mother tended to change the subject whenever their illness came up in conversation.
“What is without remedy should be without regard,” she would say, quoting from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.
Her son understood that her “big worry was that she might pass her mother’s madness down to her own children. She suspected it was genetic, built in, that the mental illness that apparently runs in families ran rampant in ours, and she knew full well the risks. Schizophrenia swoops offstage the one you thought you knew. In his or her place comes a sad alternative, like a changeling. It throws a long shadow, too, the spared suffering from an almost hypochondriac obsession that they too could be carriers”.
Tracey’s mother had planned to be childless and to have a career in law until she met the love of her life, married him, and gave way to his optimistic need to be a father. Patrick, the youngest of the brood, adored his talented, funny, affectionate older sisters, and, perhaps because he was the youngest, was ambushed and nonplussed when the best friend of one of them contacted him to collect his sister off a train, because she was not “doing well”. That, he quickly found out, was an understatement. His beloved sister was suddenly, floridly delusional.
He took her home, trying desperately to follow her wild stories of having had an affair with Warren Beatty before dumping him for Christ. Coming of a generation that experimented with drugs, he assumed that this was episode was some kind of bad trip and that, with treatment, his sister, eight years older than he was, would return to normality and be just fine.
The most shocking reaction, for him, was that of his mother, when she came home later that evening, the expectant light in her eyes dying the moment she saw the condition of her daughter, to be replaced with the infinite sadness of a mother who has lived half her life with the dire dread that the disease which had crippled her mother and great-grandmother would visit one of her children. At a glance, she diagnosed her daughter’s illness.
“It’s the schizophrenia,” she said, and was right.
His sister, Michelle, was eventually hospitalised after a series of shocking actions which included walking naked down the aisle of their local church and verbally abusing the congregation. What bothered Patrick almost as much as Michelle’s illness was the lack of interest shown by another sister, Austine, when he telephoned to tell her what was happening. It never struck him that the disconnected responses he was getting from Michelle’s twin were caused by the disease moving in on her, too. Again, a friend organised her return to the family home.
“Two beautiful girls, child models, each with loads of charm and personality, who left home one day as young women, just as May had, and came home mad,” is how Tracey sums up their story.
Tracey wondered if their shared Irish heritage had anything to do with it, and came to this country to their home county, Roscommon, to explore the family history there. He found that, despite folklore to the contrary, “genetically speaking, the Irish are no more at risk [of schizophrenia] than other people”.
Shortly after the diagnosis of the second daughter’s illness, their mother dropped dead. It was, in some ways, a merciful escape from a life spent visiting daughters suffering the same grievous mental illness as had afflicted her own mother.
When we play out the profitable rituals of Mother’s Day, we rarely think of the mothers for whom the role is more punishment than pleasure, who serve but cannot solve, who do the needful, bear the unbearable, keep up a good front, hold fast to the family secrets.
But we should. Because it’s those women who express motherhood in heroic terms.
Monday March 16th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Ben the brothel bouncer and the need to call a spade a spade
Some people are managers almost from birth, some followers. Which is not to assume either subservience or inferiority on the part of the followers. Many people, over the last couple of decades, got shoved into leadership roles because companies developed an ‘up or out’ theory.
The word “manager” went out of fashion during the boom years. Team Leaders replaced Managers, and Employees became Associates. Whereas Managers could tell Employees what to do, Team Leaders couldn’t tell Associates what to do. Perish the thought. Them days was gone.
Now that we were into the 21st century, it was all about “buy-in.” Instead of telling someone to move a flex from where it was likely to trip three other people, as a Manager would, a Team Leader typically gathered members of the team around to achieve “buy-in” to the notion of flex-shifting. A really good Team Leader would work out a way to convince members of the team that they’d come up with the idea to move the flex all by their little selves, to raise their self-esteem.
All this buy-in guff runs counter to nature. Some people are managers almost from birth, some followers. Which is not to assume either subservience or inferiority on the part of the followers. Many people, over the last couple of decades, got shoved into leadership roles because companies developed an “up or out” theory, which said that if you weren’t promotable, you were no good at all, ergo should be warmly encouraged to take yourself somewhere else, together with your skills and experience and proven capacity to work at some level below the top.
The companies which majored on this soft-and-fuzzy leadership stuff produced warm, unchallenging, consensus-driven men and women with the skills to facilitate groups into chronic inaction. They developed a whole new language around this chronic inaction. They never described an obstructive self-serving, pain-in-the-butt as an obstructive, self-serving etc. Perish the thought. Instead, they described that person as “having difficulty with” or “struggling with” the issue. Problems were always described as “issues.” The old honesty of calling a spade a spade, if not a bloody shovel, ceased to apply.
Bad-tempered, nasty people were described as having “anger management issues.” The words “bad temper” were replaced by the word “anger.” Bad temper is inexcusable in business. So some twit decided to re-calibrate having a rotten temper as being angry, which at best carries an aura of magnificent validity about it — remember the phrase “righteous anger” — and at worst carries a trailing implication of inculpation: they’re angry from birth or because their father was a drunk or their mother wrote about them under a pseudonym or favoured their sister.
Once “bad temper” mutated into “angry” there was no dealing with the belligerent. So people made excuses to facilitate progress.
Those excuses allowed the career progress of people who should never have progressed within organisations. I remember, in the course of a communications audit in one company, encountering a man with the build and charm of a bruiser at a brothel.
I got rid of him quickly, on the life-is-too-short principle, and his team leader arrived within minutes to explain that Ben the Bouncer was a little fragile today. Fragile? Fragile? “He’s fragile like a double-deck bus is fragile,” I said, and the Team Leader’s PA stifled a snigger.
No, no, the Team Leader explained. Ben the Bouncer was having a tough week. His wife had left him. (Good girl, I thought.) He’d had a bit of an incident on the road. This threw me, the way I always get thrown by news reports attributing deaths to “an incident” on the Long Mile Road or the Kinsale Roundabout.
I think it stems from a moralistic desire to remove the blamelessness from car crashes on the theory that there’s really no such thing as an accident. But it makes news reports weird. Describing a car crash as a “road incident” makes it sound like covert vehicular pushing and shoving done with malice aforethought for a fell purpose.
However, let us not lose sight of Ben the Brothel Bouncer. His wife had left him and he’d had a road incident. Quite a vigorous road incident. The other driver was still, at that point, in hospital.
Having had the incident, Ben had then become assertive when the garda who arrived on the scene wanted to breathalyse him. The garda, female and half his size, nevertheless overcame his anger management issues and lashed tickets at him like they were going out of style. Hence, the Team Leader finished, BBB’s fragility today.
“Is he usually a little ray of sunshine?” I asked.
Phrases like “normally more amenable to…” were uttered.
“He’s been here five years,” the Team Leader’s PA said crisply. “During which time he’s never been known to say a civil word to anybody. He’s a complete b****** and an absolute b*******.”
Why didn’t they get rid of him? Several reasons. First of all, he was highly skilled, and getting anybody to replace him in the boom years would have been difficult.
Secondly, by the time everybody realised what a complete tool he was, he’d stopped being a novice and was fully professed, in corporate terms. Thirdly, by the nature of his job, he spent between three and six months in one area of the plant before moving to another, and so the area currently favoured with his bad temper (sorry, anger) just counted the days until he could be decanted onto someone else.
Fourthly, by the time every area within the plant knew him for what he was (a bad-tempered social dyslexic with the human skills of a brothel bouncer) they had — as the Team Leader ruefully described it — “bought in” to his brothel bouncer behaviour and couldn’t suddenly decide they wanted him to become sweet-natured and gambolling through the plant sniffing the flowers on desks. Well, they could and did decide that (although the flower-sniffing would have been a gambol too far) but, HR rules being the way they are, they couldn’t implement their decision. And finally, they didn’t get rid of him because they suffered from irrationally positive expectations. They believed that sooner or later, he would get the message.
“We invest in our people, especially if they manifest challenging behaviour,” the Team Leader told me over the phone.
Ben the Brothel Bouncer had been sent to a prestigious overseas third-level institution to do an MBA. Which was good for the plant, which got 12 months peace, bad for the third-level institution and neutral for Ben, who ended up obnoxious at a much better informed level.
During the boom years, people convinced themselves that avoidance of managers and approaching everything through teams was a fairer way of doing business. In some companies it was and is. In most, it wasn’t. Good managers listen, learn, are respectful, responsible and energetic. They don’t spend forever hoping for buy-in through group therapy.
Those are the managers who will steer their companies through these bad times.
Monday March 9th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Green Idealism without bitchiness is frustrating, like an egg without salt
WHEN the Green Party asked me to serve as a discount X Factor judge at its party conference this weekend, I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.
Never having seen the TV programme, I wasn’t sure whether it was crime or sci fi or worse.
The suggestion was that party members who were going to run for their local councils would go up on stage, make a one-minute speech, and me, Noel Whelan and Donal Geoghegan, the Green Party general secretary, would rate them from winner to ultimate loser.
At that point I balked, reluctant to humiliate the unfortunate selected as the worst, Cowell-style. I got a brownie point from the organiser for balking, but it turned out that no ritual humiliation had ever been intended.
We were to pick the top three, say a few words and buzz off. Although, they hastened to add, we’d be more than welcome to stay for the subsequent craic.
So I headed for Wexford on Saturday afternoon, leaving enough time to get good and lost on the way, because I always do. I can get lost going to the bathroom and regularly find myself in the garage, wondering why I’m there.
On the journey to the sunny south-east, I made one error, which was visiting Enniscorthy en route. The man in my life, who acts as a mobile phone air traffic controller making sure I don’t end up in Perth, seemed to regard going through Enniscorthy as a mortal sin. Since my grandfather hailed from Enniscorthy, I took this amiss.
I did, nevertheless, hit Wexford in daylight and started to search for White’s Hotel. This took an hour and a half. Wexford’s streetscape has been laid out by someone of a twisted nature who must sit in a high window somewhere along one of the winding one-way routes and laugh himself sick at cars appearing for the eighth time, circling with increasing desperation as they try to find White’s. The first time I found myself in front of it, I was so distracted by seeing David Davin-Power talking authoritatively to a camera on the footpath, I drove past the hotel having missed the car park entirely and had to do yet another full circuit of the town before I could get back to it.
They had us three judges lined up behind a table, in the front row of the audience, and while Deirdre de Búrca summed up the speakers from the previous session, we were handed clip-boards with printed forms on which we were to rate each of the 46 speakers.
We were to give them marks and comments on their topic, their presentation skills, their engagement with the audience and their eye contact, plus we could make further comments on what we particularly liked about them and what they might usefully improve on. Each speaker would get our comments — all three sheets of them — in an envelope to which nobody else had access. Clever idea — allowing them to introduce themselves to their colleagues, get a bit of advice while using the first night of the conference for something more than dreary motions.
The chairperson of the session, deputy leader of the party Mary White, told everybody that the first prize was a seat behind the party leader, John Gormley, during his TV address.
No offence to John Gormley, but if I had to impress 600 people in one minute, I’d be hoping for a week at a spa as a prize rather than a seat behind the Minister for the Environment. But to each his own. At least the winner would be seen by his or her constituents in wide shots during the televised bit of the gig.
Of course, when the first person started to speak, I was only getting used to her when I realised she was finished and I hadn’t made either notes or done my markings. Noel Whelan, who had gone to work the moment she opened her mouth, looked smug as I scrambled to catch up with him.
Fair dues to them, they mostly kept within their sixty seconds, with the exception of one small woman who was so undeterred by Mary White’s increasingly irritated tinging of her pen against her waterglass, I thought Mary was going to go over to the podium and ting her pen against the speaker’s head, instead.
Nobody got attacked. That was the weird thing. How can you have a party conference without an attack on another party? How can 46 speakers talk passionately and never once take a pop at Labour, Sinn Féin, Fine Gael or Brian Cowen?
They just don’t do that nasty stuff at all, and it’s very frustrating. Like an egg without salt, it is, to have to listen to idealism unleavened by bitchiness. The Greens are like environmental Quakers. They know they have the way, the truth and the life, and their code prevents them doing what any good Catholic would do: take off after the heathens and heretics and knock the hell out of them. The Greens just look sad that the others haven’t converted. Yet.
Being in partnership with the most hated party in Dáil Éireann didn’t seem to worry the speakers on the first night of their conference at all. Their point of view, expressed in several different ways, was that, for one thing, they hadn’t been in Government when many of the policies that dropped Ireland into the insolvency pond were dreamed up, ergo could not be found guilty of those policies.
In addition, they were eager to suggest — as all small coalition partners always suggest — that things would have been much worse if they hadn’t been at the cabinet table, gently urging Fianna Fáil to see the error of their ways.
This is a line coalition parties share with bad PR consultants. When their client is the butt of every radio jokester and the target of tabloid venom, such a PR consultant sets out to convince the client that if the PR consultant hadn’t been around to smooth down the sharp edges of this or that journalist, the coverage would have been much worse. The client, when they’re listening to this guff, is usually too shell-shocked to see it for what it is.
Mary White dragooned the speakers in half-dozen batches onto the platform and back down off the platform at admirable speed. I had writer’s cramp by the third batch.
“This is like speed-dating, isn’t it?” muttered Donal Geoghegan out of the side of his mouth.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said virtuously.
“You’re filling the wrong form,” Noel Whelan said.
I suppose it was fortunate that I didn’t have the time to add the postscript I wanted to add to each form, begging each of these talented energetic people to do anything rather than go into politics.
They’ve heard all the stories of betrayal and disappointment, and they don’t believe them, exemplifying the old saw that what we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
But maybe that’s a good thing…
Monday March 2nd 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Money not the only way to reward workers - try listening to them
THE current bitching about the outrageous salary levels enjoyed by top bankers is an aspect of equity theory, the idea proposed in the mid-1960s by psychologist J Stacy Adams.
Equity theory starts with the fact that human beings are involved, directly or indirectly, in relationships with others, and instinctively check the fairness or equity of those relationships. If one person gives a present to another, for example, and gets nothing in return, whether that be an acknowledgement or a bigger response, they feel hard done by.
During the boom years, the salaries enjoyed by top bankers did not amount to a major perceived inequity, because the basic relationship was positive. Since the biggest transaction in which most people engage is the purchase of a house, and since banks and bankers, at the time, were effusively eager to lend for that purpose, the fact that the top guy in the bank was paid multiples of what the house purchaser was earning wasn’t experienced as a personal inequity.
Once the projected soft landing turned into the hardest landing imaginable, however, the relationship shifted radically. Once the actions of bankers worldwide and nearer home brought the economy to its knees and crimped the living standards and prospects of the majority of people for the foreseeable future, the remuneration packages of top bankers moved front and centre, and a general demand grew for radical change, for someone to ensure that the salaries of top bankers were immediately cut down. Only a quantum shift in recompense would persuade the impoverished that the proper fairness in the relationship had been restored.
That preoccupation with bankers’ pay has undoubtedly distracted us from a more pervasive and societally dangerous problem that has emerged during the years of the Celtic Tiger. That problem is the fact that, in almost all enterprises, albeit most floridly evident in financial services, the incentive, the reward, the management weapon of choice has been money. And only money.
As a result, managers throughout many businesses have focused on providing bigger and better packages as a way of incentivising staff to work better. Whether it was commission, bonuses, pension contributions or share options, the factor that gave you the guide as to how well you, personally, were doing was money. It started in the private sector and leaked into the public sector via benchmarking.
This unprecedented emphasis on motivation-by-money has had a number of outcomes, all of them negative. The first can be found in the multi-national phrase “compensation package” with its implication that people have to be compensated for getting out of bed in the morning and dragging themselves to work.
To take that view of people as essentially passive and as motivated only by money is to do a grave injustice to human beings. People turn up for work for a multiplicity of reasons, including pride in what they do, the pleasure of completing a task, the fun of genuine sharing with colleagues, the sense of camaraderie delivered within a good workplace. People enjoy meeting targets set by — and with — people they respect.
However, during the boom years, a creeping management malaise resulted from the flawed view of the workforce as a bunch of venal greedy grabbers who could be focused and directed only by giving them fat pay cheques and fatter bonuses.
The pernicious end result of that view is that a whole generation of managers have never been trained in or have forgotten how to genuinely manage people. The recession presents us with a wonderful opportunity to re-learn the essentials of human relations. One of those essentials is that money is only a short-term motivator.
Research with children, many years ago, proved that if you reward a child for good behaviour with increased pocket money or another concrete treat, your action is counterproductive. It doesn’t ensure that the child continues to deliver the behaviour you rewarded. In fact, it may diminish the frequency of that behaviour as the child decides this is something to be done only in response to reward, not because it’s good in itself, and certainly not because it delivers an internal boost to the child’s sense of itself.
It is true, of course, that when people are struggling to meet their basic needs, money is absolutely central to them. But, as Maslow pointed out, once you get above basic subsistence needs, then other factors become more important than finance, except for the very few who are motivated solely by money.
Of much more importance than money, as a motivator, is the sense of personal achievement. The capacity to do something well. The conviction that one has delivered something valuable. Personal achievement is one of the key incentives driving human beings.
Linked to personal achievement is recognition by others. What the father of psychology called “the inestimable gift of your attention to another human being”.
One of the most vivid illustrations of that fundamental truth resulted from an early work study experiment in a place called Hawthorne in the US, where observers went into a factory to look at what made workers work well or badly. The observers were puzzled to find that productivity went up, in one part of the plant, when the lights were lowered in that section, yet when the lighting was intensified, in another part of the factory, the same thing happened. They eventually worked out that what was driving productivity increases had damn all to do with lighting. What was driving the increase in productivity was the fact that, for the very first time, someone was paying attention to the workforce and finding them interesting. Provided with that warming gift, the workers blossomed.
It’s screamingly obvious, this need for attention and affirmation by others. And it’s one of the most ignored and overlooked considerations in motivating people at work. I was horrified, recently, when preparing a woman for a promotion interview, to hear her say that, in 25 years in a public service job, she’d never been told she’d done a good job. Success was negatively measured by this executive and by her peers.
If you didn’t hear from Him Above or Her Above that you’d done something wrong, then you could presume you were doing OK. Dedication and passion went unnoticed. Self worth was never reinforced. The encouragement to tap into talents which had been noticed was never given.
Inevitably, in that situation, an executive ends up measuring themselves by what they’re paid. But what a bitter, coppery-taste-in-the-mouth measure that is. And how lethal a de-motivator it becomes when it is reduced in response to circumstances completely outside the worker’s control.
It’s worth pointing out that entrepreneurship is not based on money, either. The history of great entrepreneurs shows, again and again, that they were motivated by a desire for independence, by a great idea, by a dream shared with a pal — but almost never by the desire to be a millionaire.
This recession offers at least one barbed benefit — the opportunity to re-learn respect for the profoundly important non-financial needs of the workforce.
Monday February 23rd 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Our furry friends are the first to fall victim as the recession bites
No, I don’t know the names of the Brass Neck 10. I do have a list, of course. Everybody does. How many are on your list? Mine has 13 people on it. One way or the other, I’m tearing it up.
I’ve lost the will to get excited about lads pumping up share values, and draw comfort from the certainty that when all is revealed, I’ll know none of them personally. Me, I have friends mainly in low places.
The recession-related news story that really bothers me is the one about people dumping their pets because it’s too expensive to maintain them. I could understand that if foreclosure is imminent and the ESB are getting stroppy about their bill, it might make sense to get rid of the fish, if you’ve four heated tanks of them.
Deep meaningful relationships with fish are rare, although I once had a pair of goldfish named Finn and Haddie, the demise of which made me so distraught, my big sister organised a stunningly elaborate back-garden funeral. It was short of a riderless horse and a 21-gun salute only because the back garden was too small and the neighbours too picky to allow for either.
We don’t currently have fish, but I’m a little nervous that the man in my life might come to the view that eliminating our two cats would be a good cost-cutting measure. Each is the size of a sheep, with an appetite to match.
The minute either of us opens the fridge or lifts a saucepan, they start a campaign to get a bit of whatever we’re cooking, even if it’s the heavily-salted runny brains called porridge Himself eats in the morning.
The problem about them campaigning for porridge is that they’ve usually slept across his legs in the bed like two oversized soft anchors, pinning him in the one position the whole night, so when breakfast time comes he’s got a pronounced limp and severely reduced cat tolerance.
When he swipes at them with the tea towel, Scruffy (who’s as thick as a plank) thinks it’s playtime, while Dino (who’s smart but touchy) lies down in a sulk, usually on the freshly ironed white shirt Himself is planning to wear that day. Dino is coal black and sheds half a ton of hair each day. The end result is that, half the time, Himself looks as if he’d had a fight with a bear and lost.
Whenever he’s going to an important meeting, the entire office has to go to work on him with strips of Sellotape to remove the contrasting fuzz. (We’re so used to him wearing tufts of cat fur, we take it for granted, but clients mightn’t like it…) I’ve never figured out why a white cat will always choose to lie on black clothes, while a black one will go for white ones.
The important thing is their marvellous laziness. Slip them a few slivers of ham and they purr like helicopters, then collapse and go to sleep. Dino goes to sleep as if he was posing for an ad. Scruffy, on the other hand, tucks his back legs under him in a way that makes him look like an oven- ready chicken.
Never let anybody tell you that cats aren’t affectionate. Of course they’re not clingy, tongue-hanging-out adorers like dogs.
If you disappear out of their lives for a week or 10 days, they don’t go into a decline. They do what they normally do, which is eat, sleep and pose. When you come home, they’re not all over you. But they’ll bring you gifts to celebrate your return.
When I came back from a recent business trip, for example, Scruffy brought me a robin in rigor mortis, depositing it neatly in my unpacked overnight bag.
I wept and yelled at the giver, who was markedly taken aback, not appreciating that robins have an emotional hold on humans most vividly expressed in Christmas cards of little redbreasts with notes of music issuing from their open beaks. Robins have an extra heartstring tug for me.
When my father, in his last few years, would be overcome by breathing difficulties while digging his garden and lean heavily on the handle of the spade a robin would come hop, hop, hopping up to him and perch on the cross piece at the top of the digging part of the spade, looking up at Dad and chirping at him. Break your heart, it would, to see the two of them.
One mitigating factor about Scruffy’s recent gift of the poor dead robin was that National Geographic magazine that week carried a feature about robins which suggested that, under their designer gear, they have a fundamentally bad attitude. They’re much more territorial than most birds and will kill each other rather than yield a millimetre of terrain.
Two robins on a sea journey divided the ship between them, one owning the bit from the mast to the prow, the other the bit from the mast to the end. Other than eating, they devoted the entire journey to fighting like hoodies.
At least, I thought, as I buried the poor victim, at least he was dead. Half the time when Scruffy brings home prey, it’s not dead. You have no idea how exciting it is to come home after a day’s work and find your sitting-room occupied by a blackbird perched on a light fitment, gazing down in terror at the feline who dragged him through two catflaps.
Although, a blackbird is easier than a wood pigeon. Maybe north Dublin produces particularly large wood pigeons, but the ones that end up — live and unhappy — in my sitting-room are as big as turkeys.
It takes a big bath towel, expertly thrown, to subdue an oversized pigeon and get it out into the garden for release.
I find myself clutching the bundled towel, the bird’s heartbeat hammering against my palm, giving it a lecture.
“Would you ever wise up?” I softly tell the pigeon. “Scruffy is huge and white. How the hell can you not see him coming? Just stay up high, would you? That’s why God gave us trees. So birds like you and your pal the blackbird could avoid cats. Be upwardly mobile.”
I gently release him onto the top of a hedge and he cowers for a few minutes while I worry that Scruffy may have permanently disabled him.
Just as I get to the point of deciding I must recapture him and take him to a vet to be put to sleep (oh, the wonderful euphemisms of wildlife mercy-killing) he takes off and flies out of sight.
Next time I go through the procedure, I can’t tell whether it’s a brand new pigeon or a slow learner with a death wish.
Although the man in my life gives out to them and about them, I don’t think he’d do the cats in to save money. But if they’d learn to eat what they kill, (outdoors, ideally, and concentrating on rats and mice) they’d cut our cat food costs by at least 10%.
And, as Marty Whelan keeps telling us, every little helps.
Monday February 16th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Tiny group devastated by pregnancy ‘wonder-drug’ need to be heard
FOR some mothers-to-be, it happens in the morning.
For some, it doesn’t happen at all. For a sizeable number of pregnant women, it takes the virulent form of constant, unremitting day and night nausea and vomiting for weeks if not months on end. It’s called “morning sickness”.
When a new wonder-drug promised — among other benefits — to curtail the crippling nausea affecting many of them in their early months of pregnancy, it was widely welcomed. GPs loved it, because nothing makes a patient fonder of a GP than the doctor’s capacity to take away real and present misery, and there’s no misery quite as real and present as pervasive nausea.
When, less than a year after the introduction of the drug, one baby was born with anomalous physical distortions, it was a tragedy for their family. When several were born within months of each other, questions were asked. These babies were missing limbs.
Or missing parts of limbs. Some had feet emerging from shortened legs, others had hands attached to their shoulders. These were not problems amenable to surgical correction. These were gross deviations from the norm.
The one common factor connecting many of the devastated young mothers trying to cope with a challenge they had never dreamed would be presented to them was that they had been prescribed the new wonder-drug. Thalidomide.
As more and more damaged babies were born, suspicion hardened to certainty, and Thalidomide was withdrawn. It didn’t have to be withdrawn in the US, where the Federal Drugs Administration had — fortunately — delayed its introduction in a rigorous form of regulation that would protect it against criticism for many years. And it wasn’t properly withdrawn in Ireland. A standard green leaflet went out to pharmacists. The sort of circular that was issued by the Department of Health for minor recalls. Not all of the drug was removed from the shelves of pharmacies.
When a doctor who hadn’t registered the import of information sent by the department prescribed Thalidomide after it was known just how dangerous it was, there was a chance that the pharmacy to which the prescription went might actually issue the drug. At the same time, some inattentive doctors continued to dole out free sample packs of Thalidomide. More babies were born with distorted or absent limbs.
This wonder-drug came out of the pharmaceutical research pipeline 50 years ago and its use resulted in the birth, worldwide, of some 10,000 babies with malformed limbs.
In Ireland, the victims of Thalidomide — parents and children alike — found a powerful champion at the time in the form of a Dublin GP turned politician, Dr John O’Connell. Dr O’Connell got livid with the German producers of the pharmaceutical, Chemie Grunenthal, and even more livid with Distillers, the company in Britain which distributed it there and in Ireland. Both sought to protect shareholder value at the expense of the children involved, and they might well have got away with it had Dr O’Connell not been such a rabidly relentless opponent.
They might have got away with minimal compensation for the children, because the parents involved were not geographically close to each other, so organisation was difficult. In addition, the mothers involved were often eaten alive by guilt over having taken a drug which had dealt their baby such a blow, despite the fact that it had been prescribed for them. Marriages came under huge pressure.
Nobody could even guess at the life expectancy of a child damaged by Thalidomide.
The physical distortions might, for all anybody knew, be matched by some systemic problems that would grievously shorten the child’s life. One thing was clear.
Any Thalidomide baby would need financial support. At the very simplest level, none of these children would be able to go into Penneys or Dunnes Stores and have clothes bought off the shelf for them. Every garment would have to be altered.
But that was just the beginning. Mobility was going to be an issue for some of the kids.
Education was going to be an enormous problem. How do you teach writing to a child who has no arms? How does that child turn the pages of a book or paint a picture in art class?
It took years, but eventually, finance began to flow. The State provided some support, and the company that had developed and marketed Thalidomide was forced to divvy up. Irish victims did marginally better than some of their peers in other European countries.
Every now and again, a story would surface of a child physically limited by the drug who nonetheless could play a musical instrument or who had done particularly well in school.
But, for the most part, the families involved concentrated on making the best of their lot, and the children learned to cope with constant stares and half-heard comments about their visible condition.
They created friendships, won their independence, got jobs, married and had children of their own. They didn’t want to be heroes or victims. They just wanted to be themselves. They achieved the extraordinary: they became ordinary people with ordinary, if difficult, lives.
Roughly 35 of them live, scattered around Ireland, connected by their shared history but undefined by it. In recent years, each of them has discovered that the clever physical resourcefulness they’ve shown throughout their lives has a dire downside. The human body will take just so much of the unnatural strains posed by trying to make two limbs do the work of four, or of torturing a shortened limb into doing the function of a fully formed arm. Each of them is suffering severe new limitations, pain and illness. As a torturous double-whammy, what they’re going through is akin to Post-Polio syndrome.
They need more help. More financial help. They’ve asked the State for that help.
The State, in the form of the Department of Health and the HSE, is thinking about it. Both have been thinking about it for quite a while. The problem, of course, is the context in which that thought process is happening. The State is fresh out of money, and besieged on all sides by organised protest.
Protest — as we saw yesterday — by the able-bodied. Protest — as we’ve seen in recent weeks — by the passionate parents of children needing special needs assistants.
Thirty-five people with — in some cases — grievous physical constraints can’t mount that kind of protest, and the individuals involved are reluctant to parade their injuries to evoke sympathy.
They just hope the powers-that-be can find a way to help their tiny group.
Ireland got itself into its economic meltdown through the worship of scale and the reduction of citizens to statistical units attracting subvention depending on their numbers and the volume of their protest.
We have the opportunity to change. To register and react to the exceptional. To even briefly halt our collective self-directed complaint of “but what about me?” and acknowledge our duty to look at this tiny group of people, punished twice by what was once a wonder-drug, and ask: “But what about them?”
Monday February 9th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
You can keep the presidency, there’s no way I could be ‘happier’ than thou
ON THIS page, last week, Ivan Yates briefly and facetiously included my name in a list of women to be considered as nominees for the presidency before deciding — as he would — that to put a third woman in Áras an Uachtaráin would be excessive and it was time the job reverted to the male side of the population.
It was the nearest I’ll ever get to the Áras. In theory, I should be cutting out the column, flattening it under glass and making sure anybody mentioning me in despatches adds the thrilling “was suggested as a potential presidential candidate by a former government minister in 2009”. In reality, Ivan and his suggestion are drying out in my garage, the newspaper in which they appeared having been first soaked in rainwater, then scrunched into a papier-mâché briquette. Once Mr Yates and his suggestion are less soggy, into the fire they’ll go, which is right and proper.
Because nobody ever suggested me as a possibility before Ivan did, I hadn’t realised until last week how much I would hate to be president. Being president of Ireland has all the disadvantages of a politician, including having to get elected, with all the best bits taken away.
Getting elected is bad enough. Because when a candidate is put forward for the presidency, their entire extended family and personal history, including the nature of the breakup with former boyfriends/girlfriends, is open for discussion. (Not that I’d be afraid of scandalous accounts of my earlier love life. I’d be afraid of mortifying accounts of its paucity.)
But even if you could get through the electoral process, it wouldn’t be worth it. Yes, you get a timeshare use of a lovely house, but you have to split it with a bunch of staff and you can’t knock down walls and remodel it. Worse, as president, you don’t even have the illusion of power, the way politicians do. Or did, until the recession struck and the junior ministers started lining up for execution, thereby suggesting they’d never done anything very effective in the first place.
Politics is assumed to be like the food pyramid with ministers at the top, deciding policy and changing lives, and county councillors at the bottom, shouting and roaring random insults in an effort to get into the next edition of their local paper.
The reality, of course, is that for the first six months after a human becomes a cabinet minister, they’re distracted from the impotence of their position by photo opportunities, launches and parties to celebrate their accession.
After that, the grim appreciation comes home to roost that no ministerial decision actually turns into measurable action unless a) the entire cabinet agrees, b) the civil service is enthusiastic about implementing it, d) in present circumstances, it costs no money, e) it’s not unconstitutional, f) the wind is in the right direction g) the Force is with you.
Even when all of the above are in place, external circumstances can intervene — remember John Gormley’s light bulb initiative that got switched off by the EU.
Real influence and freedom in politics paradoxically lives at the bottom of the pyramid, with the councillor on the local authority. The most effective politician I have ever watched in action is a councillor in Athlone named Boxer Moran. He got pulled out of a meeting I was chairing, and when it became clear that no decision was going to get made in his absence, I adjourned the session and went looking for him. I found him outside in a field, walking up and down (because otherwise he’d have frozen in position) using three phones simultaneously. He was making connections, creating possibilities, closing deals, preventing feeding frenzies and changing lives, all by himself through force of personality, connectedness, understanding of how a multiplicity of systems work, and sheer bloody energy.
None of that is possible if you’re president. Instead of possibilities, you’re surrounded by constraints. You can’t swear. You can’t get fat. You can’t tell Vincent Brown to get stuffed. You can’t even leave the country without asking Brian Cowen’s permission. Instead, you face an endless schedule of pointless formalities, not least of them getting dolled up to greet incoming ambassadors and take their formal papers from them. You might hope for one of those exciting moments when a taoiseach comes knocking on the front door to tell you he (or, some day, she) can’t continue to govern, but how often does that happen?
If you try to make yourself genuinely efficacious on behalf of the nation, as Mary McAleese has by trying to build bridges between North and South, you get some twit like that unionist at the weekend, complaining about the cost of her “expensive jaunts” to the North.
THE worst aspect of being president is the unspoken requirement that the holder of the role will have no moods. As an ordinary citizen of the state, your civil rights include permission to be in a bad temper, to be “not speaking” to half the neighbourhood or family, to be on an irrational high, to be grimly hungover or to be socially silly at a high volume. Once you become president, that permission is withdrawn.
As president, you have to demonstrate unbroken and dignified good humour. Smile, and smile, and be a president…
The contrast between the role of taoiseach and Uachtarán is profound, in mood terms. Brian Cowen is allowed to be grumpy. He may be criticised for looking sulky or surly, but nobody suggests he’s thereby breaching the terms of his contract. Indeed, when — as last week — he goes a bit upbeat, the change in mood is such a contrast with the norm, it’s greeted as the harbinger of improvement on all fronts: economic, social, climate and national morale. Once you’ve established a pattern of reading from a script while looking as if someone stole your bun, talking without a script looking as if they’d given your bun back becomes a national talking-point.
But there’s the presidential rub. As president, you’re never allowed to let on that someone stole your bun. Our current president and her husband, from the outset, have presented a continuum of benign positivity that should get them into the Guinness Book of Records.
Whenever I’ve met Mary McAleese (there’s name-dropping for you. It’s been twice, and both by accident) she has behaved as if encountering me has lifted a weight off her shoulders, put a spring in her step and a song in her heart. Which is really very sweet and admirable, but must be such a pain in the — well, such a pain, when behind it all, she must want to say “Lady, I don’t know you from a hole in the floor. You don’t need to know me and I don’t need to know you, so buzz off home, would you, and let me get back to the Áras to put my feet up?”
Like Tom Daschle, but without admitting wrongdoing, I hereby formally withdraw my name from consideration for high office. Whooo, the relief.
Monday February 2nd 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Passing the buck of responsibility to the officer in charge
FRENZIED brainwashed loyalists ready to die for their Emperor, they were manic in their patriotic determination to destroy American shipping.
Their faces fixed in vicious resolution as they speeded downward from the sky, knowing they would die on impact, they were nonetheless madly secure in their conviction that they personified the best of the Samurai and Bushido ethic. Highly skilled suicides in the flower of their youth.
That tends to be the image of Japan’s Kamikaze pilots in the second world war. Just under 2,000 of them dive-bombed US aircraft carriers in the Pacific in the dying days of the conflict.
According to maritime historian Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, the image does not match the reality.
For starters, the kamikaze pilots were not skilled. From the outset, Japan and America had taken sharply opposing approaches to the training of their pilots. The Americans ordered an intensive fifteen month training programme for 6,000 pilots. The Japanese initially trained only 100 pilots a year, creating a skilled elite. The Americans pulled their ace pilots off the front line to train the next waves of aviators. The Japanese left their best in the cockpit. The end result was a continuous enrichment of America’s air war capacity and a matching diminution in Japan’s.
By 1944, the huge aircraft carriers of the United States were all over the Pacific, destroying Japanese aircraft in relentless numbers.
“American tactical success was due to the new, well-supplied American aircraft, flown by highly trained pilots and delivered through the mobility of the fast carriers,” writes Kennedy, in Danger Hour, his just-published account of the crippling of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze pilot who dive-bombed her.
Japan knew it was not going to win the war. But it was determined not to surrender, and to inflict as much damage as it could. Hence the kamikazes. Taylor makes it sadly clear that they were volunteers in name only — the moral and actual consequences of a refusal to join the suicide squads were unconscionable. They didn’t have to be trained to survive — like Mohammed Atta’s Twin Towers terrorists 60 years later, they needed to be able to take off and to keep their eyes open and focussed as their plane dived on the target.
Because they had failed to train their pilots to the level achieved by the Americans, they had effectively lost the first part of the air war. Because doomsday now loomed, the young pilots still alive were expendable. For decades after WWI, they were remembered in the West as little more than scary stereotypes. Taylor’s scrupulously researched book frees them from movie type-casting and shows them as 20 and 21-year-olds who loved flying, reading, poetry, their families and their country. But it also hammers home the fact that when a nation or a people has been backed against a wall and faces either economic or physical destruction, their rulers, despite the best of intentions, tend to lose their connectedness to human realities.
On the face of it, no link exists between the Kamikaze pilots of WWII and the workers sitting in the showrooms of Waterford Glass. The fact is that the same odd gaps in logic are in play.
One of those gaps in logic is the ceding — if not the willing hospital-passing — of responsibility to the officer on the spot. Who, in the case of Waterford Glass, is a receiver who must wish he had caught any job other than one which makes an entire community, never mind an entire workforce, hate him. God love him, the receiver is just doing his job. He’s like the flight commanders who ordered the Kamikazes into their cockpits: in the business context within which he finds himself, no alternative presents itself. His frame around the matter is necessarily constrained.
Enter — we must hope — the Government.
Mindfulness of the context wider than the local business context is the job of Government. The Cabinet provided guarantees to depositors in banks. They nationalised Anglo-Irish bank. They took these actions in the interests of the wider good, to ensure the survival of the banking system, and to protect Ireland’s standing within the international financial community. Yet the Government which intervened in private sector business seems to have no sense that it could or should intervene in the Waterford Glass situation.
Now, doesn’t that tell us something about our sense of what it is to be Irish? Here’s a business which, with an hiatus in the middle, goes back to the eighteenth century. Here’s a business which created chandeliers and awards for historic sites and international sporting events. Here’s a business which, for generations, has marked the milestones in the life of individuals, families and companies.
Generations of blowers and cutters in Waterford learned to capture light, to create artefacts so beautiful that to hold one is a sensual experience. Long before cleverality created internationally recognised brands like Kerrygold (based, as Tony O’Reilly observed, on a reference to a county which has precious few cows), Waterford Glass was a global reference. The factory itself became part of the mental maps of tourist-transporters, bringing millions of visitors to the sunny south-east who might never, otherwise, have set foot in it. Watching the craftspeople in action was, for many visitors to this country, the highlight of their time in Ireland.
Any business which closes throws people out of their jobs and has other consequences, including damage to the local economy and — on occasion — the bringing down of related enterprises, such as caterers and suppliers. Every enterprise, large or small, which ceases to trade as a result of the economic meltdown, leaves behind it a filigree of inter-related family and community sadnesses. In the case of new, young companies, the 20-somethings hand back the keys to their home and head for another county or another country. In the case of long-established companies, older employees find themselves beached after 30 or 40 years of daily life within a kind of extended family.
Waterford Glass is not unique in the devastation caused by its closure. Waterford Glass IS, however, unique in its marvellous straddling of the line between art and craft, in the precious fragility of its pieces, in its refinement of skills tracing back past centuries and millennia, in the capacity of its output to stand for what is best and most beautiful in Ireland, past and present.
The Government may have been obliged to nationalise Anglo, but — paradoxically — none of us feel that it’s ours. Waterford Glass, on the other hand, has ALWAYS been ours. Our names weren’t on the list of shareholders, but we owned a bit of it, nonetheless.
Let us not, in this recession, lose our connectedness to all that Waterford Glass represents.
Standing by while we lose an aspect of the best of ourselves is Kamikaze thinking.
Monday January 26th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Church was traditionally a media leader — about time they caught up
THE cynicism with which the Pope’s venture onto YouTube was greeted is ill-informed.
Moving into new communications technology isn’t an innovation for Catholicism. It’s been a constant throughout Church history.
Communication is the Christian imperative. Christ’s apostles were instructed to go and teach all nations. When he spotted a man up a tree trying to hear him, he brought him down and talked to him. When his followers tried to stop him communicating with younger people, he told them to “suffer the little children to come unto me”. The parables he told used not just the language of the people to whom he spoke, but their references, the tools of their trades, the images of their daily experiences.
Joseph Goebbels, who regarded Christ as the ultimate salesman, copied many of his methods, not least his emphasis on semiotics — his use of symbols ranging from palm leaves to the overturning of the moneychangers’ tables at the temple, not forgetting the abiding symbols of his crucifixion.
The tiny band of Christians left after his death chalked symbols on walls to send messages to followers. They used liturgy and song to elevate and enlighten. St Paul corresponded across continents, sending letters meant to be read aloud at group meetings.
Each nation, as it became Christian, used its own skills and crafts to communicate the message. In Ireland, Christianity went to the heart of Celtic culture, finding expression though every craft and art available, whether in the ‘statements in stone’ of the ancient crosses, with their detailed storytelling, or the illuminated manuscripts.
The first sizeable book emerging from the printing press, when it was invented, was the Bible. It fitted the pattern: As every communications innovation arrived, Christianity pioneered its use. So the rose windows of the great cathedrals were used to educate the illiterate. Thomas Aquinas stressed the importance of public lectures and disputations. Church bells owned the day and warned of disaster. Saints and the Madonna owned the themes of life and were a comforting presence when individuals were under pressure, even if they had to create the images themselves, as happened during the siege of Stalingrad, when a medic found the time, just before Christmas, in the filth, starvation, disease and death, to paint, on the back of a big map of Moscow, what became known as the “Fortress Madonna”. The painting provided solace to men who died within hours of praying in front of it. It survived the siege and is on public display today.
Accompanying the emphasis on technology were the reminders that what was being communicated was more important than the technology used. The Council of Mayence, in 813, for example, urged priests to write their sermons in language ordinary people could understand.
The Church concentrated on the transmission of information — even rumour — in order to stay on top of the political developments throughout Europe. During the War of the Roses, for example, when James I of Scotland was murdered, a courier was sent the 440 miles from Perth to London, changing horses frequently so as to be able to cover roughly 40 miles a day, in order to bring the news to Cardinal Beaufort who could in turn, send the message by sea to the Pope.
The fact is that at all points in history up to the latter half of the 20th century, the Catholic Church was in the vanguard of communications.
Sometimes, the adoption of new communications technology by the Church came about because the Church perceived itself to be threatened or outflanked. For example, when Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius the 12th, was given his first major post within the Vatican, his appointment coincided with the banning of the Catholic Boy Scouts by Mussolini, who was, at the time, on a mission to wipe out any powerful Catholic organisations in Italy.
The Pope promptly attacked the Duce’s action in an encyclical entitled Non abbiamo bisogno. What Pope Pius the 10th didn’t realise was that, since the Fascists controlled all the telegraph lines and cables to the outside world, Mussolini was in total communications control. He would — and did — read the encyclical before anybody else did. He could — and did — reply to the encyclical before its key messages could be absorbed.
Cardinal Pacelli went into supercharged action. He stuffed copies of the encyclical into the suitcase of an American priest named Francis Spellman who had access to private planes, instructing him to get it to France and publish it from there. Spellman later became a Cardinal, but the more important outcome was Pacelli’s determination to get ahead of the posse in terms of communications technology.
Within a short space of time, according to the American polemicist Whittaker Chambers, Pacelli “had equipped the Vatican with a short-wave radio station (‘for research and propaganda’), a new electric powerhouse, a fleet of modern automobiles (gifts of the manufacturers) to replace the old carriages, electric elevators, 800 telephones, a telephoto apparatus and an electric device to replace the bell ringers at St Peters. The fabric of St Peter’s became as modern as the fabric of New York.”
That pattern held throughout the first half of the 20th century: When a new technology came on board, it was initially explored and then often adopted by the Church. The results were sometimes mixed. It was a racist fascist priest who made the most of radio in its early days in the US, becoming a nationally powerful thought-leader for a time. On the other hand, Bishop Fulton Sheen managed to be profound but not recondite in the early ’60s on TV. DVDs of his TV sermons still rack up substantial sales.
It could be argued that the Church’s communications leadership was grievously damaged — with the best of intentions — by some of the thinking which came out of the Second Vatican Council.
As quintessential Catholic William F Buckley put it: “The Church threw away fish-on-Friday, liturgical Latin, tough rules for the priests and nuns; and, for their pains, got emptier and emptier churches.”
The Church in Ireland, which — through men like Fr Peter Lemass and Fr Joe Dunn — had been a world leader in training religious for radio and TV, nonetheless failed to make the most of those media, ceding them, in the late ’70s and thereafter to populist priests like Fr Michael Cleary.
Against a background of two millennia of Catholic Church emphasis on communication and speedy adoption of communication innovations, the Pope’s arrival on the web is admirable, if somewhat overdue.
It is unfortunate that a communication from the Vatican which has gone worldwide in the last 24 hours, without the requirement to visit Pope Benedict’s site, is a message designed to placate traditionalists. The announcement that the Papacy has rescinded the excommunication of a bishop who denied that the Holocaust ever took place has drawn fury from Jews — in a year when the Pope was due to visit the Holy Land.
The Vatican can’t afford to forget that it is the message, rather than the medium, which truly matters.
Monday January 19th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
First lady will need guts to survive one of the world’s toughest jobs
NOBODY’S sure just how many people are going to form the crush in the Mall and line the streets of Washington for tomorrow’s inauguration.
It will be somewhere between two and four million. Four hundred thousand came for George W Bush’s second inauguration. A total of 1.2 million came for Lyndon Johnson’s, following the Kennedy assassination.
The sheer numbers trekking across America, most of them from and through killingly cold states, underlines the hopes and dreams embodied in this slender biracial new Commander in Chief.
When he makes his first speech, the world will listen and analyse. Michelle Obama, on the other hand, will be watched and analysed, not for what she does or says or stands for, but for what she wears and how she looks.
The woman who was once Barack Obama’s boss has pulled the short straw. For now and for years to come. The role of first lady is a conflicted one and seems to be subject to an odd and perverse balance; when commentators and public decide they admire and like the president, they tend to dislike the first lady, and when they decide they don’t admire and like the president, the ratings on the first lady go up commensurately.
So, as George W’s ratings tanked, public sympathy, even affection, for Laura Bush rose. Three decades earlier, as Richard Nixon was loathed, as a result of Watergate, the silent Pat Nixon was admired all the more.
On the other hand, Ronald Reagan’s wife was portrayed as a flaky, unmaternal bad actress who consorted with psychics, borrowed designer clothes without paying for them, headed up an anti-drugs campaign jaw-dropping in its pointlessness and essentially hung around Ronnie looking at him adoringly.
Her place in public consciousness was so improved by her dignified management of her husband’s decline into Alzheimer’s that when Obama, during the presidential campaign, made a joke which was mildly unkind to her, he immediately took it back and telephoned her to apologise.
Jacqueline Kennedy was arguably as popular as her husband, largely because she made no waves other than fashion waves, and when forced to speak, did so with such brevity and in such high little-girl tones that her great intelligence was cleverly concealed.
Only two first ladies have failed to conceal their intelligence. Hillary Clinton’s brainpower was acknowledged by her husband handing over to her the task of finding a solution to the cost of healthcare. She failed.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s opportunity arose because of her husband’s immobility after suffering polio. He simply could not travel throughout the nation as an able-bodied president would have, and so needed an acceptable emissary.
It helped that Franklin and Eleanor were married in name only and that prolonged absences suited rather than hampered them as a couple. But what made Eleanor Roosevelt uniquely successful as a publicly-functional first lady was that she had a good mind, a constant intellectual curiosity, and a radicalism her husband did not share but was happy for her to express.
Since her time, first ladies have tended to be anonymous and invisible (like Mamie Eisenhower) or — with the exception of Hillary Clinton — to serve as advocates on safe, non-controversial issues.
Michelle Obama has described herself as “first mom” and stressed that she sees as paramount her role as mother to two little girls, one of whom (depending on whether or not Obama wins a second term) will be an adult when the family leaves the White House, having gone through adolescence in a fishbowl.
The fact that Michelle Obama beamed her way through the train journey to Washington does not mean she looks forward to the life set out for her in the immediate future. But she’s had a long time to think about it.
Back in 1996, a photography project about couples in America included the Obamas. The quotations accompanying that project have been re-published in this week’s New Yorker Magazine and illustrate what Michelle Obama described as “a little tension” about the possibility that her husband would go into politics.
“When you are involved in politics, your life is an open book,” she said at the time. “People can come in who don’t necessarily have good intent. I’m pretty private, and like to surround myself with people that I trust and love. In politics you’ve got to open yourself to a lot of different people.”
Even back then, it was clear that she was listening to herself and eager to put a positive gloss on even the aspects of her husband’s career she clearly dreaded.
“It’ll be interesting to see what life has to offer,” she went on. “The more you experiment the easier it is to do different things… Barack has helped me loosen up and feel comfortable with taking risks, not doing things the traditional way.”
Obama himself said that what he sees as a productive contrast between them derived from their different backgrounds: her solid two-parent family based in one location, his less orthodox life with his mother and step-father.
“We represent two strands of family life in this country — the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, travelling, separated, mobile…”
Taking risks has already earned her a public thumping. Her comment — about Obama’s win — that it was the first time she’d felt proud of her country, brought disproportionate fury down on her head.
But what is much more likely to annoy her is mass media’s preoccupation with appearance. The non-designer dress she wore on a TV programme during the campaign sold out, nationally, within days of the appearance. What she said on the programme was forgotten. The red and black dress she wore to the victory announcement, on the other hand, was massively criticised. Every where she goes, from now on, she will generate kilometres of coverage about her height, her weight, her clothes and her shoes.
It’s a tough job. The indications are that she’ll handle it well, not least because of the complexity within her personality about which, more than a decade ago, her husband told the woman who came to take the photograph of the two of them.
“Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is and where she comes from,” he said. “But I also think in her eyes you can see a trace of vulnerability that most people don’t know, because when she is walking through the world she is this tall, beautiful, confident woman. There is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her.”
Let’s hope this tall, beautiful, confident woman walks out of the White House at the end of the Obama presidency knowing she handled one of the toughest jobs in the world with flair and individuality, and that her family gained, rather than lost, during Barack Obama’s time in office.
Monday January 12th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
The French justice minister and the Kinsale Road roundabout
THE picture was on the right of the front door of my grandmother’s house in Dublin’s Liberties.
Straight ahead was the kitchen. To the left was the drawing room into which nobody ever went, firstly because it had to be kept perfect, in case somebody died or the Pope dropped in, and secondly because it had horsehair furniture which is pure misery to sit on.
To the right was the stairs — and a small reproduction of Millais’ painting The Gleaners.
It wasn’t just a print reproduction of the famous painting of women at sunset, taking in the harvest in the fields. This framed version was embossed, the figures raised out of a hard material which certainly wasn’t plastic, which didn’t exist at that time. It could have been ivory, because many of my grandaunts and uncles and first cousins twice removed had served as nuns and priests in Africa and might have sent back the odd tusk or artifact rendered from a tusk. More likely it was humble Bakelite, the precursor to plastic, out of which were made the knobs on my nana’s cooker, the controls on the huge Bush radio and the handles on the saucepans.
Embossing Millais’ gleaner improved it no end, if you were a four-year-old reaching with effort to dip your middle finger into the holy water in the slimy little trough underneath the picture. You could stand on your tippytoes and feel the figures, remembering in your mind’s eye what you’d seen when your father had lifted you up to see the artwork. Oh, yes, this tufty bit was two sheaves of corn stacked up, one against the other. This roundy bit was the back end of one of the two women bent over, working, enveloped to the heels in big thick skirts that reached their ankles.
I was running my forefinger over the embossing one day when my father muttered that no females should complain, these days. We had it easy, compared to the women in the picture. One of the gleaning women, he opined, had probably given birth to a baby the morning the picture was made.
“Back in the fields by sundown,” he said, and went off to get a light for his Players Untipped.
I didn’t have a clue as to what he meant. My big sister served as a kind of instantaneous translation of the weird stuff my parents said to us, to each other, and about each other. I went and asked her to explain.
“In the old days, before hospitals, women just had babies in fields and went back to work straight away,” she said.
I considered this in silence. Only a few weeks earlier, the same sister had explained the motor mechanics of childbirth to me. I was still in shock and awe, not to mention revulsion. Bad enough to do this horrible thing at all, but doing it in a field before resuming work didn’t sound either hygienic or comfortable. I stood, knees clenched together in sympathy with historic mothers.
“That was back then,” my sister said, getting impatient with my over-reaction. “Everybody has their baby in hospital now.” (You have to forgive my sister. Because she was a Dub, she had not heard of the popularity of the Kinsale Road roundabout as a place to give birth.) When my father finished his fag and rejoined the two of us, he got quite enthusiastic about the Back in the Fields by Sundown approach to having babies. For heavens sake, he said, wasn’t it the most natural thing in the world? I wasn’t old enough to tell him maggots were natural, too, but that didn’t make me like them.
He got positively lyrical, did my father, about negro spirituals, and how, if you listened to the words, you’d realise they were sung to a fractious baby by its mother while she worked, gathering cotton or slashing sugar cane.
This made the whole proposition even worse. Now, the poor mother was not only to interrupt her daily grind in the cotton fields to sidle sideways, deliver a baby, wash it off, wrap it up and go back to the day job, she now had to sing, as well, to keep the new infant from bawling and putting the other workers off the task in hand. Work/life balance, anyone? That was nothing, my father went on, compared to the native American Indian females.
These squaws would be out on the prairie, disembowelling recently-killed buffalo, when they’d go into labour.
“All of them?” I shrieked, and my sister rolled her eyes to heaven.
“The pregnant ones,” she said on a gusty older-sister sigh.
The poor squaws had to deliver the infant and get back to buffalo-gutting. But, in addition, they had to ensure the baby didn’t cry, in case it distracted from the entrail-removal. So the squaws brought papooses with them (no doubt saying casually to each other “I made this one earlier”) and, when the baby emerged, pinned it into this tennis racquet type crib and hung baby, cradle and all on a handy cactus.
Immobilised babies cry less, and the papoose, the bottom part of which was stuffed with grass, acted as a naturally recyclable, infinitely sustainable and literally green nappy. All the squaw had to do was slide the baby out at the end of the day, give him or her a quick wipe, throw away the soiled grass and replaced it with fragrant fresh stuff.
The reality represented by such detail is that for millennia, child-birth carried with it no entitlement to maternal leave, never mind parental leave. It was a minor blip in the working life of the mother.
All of which has been forgotten by humankind, to judge by the controversy surrounding the French justice minister. Rachita Dati returned to work last week, slim and businesslike, five days after giving birth to her first baby by Caesarean. Female commentators are livid. They say what she did is bad for her own health, bad for her bonding with her baby, and puts terrible pressure on other women.
“Maternity rights have been hard won,” said one, “and should not be ignored by new mothers.”
Which principle, carried to its logical conclusion, would condemn anyone who buys a book rather than borrow it from a public library. As is their right.
That Sarah Palin apparently returned to work — looking infuriatingly slim — only three days after giving birth to her most recent baby son is equally maddening to this branch of the sisterhood.
To get wrought up about Dati or Palin is to give them a power they don’t have, and portray every new mother as pathetically likely to compare herself to them.
Motherhood is as individual as a fingerprint.
We all do it our own way. We survive it using whatever mixture of hope, prayer, diet, denial, delight and help we can.
The great thing about the 21st century is that we can choose to be back in the fields (or at the desk) by sunset or take extended maternity leave.
Monday January 5th 2009
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
You know, when talking, it helps, you know, to have something to say
Caroline Kennedy identified Barack Obama as a quantum shift in political potential.
But she has yet to demonstrate understanding, passion, direction, to show what she stands for and what she wants to change and to illustrate all of this with specifics
SHE was the pretty toddler hiding in the well of the president’s desk in the White House. She was the solemn-faced adolescent when her widowed mother married a Greek billionaire. She was the laughing sister of a charismatic magazine editor and dynastic celebrity. She — along with her uncle, Ted Kennedy — was one of the influential factors tipping voters towards Barack Obama in the Presidential campaign. Now, Caroline Kennedy is touted as a possible successor to Hillary Rodham Clinton as Senator for New York.
The logic of this career path is being questioned by some Democrats on the basis that she has no experience justifying her selection and no track record in the down-and-dirty of active politics. That unexpected opposition has been added to by media, which doesn’t like Caroline Kennedy’s selective approach to them. It didn’t help that in a recent interview, she took Hillary Clinton’s habit of saying “you know” to a new height, delivering 30 “you knows” in a little over three minutes.
“You know, I think, really, um, this is sort of a unique moment, both in our, you know, in our country’s history,” she said at one point. “And in, you know, my own life, and, um, you know, we are facing, you know, unbelievable challenges.”
The recurring phrase has had a disproportionate impact on her candidacy, courtesy of the internet’s capacity to replay the clip and capture comments suggesting that, despite DNA and an impressive education, Kennedy may not have the capacity to perform as a senator.
“Caroline has acknowledged that she hasn’t mastered the art of the political sound bite,” was her spokesman’s response to adverse comments. It was an inadequate comment for two reasons. The first is that Ted Kennedy has never been regarded as a good media performer, with commentators describing him as The Wizard of Uhs, and an expectation existed that a representative of what might positively be described as the younger generation of the Kennedy’s might be a tad more fluent. The second is that the “hasn’t mastered the art of the political sound bite” misses the point.
Most people have filler phrases or noises which are a constant in their speech. Barack Obama’s is “uh,” although he uses it to a tiny extent, when compared with Edward Kennedy. The issue with Caroline Kennedy is not that she needs superficial training in the amputation of “you know.” The issue is that she has nothing to say. She — in common with half the world — identified Obama as a quantum shift in political potential. She understands the breadth of his thinking and his capacity to elevate mood among the populace. She likes the generality of his thinking.
But, in her own person, she has yet to demonstrate understanding, passion, direction, to show what she stands for and what she wants to change and to illustrate all of this with specifics. If she can get to that point, then “you know” will naturally fall away and the occurrences of the phrase will be less noticeable, because she’ll be delivering meaning and interest to listeners. Verbal and physical tics, together with the details of the speaker’s dress and appearance, become memorable only when an audience has damn all else to attract its attention. Tina Fey’s winking mimicry of Sarah Palin would never have been successful if Palin had, in her own media appearances, offered anything other than prettiness, great glasses and phrases like “you betcha”.
The first key difference between Palin and Kennedy is that Kennedy demonstrably has a mind. A well-stocked and print-focussed mind. Kennedy has published formidable books on constitutional law and — at the more popular end of the reading market — collected and written the introductions to published editions of her mother’s favourite poems. She can handle a script and present a TV programme. And, of all of the available verbal fillers, “you know” may be irritating, but has no deeper significance, whereas some of the alternatives reveal a great deal about their users.
One of the classic verbal repetitions is “Joke! Joke!” This is used when someone has said something offensive and hasn’t the courage to live with it. The most famous political exemplar was Stalin, who constantly tested out ideas using “Joke! Joke!” as a back door when the idea was rejected.
He did it at the post-war conference of allied leaders in Tehran, where, raising his glass in a toast, he saluted the possibility of executing 50,000 Wehrmacht officers. This made Winston Churchill mad as hell. He got to his feet (always something of an achievement for Churchill, late in any day and at a social function) and said the British people would never “stand for such mass murder,” before walking out, followed by the Soviet leader, who embraced him warmly and claimed to have been joking. (The number of German and German-captured Red Army Officers who died in Soviet hands in the following decade sucked any humour out of the claimed joke). Stalin meant what he had originally said and knew precisely the significance of his words. Most people think they mean what they say but often miss the real significance. The following is just a sampler of frequent current usages and their real meaning:
People who repeatedly say “to be perfectly honest with you” lie like rugs.
People who promise “to cut a long story short” never do.
People who talk about what they’ve learned from life haven’t.
People who use the word “inappropriate” don’t understand the difference between an irritant and an outrage. (Calling a colleague “honey” is inappropriate. Painting the baby green and putting paid to the budgie with a single blow from a cast iron frying pan before running away with the postman can be described the same way, but there’s a qualitative difference between the two).
People who say “with all due respect” have none.
People who describe themselves as “apolitical” are Fine Gael.
People who describe themselves as “vindicated” are Fianna Fáil.
People who — as bosses — describe themselves as “firm, but fair” are manipulative bloody-minded tyrants who make Vlad the Impaler look like Rupert Bear.
People who say “I used to read a lot” didn’t. Ever.
People who say “politicians are all the same” are as unthinking in their prejudice as those who used to say “black people all look alike”.
People who say “I don’t want to sound condescending/patronising/offensive” want the fun of condescending, patronising or offending without paying the fare.
People who, when you answer the phone, ask “can you talk?” mean well.
People who say “you don’t know me” hope you really do and are slightly offended when you don’t. Even if you couldn’t.
People who say, “I have to get my seven-year-old to programme my iPod” date themselves as much as if they wore shoulder pads or a mullet hairstyle.
People who “express regret for any hurt caused” believe they’re apologising. They’re not.
People who say “at the end of the day” or “going forward” are on verbal auotopilot and also should be shot.
Monday December 29th 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
The media should stop covering up for alcohol-addled politicians
YOU’RE not supposed to like The Sound of Music.
It’s like admitting you like tinned salmon. To hell with it. I have no shame. I like tinned salmon and The Sound of Music.
Christopher Plummer’s portrayal of the aristocratic Austrian Baron von Trapp — amused, understated and ironic — is everything I fancy in a man: heavy-lidded sleepy cynicism personified. Which is why his autobiography, recently published by Knopf, was such a welcome present to find under the Christmas tree. In it, Plummer examines his career with an instructive lack of vanity, concluding that his success, as the title of the book suggests, was achieved In Spite of Myself.
Make that “in spite of alcohol,” too, because the book is awash in accounts of drunken actors, himself included, failing to turn up for performances or — when they did turn up — doing so in such a pickled condition as to remove their capacity to speak, perform or do anything other than get in the way of other actors forced to improvise around them. It’s presented as riotously funny, which — to the drinkers — it must have been. The stories are told with perverse pride as if being present at the booze-up was a confirmation of talent, whereas, in fact, Plummer’s genius was ill-served by sousing.
When, once upon a time, I had notions of becoming a great stage star, I started, as all student actors did, at a desk in the wings of the stage under a tiny light, where, every night, I turned over the pages of the play script in sync with where the actors on stage had got to, ready to prompt if one of them missed a line or dried up. Towards the end of the run of any play was the most dangerous point. By that time, the actors were so used to the script that they could do it on auto-pilot. Plus they were often tired, because they were rehearsing a new play in the daytime and beginning to celebrate the end just a tad before the play actually closed.
That’s what happened towards the end of the first Abbey Theatre production of Brian Friel’s The Loves of Cass Maguire starring Siobhan McKenna, a legend in her own lunchtime.
McKenna was the great Irish actress. The definitive Pegeen Mike. The minute she walked onto the stage as Cass, the returned working class Yank, the audience erupted in applause.
I thought she was a complete fraud, but earnestly observed her each night in young cannibal mode: you have something I need and I may, by fierce watching, be able to absorb and internalise whatever it is.
Cass Maguire has one scene where the old woman sits on a couch and has a conversation with her grandson, played, in that production, by the wonderful Niall Buggy. Came the night when Niall emerged out of the darkness at the back of the stage and gave McKenna the cue for her (lengthy) first speech. Silence. I prompted McKenna. Niall gave the line again, louder. Silence. Another prompt from me, this time in a hissing shriek, because I could see that she had fallen asleep. Niall copped on at the same time, and — like one of the great barnstormers Plummer writes about — played the entire scene on his own, along the lines of “I know you’re asleep, but if you were awake, I know you’d say…” It worked rather better than the normal scene did, so the curtain for the interval fell to thunderous applause, which concealed the noise the tiny stage manager made as she arrived out in front of the two actors, banged down a percolator of black coffee and an oversized mug, drew back, and with all of her considerable force, belted McKenna back and forth across the face until she blearily regained consciousness. A litre of caffeine later, she was almost fit for the rest of the performance, and Buggy was a hero. Wot a laff.
Wot a laff those alcohol-sodden theatre days were, to be sure, each performance followed by drinking sessions in the nearest pub, going on until the small hours in hotels like Groom’s, every one of the drunks convinced they were the wittiest, most talented, least appreciated performer in the world, the one or two teetotallers present letting on to agree, letting on to find the 90th reiteration of a not-so-funny story riotous, steering clear of those — like Donal McCann — who were never moved by liquor into benign incoherence but, instead, into shockingly cruel mimicry of young actors like Buggy, who had to pretend to be amused. Wot a laff.
Later, McCann’s alcoholism became so uncontrollable that the great Joe Dowling made an extraordinary arrangement with St John of God’s. In order to have McCann on stage, sober, throughout the run of a particular play in which he was breathtakingly good, Dowling had him brought, each night, from the hospital to the theatre by two heavies who sat in the wings, led him back to the dressing room and stood over him, whether on stage or off stage, until it was time to bring him back to St John of God’s for the night.
The excuse for all this drinking (not that anybody at the time felt the need for an excuse) was that alcohol was a countervailing force against the emotional demands of major parts. The excuse was that it had ever been thus, that alcohol was the catalyst of greatness. The excuse was the story of Barrymore reading his lines off his spear when his wet brain could no longer learn them — but still giving a stirring performance. Excuses came with the territory and nobody told the truth.
Instead, we all collaborated, the media included. Co-dependents to a man and a woman, we bought into the notion that geniuses in pressured professions needed and were entitled to drink and wouldn’t be half as good sober.
While the theatre still has more than its fair share of alcoholics, the level of tolerance and collaboration has dropped. Film actors are shoved into detox and rehab at a much younger age because producers on tight budgets can’t afford the cost of a cast hanging around waiting for a hungover cast member’s late arrival.
Similarly, corporate Ireland doesn’t pay out much rope to drinkers and the long liquid business lunch is largely a thing of the past.
On the political stage, however, the tolerance continues. Our public representatives have their very own equivalent of Groom’s Hotel, called the Dáil Bar and it takes decades for the media to even suggest, in the most safely coded language, that a particular politician is drinking too much. Remember, it was print media that came up with the phrase “tired and emotional” as a way of conveying “stinking drunk” without saying so.
Sooner or later, the media will tire of its co-dependency with hard-drinking politicians, just as the media tired of covering up for hard-drinking actors.
Sooner would be better.
Monday December 22nd 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Why a prescription for Viagra would be a useful Christmas present
ALL I want for Christmas is a prescription for Viagra. I figure my chances of getting one are small, since Irish doctors tend to be a bit limited when it comes to creative prescribing, and also because nothing’s gone right for me with the Christmas preparations thus far.
The Christmas Tree was up and fully decorated before I realised it was at a Tower of Pisa tilt that required it to be tied to the pipe leading to the radiator. I thought I’d trussed it fairly subtly until the man in my life came home from work and surveyed it.
“Trying to escape, was it?” he asked.
He got a short answer, because I was busy taking off all of the lights in order to find the one bulb that was on strike and had brought all its pals out in sympathy. It was ever thus. Each year I get one striker and one flasher, so either the tree is dark or sporadic. I can’t bear to have my tree winking at me in a random way, so have to search for the blinker and excise it. I remind myself of my father, who ended up on Christmas Eve blind with rage for the same reason. Except that in my father’s time, Christmas light bulbs were big, rendering the search for the bad guys reasonably simple. These days, they’re tiny and come in clusters. So that instead of testing perhaps 60 bulbs, you have to try out about 600, and I didn’t find the yoke that identifies the dud until I opened the last carefully sealed plastic crate.
The innards of that final plastic crate looked like the contents of those old packing cases murderers used to check into railway luggage storage places, a dead body scrunched up and festering within. Putrid doesn’t come near to describing what was revealed within my blue plastic box when the lid was lifted. It would even be difficult to guess what the slimy smelly mess had once been. I was about to investigate when Himself advised against it.
“You left batteries in everything,” he said. “They’ve leaked acid. I wouldn’t touch anything in it, if I were you.”
You can see how he got all his degrees. I put the lid back on the container, knowing I’ll have to share it with the local authority. They may not welcome it. Spent batteries are one thing. A crate full of acid, suppurating wreaths, a non-functioning gadget for identifying failed light bulbs and a destroyed King and a sheep may count as toxic waste, but I don’t suppose they get a lot of it. Not to mention the fact that the crib looks very odd, with only two Kings (one of them permanently inebriated and so used to falling on his face that his nose is completely gone) and one orphaned lamb. Our Lady’s look of astonishment, with her two hands crossed on her chest, is more than justified, this year.
Every year, I decide to give the Christmas lights to a charity shop after they come off the tree and buy trouble-free new ones the following year, and every year I decide that would be the lazy option. Which is why I’ve ended up with a star for the top of the tree the tubular bit of which has broken off, leaving it with no means of bonding with the tree. I tied it on with transparent fishing wire (don’t ask why I have transparent fishing wire, it’s too sad a story) so that unless you’re up close, you don’t know it’s held against its will, like Dick Roche only silent.
WHEREAS my next door neighbour makes — I kid you not — THIRTY SIX Christmas cakes for eager consumers, no such baking goes on in our place, largely because we all hate the stuff, particularly the marzipan, a product invented by someone with a nasty mind. Puddings don’t get made, either: too many hours spent as a child grating lard and half my fingers into a bowl. Anything involving lard and human fingers and hours of burbling on the stove is bad. I buy a small Marks&Sparks pudding with no fat to speak of, microwaveable in two minutes. This year, I decided to be innovative and bought a tiny bottle of peach schnapps to pour over it and set fire to.
When I confided this little novelty to my son, he laughed at me.
“Ma, peach schnapps has about a 15% alcohol content.”
“So?”
“So it would be considerably easier to set fire to the cat than get a flame going on the pudding.”
The only bit of the preparations thus far that’s been any fun has been buying books as presents. Writers never admit to it, but every one of them, including me, takes time whenever they go into a book shop to either gloat (if their current book is well displayed) or sneak it into a better position (if it isn’t.) That done, it’s time to buy copies of books you’ve loved for other people, make lists of new books to drop hints about, and make yourself feel virtuous by buying a few paperbacks (not hardbacks) just to tide you over until the big day. I did buy one hardback because it was half price, and that was where the Viagra came in.
Schott’s Almanac is a cross between Ripley’s Believe it Or Not and the Encyclopaedia, with a few pages of Hello! magazine thrown in. It updates you on obscurely satisfying data, like that eating high levels of tofu could raise the risk of memory loss in older people. This is a piece of information deserving wide promulgation in the interests of preserving the elderly from one of the most God-awful foodstuffs ever invented. (It’s up there with marzipan.) Another nugget is a survey showing that broadcasters, celebrities and newspapers collectively have three times the influence on people’s day to day lives than does government, which establishes, yet again, that politics is a gruesome career choice attracting oversized amounts of blame for undersized amounts of influence.
The really exciting bit in Schott’s, this year, though, is the bit about Viagra, which is proving to be unexpectedly useful in areas outside its main function, which we will not discuss here at all. Studies show it has “a protective effect on heart tissue deprived of oxygen before and after heart surgery”. It also lowers blood pressure in the lungs of chronic bronchitics. All of which is good.
But the two best results are yet to come. Apparently Viagra is your only man to prevent Raynaud’s Phenomenon, from which I suffer grievously. Raynaud’s is that circulatory hiccup that strikes on cold days, where your fingers turn a corpse-like yellowy-white and fail to function for hours.
The other good thing it does is keep cut flowers fresh. One dose of Viagra, apparently, is all it takes to get a full extra week out of a bouquet.
On the other hand, even if I did score a prescription, I’m not sure I’d be able for the funny looks from the pharmacist…
Monday December 15th 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Barack Obama transcends simplistic racial categorisation
Throughout the American presidential election ran the constant reference — optimistic, on the part of African Americans — to the possibility of America gaining its “first black president”.
Now that Barack Obama is on his way to the White House, while the references continue, they are coming under more scrutiny. The question being asked boils down to this: How the hell does a man who is the child of a white woman and a black man end up being consistently defined by the black side of his genetic inheritance and herded into the black, rather than the white, community? Obama himself, in refusing to singularly represent any race within the wider American population, has referred to himself as a “mutt.”
“I identify as African-American,” he says. “That’s how I’m treated and that’s how I’m viewed. I’m proud of it.”
He has managed to welcome without leading, a characterisation of himself as the first black president, and a position as representing the great and hitherto presidentially disenfranchised African-American community.
But he isn’t black. That’s the truth. He’s half black, half white. He was raised by white women. That the new president is glad to use his biracial background to raise the morale of a large proportion of the American population should not deflect from the deeper questions implicit in his categorisation: Why have the offspring of black and white parents always been described as black? And what is the significance of the unlegislated-for law underpinning that description?
One thing is certain. It is not a positive law. In America, it goes back to slavery, and to the use by the ruling classes (including Jefferson) of African slave women for covert sexual relations which amounted in most cases to recurring institutionalised rape of what they saw as their property, not as fellow human beings. Inevitably, in that context, emerging children were regarded as black. They had to be.
For starters, anything else would have endangered the master’s reputation and property rights, not to mention his relationship with his wife. In addition, the owner of slaves added to his asset base by the production of mulatto children. They may have been equally black and white, but in financial terms, the advantage to their progenitor was to have them black, so black they were.
The threat to the majority population was seen as so profound that white people even shared among themselves tips on how to identify as having “a touch of the tar brush” someone who might have only one black grandparent or great-grandparent.
That made sense — however inhuman the sense might be — in a slave-dependent economy. But, post-Emancipation, when intermarriage between African-Americans and Caucasians began to happen, it ostensibly made less sense. Yet it continued, albeit with a shifting rationale best exemplified by the word of the essayist Arthur, comte de Gobineau, in the mid-1800s. Gobineau acknowledged that what he saw as the self-evident intellectual superiority of the whites and the matching physical superiority of the blacks would, if intermingled, have advantages, but, significantly, he saw miscegenation as a dilution of the pure blood of the white race.
Just a few decades later, the same thinking began to emerge in Europe, particularly in Germany, in relation to Jews. Jews themselves were against racial intermingling, and the more orthodox the family, the more violent was — and still is — the opposition. Within living memory, for example, a Jewish former lord mayor of Cork confirmed on television that when one of his children had “married out” of the Jewish faith, he and his family had “sat shiva” for them. They had, in other words, cut them away from the family through a formal mourning process, the same as if they had died.
Despite strictures against marrying out, throughout the years of the Jewish diaspora, many Jews married Gentiles. In one sense, it was inevitable. In Germany, in the late 19th century, Jews, although relatively small in number, were heavily represented among the millionaires in Prussia. In the 1920s, out of every six lawyers in Germany, one was Jewish, and out of every nine doctors, one was Jewish. They were wealthy, influential, intellectual leaders within society, and therefore hugely attractive as life partners. Intermarriage happened, observance of Jewish religious practices faded as the Jewish man or woman was subsumed into their Gentile host family, and it was in many ways as unremarkable as a redhead marrying into a family of blonds.
Yet the Holocaust, just a few years later, was predicated on the twin assumptions that a) Jewish blood in some way polluted Aryan families, and b) that no matter how small the proportion of that blood in any individual, they must be assigned to the Jewish, rather than the Gentile community. In due course, the purification argument led to the decision that extinction of the Jews as a race was the “solution” to the “Jewish question”.
In this context, at this time, it is perhaps appropriate to give two cheers to Irish integration through intermarriage over the past two decades.
Two cheers, rather than three, because much of Irish society still carries a racist under-tow which hurts and damages both sides.
Nonetheless, the children of visibly mixed-race parents are not only not consigned to the minority group represented by their immigrant parent, but are generally and fairly comfortably described as “New Irish”. That category, of course, doesn’t solve the practical problem of describing someone from that group to someone from the majority group, and there’s what could be called a positive embarrassment around the issue. Irish people who would have no problem saying “D’you see that fat guy over there in the leather jacket?” or “You’ll know her, she’s not two hands higher than a duck and has Ribena-streaked hair,” struggle to be as direct when describing someone who is black (or black-and-white) lest drawing attention to the obvious might in some way be construed as racist.
Yet America, with its much longer history of intermarriage and biracialism, still talks of their new president as if he belonged to a minority group within society. The fact that — even if he accepts the definition — he so demonstrably transcends it carries the hope that his inauguration will be the start of its abandonment.
One professor of African and African-American studies at Dartmouth College, maintains that the process is already underway. The racial categories which have provided a too-easy shorthand in the past are, according to Professor Marty Favor, falling apart.
“This is the moment in the 21st century when we’re stepping across that simplistic black/white thing,” he says.
If Obama’s presidency lives up to even a proportion of the hopes vested in it, one of the unsought outcomes will be that, at the end of his time in the White House, the phrase “first black president” will have been rendered irrelevant, outdated and inapplicable.
Monday December 15th 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Even doing the right thing decisively doesn’t have the PR payoff expected
SHE told them to put him in the bath and melted all the jelly she had, poured it into the hot water with which she had surrounded his comatose form, and left it to solidify around him with a spoon on the ledge, together with a note reading ‘Eat your way out’My phone made its text noise when I was starting to cook. I ignored it.
It shrieked again as I slid the food onto the plate. I disregarded it. It did it for a third time when I was handing over the spaghetti carbonara to the man in my life.
Meal served, I checked the texts. The first was a breaking news bulletin indicating that dioxins had been found in Irish pork. The second was that all Irish pig meat products were being recalled. The third was that the products of every Irish pig killed in the last several months were to be thrown out. I considered snatching the plate from himself, but decided against it, on three logical grounds.
First, there isn’t that much bacon in carbonara sauce. Second, given his addiction to ham sangers, what bacon he was consuming with the pasta was insignificant. Third, it was a tiny serving. (This is not a man given to ploughman’s lunches.)
As I cleared the fridge and went through the dates on items in the freezer to find out which ones needed to go in the wheelie bin, I thought about getting worried about the crispy streaky rashers served to clients at business breakfasts over the past three months, but decided against it. I’m all worried out.
At this stage, it’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning to face the day, particularly because we have one of those memory foam mattresses which forms a carapace around sleepers during the night. It reminds me of what Helen Hayes did to her serially drunken husband, writer Charles McCarthy, when he was delivered home to her, once too often, footless, by a bunch of his hard-drinking friends.
She told them to put him in the bath and when they were gone, melted all the jelly she had in the house, poured it into the hot water with which she had surrounded his comatose form, and left it to solidify around him with a spoon on the ledge, together with a note reading “Eat your way out.”
Right now, the people who must find it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning are the men and women around the cabinet table. The Greens must be gobsmacked at finding themselves on the road to hell, since they joined when it was paved with good intentions.
It’s worse for Fianna Fáil, the older ministers from which party — must realise, with a sinking feeling, that GUBU is back. Remember GUBU? Charles Haughey described the confluence of circumstances dogging his Government (including a murder in the Phoenix Park done by someone staying in the home of the attorney general at the time) as Grotesque, Unprecedented, Bizarre and Unbelievable. Conor Cruise O’Brien reduced the sentence to the acronym GUBU and in the process, handed commentators and historians a ready-made summation of an era.
What’s brutally unfair about a GUBU period is that half the things that happen have damn all to do with the Government of the day. They are coincidences. Individually, they are as random as Acts of God. But when they come in a cluster and work their way into a pre-existing negative context, they create a backwash of assumed blame: in some way the Government is responsible for all this disaster.
Of course, it’s not responsible, but it is in charge, and that, in GUBU times, can be dispiriting. Because, in those times, even doing the right thing decisively — as seems to have happened in relation to the pork problem — doesn’t have the PR payoff a government might expect.
Let’s face it. It was a Fianna Fáil-led government that kept foot and mouth out of Ireland, and the current Minister for Agriculture is a quietly competent individual who knows his brief better than most. Hence the measured optimism of the initial response to the pig emergency: this Government may not be winning high marks right now on most fronts (ask any of the people whose necessary journeys in Dublin on Saturday were screwed up by a phenomenally well-attended education protest) but maybe they’ll be okay on this one… That measured optimism doesn’t and didn’t survive the GUBU context. Because once you have a GUBU context, conspiracies abound, and one of the first to emerge was a question deriving from the earlier FÁS controversy. Coverage yesterday suggested that warnings had come from Europe as early as 2002 about financial imprecision within FÁS. Along parallel lines, questions began to surface about how Ireland’s precious pork industry found out about its disaster.
Had the Government received warnings earlier than last week — perhaps much earlier than last week — about dioxins in Irish pigmeat? Even if the answer to that question is a straight, provable “no,” then a rake of negative questions still surface. On the one hand, you have instructions to take anything you own that has ever said hello to a pig and get rid of it. On the other, you have reassurances coming from a state agency that pork products will probably be back on the shelves before Christmas.
What? Now, I’m a city woman. What I know about the life cycle of pigs would fit on the end of one of their curly tails. But unless someone’s come up with a way of force-growing pigs that gets them from birth to maturity in three weeks, how the hell can Irish pigmeat be back on sale, pre-Christmas? Yes, some farms can be found innocent of dioxin-laden product, but what proportion of Irish pig farms will be able to prove themselves innocent, given that we don’t seem to have the capacity within the country to test pigmeat for this carcinogenic toxin, and given the fact that it took nearly a week to get the tests (which established the current problem) done in Britain? Of course the recall is precautionary. Of course people shouldn’t annoy their doctors this morning with questions about feeling a bit queasy. Because the threat is much less urgent, and much more serious than that. The folks who, on a daily basis, eat rashers and pudding at breakfast time, or rashers in a breakfast roll, and go on to eat pork chops at lunchtime and pizzas involving pork fats or sprinkles of ham at dinner time, now have a hidden problem. They have ingested, every day, 200 times the safe amount of dioxins.
They’re not going to get cancer tomorrow. If they have the right genetic make-up, they may never get cancer. If they smoke, their chances of getting the disease — already high — may increase. The issue is how long the meat has been contaminated and how much was consumed by at-risk individuals. Medical researchers must already be crafting proposals for the seeking of grants to permit monitoring of cohorts of potential cancer-sufferers.
Ireland will present a globally useful case study in dioxin damage. What an achievement.
Monday December 1st 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
The pattern of life itself has changed for a chunk of the world’s population
A new defensiveness about employment is changing the way America looks at jobs, illegals, and outsourcing overseas.
One state has banned companies which engage in outsourcing from getting any state business. Seven other states now limit the activities of outsourcing companies.
The great thing about promising change is that life often fulfils the promise even if you don’t. Back when Barack Obama first started to talk about change, nobody anticipated the negatively transformative disasters of the last few months. It’s not just that the banks — here and overseas — are now kept alive on state infusions. It’s not just that construction has ground to a halt in this country and that house values have tanked. Or that pension funds, according to a leaked departmental document, are due to collapse in the next few months.
It’s bigger than that.
The pattern of life itself has changed utterly, for a substantial chunk of the world’s population, within half a year. Millions of Americans, for example, are now seeking jobs. Not because they were fired in the downturn. But because their pensions now won’t cover their expenses. Older Americans who looked forward to work-free years are now trying to return to the workforce, resigned to much lower pay than they used to earn, and probably to working in jobs less prestigious and interesting than the ones they once occupied.
They blame George W Bush, of course, but they don’t look to the current president for any worthwhile ideas to ameliorate their misery. They know he’s too busy, right now, giving himself writer’s cramp signing what are called “Midnight Regulations:” the directives by which a departed president seeks to rule from the grave.
In the last couple of weeks, the “Midnight Regulations” being rushed through by the dying administration include rules that will hamper the US government’s ability to control the exposure of workers to toxins and a softening of the rules affecting mining companies which want to blow the sides out of mountains in order to get at seams of coal inside. He’s cutting back on the effectiveness of the Endangered Species Act and of the Clean Water Act. True to his grim form, his last days in office are devoted to putting the interests of a limited number of big businesses above the interests of the ordinary citizen, whether of America or of the world.
One of the first major changes Obama should make is to place a moratorium on “Midnight Regulations.” Every incoming president bitches about the regulations rushed in by his predecessor and some incoming administrations spend a great deal of time and effort trying to unravel the weave of control put in place by the previous holder of the job.
Obama could and should create a situation where, once any future president-elect has been elected, the current incumbent cannot and may not introduce any new directives or rules. Let’s face it. If you haven’t managed to do what you wanted to do in seven and three quarter years, then why should you be allowed to slide constraints on your successor into position when you could more usefully be packing your suitcases and leaving the White House in good condition for the new residents? That change may be low on Obama’s agenda, but it’s arguable it’s on a higher rung than the possibility of regularising the position of Irish people working and living illegally in the United States.
Indeed, any move to soften the environment for illegals of any nationality would not make immediate sense for the new administration.
A new defensiveness about employment is changing the way America looks at jobs, illegals, and outsourcing overseas. One state — Vermont — has banned companies which engage in outsourcing from getting any state business. Seven other states now limit the activities of outsourcing companies. And, while restaurants and other retailers with tight margins and diminishing markets may use illegals in poorly paid jobs as a way of keeping afloat, larger companies and prominent families are much more cautious about taking a nudge-nudge approach to their employment.
In addition to the “don’t let them take our jobs” rationale, other factors are coming into play, including the cost of healthcare. The VHI announcement this week of a massive increase in charges puts Ireland closer to the American situation, where the capacity to afford health insurance is the defining line between self-respect and fear, between a good job and a bad job.
Not only are millions of Americans falling through the health-insurance cracks, but the systems on which they depend are being stretched to the limits by illegal aliens. One hospital in Florida — Jackson Memorial — pays out $1 million (€785,000) every year to translators, in order that the medical staff can elicit information from patients about their condition. That million is spent exclusively on illegals, who make up 90% of the hospital’s throughput. Which, in turn, plays hell with its budget.
“We have a burden that we clearly didn’t ask for, but we’re taking it on,” their top guy shrugs. “We’re treating everybody that comes through our door and we treat everybody the same.”
Jackson Memorial cannot balance its books, but it is driven by a commitment to deliver care to those who need it, whether or not they are illegal immigrants into the United States. However, the problems faced by healthcare providers who deal with illegals are not merely financial. The diseases the illegal immigrants introduce into the hospitals — bearing in mind that hospital-generated illness is the eighth largest cause of death in that country — present another serious challenge.
Once-eradicated diseases are returning. One of them, as the Centres for Disease Control has noted, is tuberculosis. Many illegal immigrants are at risk of TB, but, even if they suspect they may be infected and infectious, cannot afford to seek medical care for the disease, lest they be deported — or have costs levied on them that they simply cannot meet. In addition to TB, the “new old” illnesses on the march in 21st century America are Chagas disease, leprosy (or Hansen’s disease) and malaria.
“Over the last 40 years, there have been just under 1,000 cases of leprosy in the United States — a disease that most people felt had disappeared in this country,” writes Lou Dobbs, a CNN business broadcaster. “Yet there have been 7,000 cases reported in just the past three years. Obviously, leprosy, which still affects third world countries, did not just spring back to life in America of its own accord. It’s obvious we’re not checking people for disease at our borders, because we’re not checking these people at all. Hospitals don’t need the additional burden of combating rare diseases. They have enough trouble keeping their patients from contracting new ones, let alone infections developed while those patients are in their care.”
Irish parents and grandparents of illegals in the US will immediately point out that none of these diseases are issues in this country, therefore are unlikely to be brought into America by our workers, legal or illegal. It doesn’t matter. The new president cannot single out one set of illegals and find them somehow more meritorious than the others.
Barack Obama may be heavily lobbied on behalf of the Irish who got into America “under the wire” and are now building their lives there.
It’s extremely unlikely that he’ll do anything for them in the short to medium term.
Monday November 24th 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
We may all be in this together, but there’s no togetherness about it
He was having to work longer and longer hours to achieve the same living. The Regulator was making him install a meter, at enormous cost, that was going to force him to charge customers more for their journeys. That, in turn, would cause many customers to take the bus instead. Which would make worse the situation caused by those Progressive Democrats who put any eejit who wanted to drive a taxi on the road, including Michael O’Leary, who’s not an eejit, but what kind of de-regulation lets a guy like him drive a taxi just to get into the bus lane? Thanks to that Mary Harney and her PDs, Dublin has more taxis at the moment than does Melbourne. So it does.
“At least they’re wound up, now, the PDs,” he added. “Pity the media wouldn’t wind up, too. Particularly George Glee. Not jokin’ you, I’ve given up listening to the radio. It’s all moaning from morning to night. This recession is just a short term thing. It’d be over already if George Glee and his pals weren’t making money out of it. That’s the real cause. Once they get shut up, wait’n you see, everything’ll snap back and we won’t have any more moaning.”
Distracted by his renaming of RTÉ’s serious economics correspondent, it struck me only later that the people who, thus far, are only marginally affected by the recession are the ones a) most likely to talk about their miseries, and b) most likely to believe it will be over soon. This particular man is convinced that once we splurge on Christmas, jobs will manifest themselves, debts evaporate, negative equity go positive and taxes reduce.
Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we buy.
I wish. You wish. We all wish. Those doing the strongest wishing are the people who, for the first time in their lives, are filling in Lottery tickets, as they can see no other way out of the morass they’re in.
While The National Lottery’s delightful Paula McEvoy resolutely uses the word “play” about buying lottery tickets, this new wave of solid middle class lottery ticket purchasers don’t think they’re playing. Not playing but drowning… They’re not the ones who couldn’t get themselves to work without their hand clasped around a Venti skinny latte. They’re the kind of people who went to work before many of the coffee shops even opened.
They’re not the ones who bought designer handbags and designer jeans and designer in-your-face cars. Not the ones who described twenty thousand Euro as “walking around money.”
They took pride in paying off their mortgage, the older ones, and then got expert advice that suggested they re-mortgage and buy a second property. Now, when they go to meetings in the bank, the officials demand bigger, faster repayments out of money they no longer have. Because more and more of them have been made redundant. A word unthinkable, inapplicable to them, all their lives.
Who ever heard of an architect, a surveyor, a solicitor or an accountant being made redundant in their middle years by companies that have no problem with their performance? The ones who are left to rattle around in offices, that are three times too big for purpose, suffer survivor’s guilt mingled with fear. They can’t move from the oversized offices because they’re locked into a contract with the landlord, who won’t hear of a rent reduction, and they can’t stiff him without declaring bankruptcy.
“No job too small,” they say wryly, in ironic reference to the marvellous scale of the projects they worked on just a year ago. “No job too small.”
At the younger end of the disaster is a generation of bright young things who never needed to join a trade union, because they were part of a fast-growing business recently created by people who, in age and attitude and expectation, were just like themselves. Who needed a union? Who needed to know employment rights, when bonuses came thick and fast each year?
Now, some of those younger people are being fired and have no clue about the order in which it is possible to make someone redundant or the compensation an employer must pay. One young client of mine was told his salary would drop from €100,000 a year to 40. It was not a consultation and he had no idea if he could refuse without being canned.
Arguably the worst off are the bankers. No, not the guys at the top, although some of them are grievously wounded in the pocket, too. But at the middle ranks, among the branch managers and assistant branch managers who spend their days reluctantly hounding home owners and small business people for money, is a level of quiet desperation, generated by the financial commonsense of another time and loyalty to their own organisation.
They took their bonuses and their pension funds and invested them in bank shares. Now, they’re work a tenth of what they were worth. Or a twentieth. Or worse. The word is that the bulk of bad debts or sour loans on the books of several banks have the names of bank employees against them.
They’re keeping their mouths shut because there’s limited satisfaction in venting it. But it shows. Oh, Lord, it shows. Each and every one of them could be the crushed businessman described by Ed Mc Bain: “He looked as if he had wilted and didn’t know how the hell to unwilt.”
The worst aspect of it all is the sense of personal failure. The unwillingness to tell teenage sons and daughters that Daddy and Mammy are currently so hard-pressed that they would sell the car and buy a smaller one, except that they’re now doing sums on the back of an envelope and none of the sums are coming out right.
The beamer they bought because beamers, like mercs, always hold their re-sale value, has broken the rule. So selling it might not produce the price of a smaller car, although the smaller car would use less fuel.
On the other hand, with garages like that one in Birr selling petrol for less than a euro a litre, maybe it would make more sense to hang on to the bigger car for the moment… Coping best are the craftsmen with the bit of redundancy money to tide them over the Christmas. Plus, they’ve signed on, despite which action, they’re planning a few small jobs for January.
Because the black economy is roaring back to life, and with all this talk of cutbacks in the public service, are the Revenue Commissioners going to be able to put spies out on the street, checking up on every plumber who fixes an S bend for cash? They don’t think so and they’re willing to risk it.
Misery may love company, but in this instance, the suffering and fear is cellular and separate.
We may all be in this together, but there’s no togetherness about it.
Monday November 17th 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Where there’s a will there’s a way: Pros and cons of your last testament
MAKING a will is a socially approved of activity like taking exercise. I’m all for it. For other people. It may be irrational to believe that taking exercise or writing a will would kill you, but what about Jim Fixx, I ask you?
He was the guy who almost invented jogging, died at a young age while doing it and probably had his will all neatly done out well in advance of his demise.
Of course, the minute you say that, the fitness fans all shake their heads tolerantly and suggest that he might have died much sooner if he hadn’t kept himself so fit. Which line of argument is called having your cake and eating it, not that the fitness folk would sully their lips with cake.
We now have a State board to encourage us to contribute to pensions, and you can figure an awful lot of people will be contributing to their pensions on this particular Monday, in order to ward off the long scythe-like instrument the Revenue Commissioners use to amputate income and other taxes from us on this date every year. We have a State board because of the huge bulge of older people who are going to live practically forever and who won’t be working to support themselves through their 70s, 80s and 90s.
A couple of years back, a couple of little voices (including mine) raised the possibility that these older people SHOULD be able to work until they keeled over, if still productive, since work is a) fun, b) keeps people connected and diminishes loneliness, c) results in money going into your pocket that doesn’t come out of your nest egg. Now, if you’re young, you don’t think of diminishing nest eggs, but one of the sad concomitants of old age is a rising anxiety about where money is coming from and how diminished is the pension fund providing a buffer against disaster.
The line of thought that older people should keep working after the State pension kicks in is complicated by the rising numbers of the unemployed. People unexpectedly and through no fault of their own made redundant in their 20s or 30s tend to want older people who’ve had their go at serving in the workplace to move right along there and give the next generation a chance. Never mind the fact that the pension funds of many of our older citizens have taken a nosedive, as has the value of their homes. God be with the days (last year, maybe?) when to turn on the radio was to be forced to listen to voices purporting to be happy-clappy pensioners headed off on an overseas trip because of a clever financial institution offering to take a bit of the equity in their home off their hands. Quaint bits of history, those advertisements now are. Any day now, John Bowman will root out one of them from the RTÉ archives as an illustration of the heady days before the Celtic Tiger got mange, hoose and worms.
Whether you have a lot of property or a small diminished pile nobody wants to buy from you, you should, according to John G Murphy and Jason Dunne, make a will. John and Jason have just published a book called Inheritance and Succession, the Complete Irish Guide. In it, they say half the people over 18 in this country haven’t made a will. (Cries offstage of “Boo. Shame.”)
“Half of all people in Ireland,” they state, “are either continually concerned or very worried about money and about their future.” (Cries offstage of “And that was BEFORE the Budget.”)
BUT hold, I thought, as I read their book, which has cute Russian dolls with long eyelashes on its cover. Who says this 50% is the same as the other 50%? Maybe the people who are worried sick about their future are the ones who HAVE gone and made their will and find that it has brought them no peace of mind at all. Maybe they’ve made a Leona Helmsley will, leaving all their millions to the dog, and feel guilty about disinheriting everybody else. Perhaps they’re concerned that the dog-disinherited will fight the thing in court after their death. Or — in these volatile times — they worry that what they’ve given to one survivor may have dropped in value so as to amount to an insult, rather than a gift.
For example, allocating the gold charm bracelet to Ailish the Niece and the Fr Jack Hanlon painting to Michael the Colleague may give one a deep secret sense of satisfaction or create extra worries. There’s always the possibility that Ailish wouldn’t be seen dead wearing a charm bracelet and will flog it first chance and that Michael would put the sketch where the sun would bleach it.
I suspect, though, that the 50% who worry about finance may be the ones who are going to pop their clogs intestate, because people who have made wills are ungovernably smug about it. They have an air of having done the world a service. I don’t see it, myself. Because of ineradicable traces of socialism, I worry about inheritance. Poverty is inherited, as is wealth. If you’re born into a family whose finances, in that great Irish euphemism, are “comfortable”, you’re likely to be kept nourished, clean and educated. That, combined with your own energies, should keep you going for the rest of your life, without the added benefit of inheriting the family house and — if you’re really lucky — investment portfolio. The probated will, it could be suggested, serves to perpetuate social inequity down through the generations.
And before you write to the Editor, yelling that if you didn’t inherit the family house, how the hell could you afford to keep your Dad in the nursing home where his stroke put him a couple of years back, I know. You have a point. A more painfully personal point than the proposition that inheriting wealth just because you were born into X family rather than Y family is unjust.
There might be some fun in writing a will if you could disinherit someone just for spite, but according to Inheritance and Succession — The Complete Irish Guide, it’s not that easy to disinherit those close to you. My formidable next-door neighbour, who did her will 25 years ago and changed it once since then, was genuinely shocked to hear that I hadn’t parcelled out what I own in a formal document for distribution after I snuff it.
“Even if you only have a wheelbarrow, you don’t want five people fighting over it,” she said severely. “You don’t have a licence on tomorrow. None of us has.”
I do have a wheelbarrow. I went out and looked at it after she’d gone. It didn’t look to me like a wheelbarrow two people would fight over, never mind five. But I take her point. I’ll definitely make a will. And give the wheelbarrow to one specific person — whether they want it or not.
Wheelbarrows are easy. It’s who to inflict the two cats on is the problem.
Monday November 10th 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Trust me on this, skip scavenging is your only man
Because of the times we’re in, when we heard the company next door was moving, we assumed the worst. In fact, the reason is the best: they’re moving to bigger premises because they’re doing fine, thank you very much.
We are, nonetheless, sorry to see them go, not least because their smokers and our smokers used to have friendly chats as they froze themselves out on the metal fire escapes. They also didn’t mind the men in our company jumping over the wall into their back garden as a short cut exit at the end of the day’s work.
The outward and visible sign of their impending departure is the outsize skip on the pavement at the front of our joined-up buildings. You don’t see that many skips, these days, compared to the nineties. Cranes and skips have been emigrating in response to the economic downturn, and, as a committed skip-scavenger, this causes me much grief.
I was taught to skip-scavenge by American writer Rita Mae Brown, who put herself through college in New York by nocturnal rifling of dumpsters. Rita Mae would take discarded lamps, furniture, cans of paint and anything else in a dumpster that showed promise. She would repair the electrical goods, refurbish the furniture and, once she’d furnished her own loft apartment, sell them on. She would use the paint in decorating homes, which was her money-earner at the time. Every now and again she would get exceptionally lucky, as when she found an assortment of antique bronze door handles carelessly tossed away by their owners. The only problems were cruising police cars attracted by the sight of a fetching female shape emerging from a dumpster in the dark.
By the time I interviewed her, Rita Mae was rich, as a result of her breakthrough book, Rubyfruit Jungle, a series of detective novels and a number of screenplays. She no longer needed to support herself on other people’s discards, but she was so nostalgic for her days of dumpster-prowling, I ended up trying it out for myself. And getting hooked on the practice. Trust me on this. Skip scavenging is your only man.
The best time for skip-scavenging is the middle of the night or the very early morning, and the best skips are those which have been filled by amateurs. Professional builders have their own systems for making the best use of the space within a skip. They first of all build up the sides with a palisade of wood. The wood can be floorboards, rafters, widow frames or doors, and it serves the same purpose as greaseproof paper around the top of a cold soufflé; it allows you to put twice as much stuff into the container as it would otherwise hold.
However, it also means that the skip-scavenger has difficulty getting into the thing. Unless — as in my case — the scavenger wants wood for their wood-burning stove, in which case you just haul out the long planks of wood from one side and shove them in your car. A van is probably the best vehicle for this purpose, but a convertible is good, too. Once the roof is down, you can angle the wood so its lowest point is jammed behind the front seat and you’re set. Never mind the looks you get on cold November days from other motorists. Turn on the car heater, roll up the windows, sit low in the seat and get that free fuel home.
Once you’ve created a space in the barrier to entry provided by the wooden uprights, you can then get into the skip for a good rummage. Usually, when I’m ready for this second phase, I remember, too late, that four inch heels are not the best footwear for the purpose, but do a to-hell-with-it and climb in anyway.
Because the company next door to us are not disassembling their building (if you try to put a drawing pin in a wall in a building in Northumberland Road, Dublin, the local authority and An Taisce execute you) they have no wood barriers on the sides of their skip. So, on the way to work one early morning last week, I was attracted by easily-identified contents. Lovely ring-binder folders. Gorgeous three-tiered desk document holders. I couldn’t carry all my booty and didn’t get back out to get the rest until mid-morning, when one of the executives from next door caught me at it. I was mortified.
“Do you like flower pots?” she asked, holding out the three she had carried down to put in the skip. I nodded, dumbly.
“In an hour or so, we’ll be putting out quite good chairs,” she offered in a kindly way.
For the rest of the day, the two of us did an instant-recycling dance. She would put out items they didn’t consider worth bringing to their spanking new premises. I would retrieve them. It was a clear win/win. They got much more use out of their skip than they would otherwise have been able to get, because of the space I kept creating within it, and I got clean detritus. (The great thing about skips is that, for the most part, people don’t throw organic waste into them, so a scavenger rarely has to cope with dead tea bags or indeterminate slime.) The only people who disapproved were the ones I work with, who thought I was bringing down the tone of our operation and were terrified important clients would see me in the skip, filling discarded waste baskets with abandoned staplers.
I pointed out to them that millions of people in Malaysia make their living from fulltime scavenging on landfills. This was greeted with a shudder, as was the retrieved toaster I brandished.
The irrational consensus was that you could get a disease from a toaster that had (very briefly) visited a skip. Never mind that the heat within a toaster would kill off any skip-specific germ. Nobody would eat the toast I made with it. Worse, one of my colleagues likened me to “The Suits that scam Marks & Spencers.”
I hadn’t known about these Suits or their scam. But apparently it works like this. (Or did in the past — M&S undoubtedly have developed preventive measures in recent times.) Well-dressed male executives would climb into skips at the back of M&S to locate packages of food tossed out because they were at or close to their sell-by date. They would clean off the wrapping, shove them in a bag and go into the shop, where they would visit the courtesy desk, produce a couple of packages, claiming they’d bought them earlier that day and only now spotted the date stamp. The M&S people — shocked — would immediately replace the packages thereby providing the scammers with free food.
That kind of crookery brings the rest of us scavengers into disrepute. Anyone who takes such a low-life approach should be subject to an Ethics in Public Skip Scavenging Act. If there was one.
Sadly, there’s no point in bringing such legislation in at this point. Skips are becoming an endangered species, and good committed, highly-skilled scavengers mourn their passing.
Monday November 3rd 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Hallowe’en happens every year, but its miseries are preventable
I’m not suggesting we stop the Irish army doing its marvellous peace-keeping work in places like Chad.
However, I am suggesting we deploy the four or five thousand army personnel here in similar peacekeeping activities. Peacekeeping and crime prevention. LAST Friday evening, the taxi to take me to a TV studio was running so late that the driver kept telephoning to report his limited progress.
“Hallowe’en,” he said, when he eventually arrived. “Big bonfire half a kilometre down the road. Any other way out of here?
” Short answer? No. The bonfire was now two storeys high, on the sea-side of the road, the wind from the sea blowing the flames right across the road. The only road. “Get through it if I go fast,” the taxi driver said, and accelerated.
The problem, as the car went through the flames, was the smoke, which cut off his view. For half a second, he hesitated, and me and my American friend, in the back seat, wondered how soon the petrol tank would blow. Then we were through it, the windscreen coated with the tarry black smoke from the burning car tyres at the fire.
We passed other bonfires on the journey, which took four times as long as it normally would. Bonfires surrounded by capering children wearing sheets and other long inflammable robes, few of them supervised by adults. The adults present were frequently of the young male variety, clutching drink bottles by the neck. “Tonight, the A&E’s will be full of people burned because they fell into the bonfire drunk or got pushed,” the driver predicted. “Kids with eye injuries from illegal fireworks. Lads glassing each other.”
The American, wide-eyed, looked a question at me. I explained “glassing”. She looked horrified. Mishewaka, South Bend, Indiana, apparently doesn’t do Hallowe’en bonfires or glassing.
A work colleague was foolish enough to have dinner in a pleasant restaurant in the middle of our capital city the same night. He and his three friends, emerging at 10.30pm, walked the short distance to his parked car, stepping over pools of puke and urine and skirting groups of heavily-costumed revellers, high as kites and aggressive as rottweilers. They were just in time to see a drunk caving in the side of their car with a rubbish bin. They didn’t call the Guards, because they figured — rightly, as it turned out — the Garda Síochána might be a tad busy, that happy night of celebration.
By morning, the city looked like a set for a movie of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and smelled like a cesspool. The fire brigades had been called out once a minute throughout the night to cope with out-of-control bonfires. Forty percent of those callouts involved attacks on the firefighters. Gardaí were also attacked. Several of these public servants ended up in hospitals that were already clogged with the drunk, the drugged, the stabbed, the burned and the glassed. The clean-up alone, according to the local authorities, will cost more than a million.
And that’s not counting the immeasurable damage done to the environment as the bonfires released more dioxins into the atmosphere than is released throughout the entire year by industry and domestic burning.
Strumpet City, 2008.
“What will happen?” my American friend asked, appalled and frightened by the sort of behaviour she associated with TV coverage of race riots in American cities in times past.
Another short answer? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Hallowe’en, in one single night, sums up everything that’s gone wrong with Irish society over the past 10 years. It is the exemplar of the anti-social behaviour, the alcohol-sodden violence justified by the ever-present plaint “you gotta have a laugh,” the disregard for the built and natural environment that is seen but less obvious throughout the year. The Hogarth cartoons of debased Britons during the eighteenth century gin craze, with their damaged babies, half-naked comatose mothers, puking drinkers and suicides hanging in the shadows of abandoned buildings, are eerily evocative of present-day Ireland.
It happens every year. Its miseries are preventable every year. Its mutilations and murders are regretted and tut-tutted over every year, but what can you do?
I’ll tell you what we can do.
ONE bit of the Irish public service works pretty damn perfectly. It’s well-equipped, highly disciplined, multi-skilled and widely experienced. It’s regarded, internationally, as best-in-class, its teams beating those from much wealthier countries in open competition. It’s up to speed, up to strength, distributed throughout the country and has the transport and logistics to get to trouble spots quickly.
I’m not suggesting we stop the Irish army doing its marvellous peace-keeping work in places like Chad, but I AM suggesting we deploy the four or five thousand army personnel here at home in similar peacekeeping activities. Peacekeeping and crime prevention. Take the bonfires as one single example. Once upon a time, back in reasonable Ireland when the nation had a sense of proportion, kids would drag fallen branches and build them into a pyre in the few days before Hallowe’en. In recent years, the bonfires have been getting bigger and bigger, and the advance planning has started weeks before, with lads rolling car and lorry tyres to the site of the fire.
Now, the sources of such tyres are not infinite. Not many readers of this paper have a private stash of car tyres in their conservatory. Car tyres get kept in a limited number of locations. Predictable locations. Wooden pallets, ditto.
So why not, in the month before Hallowe’en, put the army in place around those locations and issue a warning that — just as a coat pocket full of beer cans are not going to be allowed if you’re attending a concert — anybody found in possession of an old car tyre without a bloody good explanation is going to have it confiscated from them?
Banning of car-tyre bonfires, and active prevention of same, would have immediate gains for public health and safety and for the Environment. John Gormley and Eamon Ryan may, currently, feel their hands are tied in lots of areas where they would wish to take environmental action. They could push this one without cost to the state — indeed, it could save local authorities and the health service money, this time next year. And if the economy, this time next year, is going to be as weak at the knees as seems likely, the Government simply cannot countenance the several million Euro Hallowe’en costs the state each year.
Dermot Ahern might also look at a little amendment to the law, based on a provision in American traffic legislation. American roads carry signs telling you that “Speeding fines will be doubled when workers present.” In other words, if you’d be fined $500 (€395)for speeding on a particular road, you’ll be fined $1,000 (€785) if you’re caught doing so when road-workers are around and likely to be endangered by your behaviour. Over here, the Minister for Justice might double the penalty for assault if the attack is on a firefighter at the scene of a blaze.
The moment you mention doing anything local with the army, it’s assumed that you’re trying to reduce civil liberties.
Not so.
Part of the army’s mission is to act in support of the civil power. If it did so, in preparation for predictable annual flashpoints like Hallowe’en, it would enhance civil liberties and radically improve the quality of Irish life.
Monday October 27th 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Cowen needs to prove — and fast — that he is a true ‘Daddy’ figure
IN THEORY, after the past week or so, Brian Lenihan should be in a corner, wearing a dunce’s cap. But Brian Lenihan may have a touch of Bertie’s Teflon, because, for some reason, he hasn’t attracted the worst of the odium.
People seem willing to smack him aside as having been put in the job by the Taoiseach, who therefore carries the can. Or maybe it’s because of his good track record as Minister for Justice. Or perhaps because he has stayed so earnestly civil, under daily attack.
It doesn’t matter. It’s Brian Cowen who’s attracting the odium and carrying the can.
Not on his own, it must be admitted, after yesterday’s Sunday Business Post Red C poll. That dropped the Fianna Fáil lift, if not quite to the floor, indubitably to a level lower than it has ever skidded to since polling began.Up, on the other side, went Fine Gael with such speed it must be a little dizzy to find itself statistically outstripping the Soldiers of Destiny, even if that party currently has a lot more soldiers on the floor of Leinster House. Fianna Fáil currently has the bodies. But Fine Gael and Labour have the vital signs.
The idea that our Brian, King of Heartland Fianna Fáil, could be rejected by the plain people of Ireland, not to mention the plain old people of Ireland, is a serious gobsmacker for his Fianna Fáil colleagues. This is the man the country was waiting for after years of Big Soft Bertie. The straight-talking, witty, big brain. The man who moved even the cynics in his party by the speeches he made after his accession, and the commitment within them to do his level best. The man they liked. The man they still like.
That’s one of the important factors not to be missed in addressing the current disaster. Most of the cabinet continue to like Brian Cowen. While some of the oldsters may make mention of the Fianna Fáil pattern of a marathon Taoiseach like Bertie being followed by a short sprint merchant like Albert, no secret meetings are currently in progress to oust Cowen. Of course, the prospect of being in charge of a slaughterhouse does tend to dampen ambitions just a bit. Cowen’s situation is helped by the fact that nobody in their right mind would want to take on the task of managing the unmanageable. Indeed, from his point of view, the great advantage of having potential pretenders to his throne around the cabinet table is that every one of them knows precisely how bad the finances are — and, just as importantly, knows that the general public does not yet know how bad they are, although they’re beginning to get an inkling.
When a private school loses several students because their parents have gone bankrupt, when black jokes are made about getting out of the 1% levy because you’re on protective notice, and when trying to flog some old jewellery begins to be talked about as a good idea, the general public are certainly fumbling around the edges of full financial understanding. Which is why Fine Gael will be hugging itself today after its poll triumph, but not planning a general election in the immediate future. Not even Fine Gael, with its oversized sense of public responsibility, would go down that road. You don’t push hard for the job of captain of the Titanic directly after the iceberg has ripped a hole in the vessel. You just hum along with the orchestra as it plays Nearer my God to Thee.
That said, the faithful surrounding this Taoiseach are as edgy, these days, as everybody’s pet labrador at Hallowe’en: they never know where the next flashbang’s going to come from, and they’re beginning to wonder about Brian’s capacity to manage them.
The emerging reality is this. Brian Cowen approaches a crisis the way Bertie Ahern approached a question. Sideways.
Bertie knew that a straight answer to a straight question had its benefits. He just didn’t think they applied to him. So he responded to every incoming question with a string of mutually unrelated words that sounded as if they might amount to a sentence if you rearranged them for him. But the endeavour looked so heartbreakingly tiring, most of us decided not to bother.
Plus, he was doing other things like achieving peace, getting the SSIAs paid out and keeping us wealthy. Brian Cowen wasn’t going to be like that, we knew. We were out of the era of soft waffle and into the era of direct-talking action. And for a while there, we thought we’d been right. It was so exciting, the night Our Brian sent a message to RTÉ — “Hold the front page [or the TV equivalent], I’ll be right over.” Except that he went decisively on the nine o’clock news and at the end of it, none of us knew whether it was Christmas or Tuesday. The elderly people planning to get their duffel coats on and warm up the Zimmer frames certainly hadn’t a clue what he’d meant.
That’s because Brian does a high-end version of Bertie’s incoherence. Bertie took phrases we all understood, like “upset the apple cart” and turned them into phrases nobody could understand but everybody kind of liked, like “upset the apple tart”. Brian just takes phrases none of us can understand and hits us with them, hard and repeatedly.
“We have stayed within the budgetary parameters,” he told us last week. Now, think about that. Let’s say you’re a patient, ready to have your left leg amputated because it’s riddled with gangrene. The anaesthetist sends you to La La land and the surgeon mistakenly cuts off your right leg. When you surface and find yourself possessed of only one leg, and it is still reeking of rot, and you get a bit shirty about the situation, the surgeon tells you he stayed within clinical parameters. To which the answer is “Tulip, if you’d taken off the right leg, I might listen to you talking twaddle, but now I’m legless, talk English or else.
” Mary Coughlan copying Brian made it worse. She warbled the “budgetary parameters” line last week so often that Matt Cooper got ratty and told her three choruses of it was enough.
Mary Coughlan’s plight is symptomatic of a wider malaise within the cabinet. The “When will Daddy come home?” malaise. The Daddy of a cabinet in tough times has a firm reassuring hand and tight management ability. He doesn’t allow loyal Fianna Fáil ministers to go on media firmly holding the line, not knowing the line is history.
The Daddy doesn’t rush out to RTÉ to say nothing at extreme length and then nearly go to China, get second thoughts, send Batt instead and then follow him, only to admit to the first microphone that presents itself to him out there that, yes, his authority is dented. His cabinet colleagues (of all parties) desperately want Our Brian to become the Daddy. They hate the fact that yesterday’s poll put a deadline as tight as a noose around his achieving it. But they still hope he’ll do it.
Correction.
They desperately hope he’ll do it.
Monday October 20th 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
A little communications planning might have averted political disaster
The first principal of good communications is to start with the audience — with the people who will be affected by a communication. In the case of the medical cards withdrawal, the primary audience was the over-70s, the secondary audience was Fianna Fáil backbenchers and the tertiary audience was media.
The medical card issue was one of those you file under “Bleedin’ Obvious”. It was bleedin’ obvious that every family in this country has a parent in their 70s, 80s or 90s who is kept alive and functioning through a daily cocktail of expensive drugs, and who, thanks to Fianna Fáil’s gift of the medical card, abandoned the VHI and now faces at least €5,000 in extra medical costs.
It was bleedin’ obvious that the offspring of those parents, already impoverished by the events of the year and — in many cases — by the crippling cost of long-term nursing home care for their father or mother, would tot up the implications, add in the emotional distress of the Mammy or the Daddy, and tell at least 20 other people of the resultant trauma to them, the offspring.
It was bleedin’ obvious, in consequence, that every radio programme would be inundated with heart-rending personal sagas illustrating the general pain, and that print media would go find recognisable figures (think Anna Manahan and Gemma Hussey) who would personify the wounded middle class reaction to the measure.
It was so bleedin’ obvious that RTÉ’s commentator-on-the-fly, KPMG tax partner Donall Gannon, was able to spot it on first hearing and predict, live on the air, that it would be a major problem.
Now, if that’s the inevitable forest fire of reaction to the story you have to tell, what, in communication terms, should you do?
The first thing you do is establish who, in the over-70s, is not going to be hit by this, develop clear, understandable profiles of them and ideally find real-life examples of them to put on media. Divide and conquer. Place the majority of the elderly in the safe zone and make sure the ones who are safe know, from the outset, just how safe they are.
The second thing you do is establish who, in the over-70s, is going to be hit by it and find the extreme, dislikeable multi-millionnaire personification of them.
Nobody then will come out crying, because they’d be laughed off the stage, and the rest of the public will say “The hell with them, they should never have had the medical card in the first place.”
If you do that, and share the details with all cabinet members, then you obviate what happened, with the cabinet a) doing sums on the TV which nobody could understand, because it isn’t the medium for mathematics on the fly, b) countering emotive personal anecdote with statistical data, which never works, or c) blundering into wider issues, thereby laying traps for colleagues appearing on later programmes.
At the same time, you take care of the secondary audience by realistically assessing their position.
The position of the Fianna Fáil backbenchers is FF takes care of the elderly and always has. They know we have more elderly, and more vocal elderly than at any time in political history and that their families are suddenly under unprecedented financial pressure. All of which was going to add up, once the penny dropped, to a mutinous fury, based not just on fear of returning to the constituency to be smacked in the kisser by dozens of voters, but on a sense that their party was abandoning one of its core values.
IF the communications problems implicit in reaching the backbenchers and making them agreeable in the face of this move had been addressed, early on, I personally doubt that the move itself would have been made, so problematic was the communication required.
But they were not addressed. Instead, the cabinet looked at the figures, at the rising tide of the demographic, and were persuaded to take a stance which ran counter to Fianna Fáil DNA and was likely to deal a blow to the Greens from which they may never recover.
All of this was going to feed into media coverage. It had the slimmest of chances of working if Brian Lenihan were present at all media events, because his sweetly reasonable relentlessness allows him to cope, even on programmes where Joan Burton and Alan Shatter sub-machine gun him.
However, he couldn’t battle it on his own, and colleagues who went to help him clobbered him worse than the media did.
The Taoiseach’s pre-emptive strike on the News didn’t work, and the other cabinet members who spoke tended, with the best of intentions, to complicate and reinforce the problem.
Even if great communications strategies had been crafted around each of the killer issues in this budget, it wouldn’t have been enough. Other issues should have been addressed in advance. Issues like the standing ovation. In political terms, the standing ovation is rarely spontaneous, and is always one of the most coercive forms of collective communication. No single individual does the insisting, but the insisting is done, nonetheless. The crowd insists that each person stands. The individual who doesn’t want to stand ends up standing because staying in a sitting position when a standing ovation happens carries disproportionate significance. Failing to join a standing ovation is never seen as neutral. It is felt to be as hostile as sending a nail bomb.
Failure to stand indicates contempt for the person celebrated, defiance of the general consensus, and disloyalty to the emerging cause. It requires spontaneous courage in a situation where the implications are difficult to work out.
The cabinet was misled by the standing ovation into sitting, the following day, in the Dáil chamber smiling at the opposition and joking with each other. While the cameras rolled. The visual disconnect between their casually happy demeanor and what the public were facing was lethal.
That disconnect repeated itself in the Tánaiste’s utterances throughout the week. Mary Coughlan’s communication errors caused the fastest destruction of a public image in living memory.
Media loved her before she became Tánaiste. Especially when she lost weight and jazzed up her appearance. Nothing goes down as well with media as a makeover. In addition to liking her as a source of column inches, they liked her personally, as did a substantial cohort of Fianna Fáil backbenchers. The self-chosen shift from jolly pint-drinking swear-like-a-sailor, bit-of-all-right girlhood to threatening gauleiter was ill-judged.
Public reproaches freighted with warnings of retribution are always a mistake. Fianna Fáil’s tradition has been the tug at the jacket and the quiet word, escalating, in Haughey’s time, to the terrifying phone call in the small hours of the morning.
You just don’t publicly tell embattled Fianna Fáil backbenchers they’ll be carpeted if they bitch while the Taoiseach’s away.
Someone should tell the Taoiseach that communications planning around tough decisions should not be dismissed as PR.
Its real function is reality-testing.
Monday October 13th 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
At Kenny’s level of income there is not that much pain in a pay cut
WOULD I have advised Enda Kenny to take a pay cut, all by his little self? Are you kidding? I’d have stayed a mile away from the suggestion, partly because his colleagues were inevitably going to be asked if they’d do likewise and fail to be thrilled by the possibility, but mainly because I know his wife.
Fionnuala Kenny is a warm and charming and direct woman. I would be fearful that suggesting she manage on a smaller budget as a symbolic gesture of solidarity with a pressured nation might make her less warm and charming and a lot more direct.
What was funny about the Kenny pay cut was the way the announcement happened. It’s unique in Irish history: the only political promise ever released by accident AFTER it had already been delivered on.
RTÉ’s David McCullough asked a “Put up or shut up” question about pay cuts and Kenny, in response, admitted he’d already told the relevant authorities to throttle back on his wages. The two men on either side of him, clearly gob-smacked by this admission, were jump-started into saying they’d do likewise. The sharper tools in the Dáil shed turned off their mobile phones lest they be similarly jump-started. And Kenny went to ground.
“Typical,” one journalist muttered. “Like the time he pulled the truck off the woman. Has no idea how to make the most of stuff.”
Truck? Woman? The journalist wasn’t desperately sure, but was convinced that the leader of Fine Gael had at some stage pulled a crashed truck off a woman or pulled a woman from under a truck (this was news to me) and then refused to talk about it, (which would explain why it was news to me).
To the journalist, keeping truck-lifting a secret was an example of egregious failure on Enda Kenny’s part to meet the reasonable and legitimate needs of media, and you have to agree. The least Kenny could have done was replay the event for the cameras, hair a little tousled, biceps straining. But apparently the old adage about PR being all about doing good and getting credit for it has passed him by. Show him a woman under a truck and he’ll miss the implications for his image. He must drive his PR man nuts.
He was wise to cast his pay cut as only a symbolic gesture, though, because it’s not going to actually kill the leader of the opposition to take a 5% salary cut. At his level of income tax there’s not that much pain in a pay cut, just as there’s not much joy in a pay increase, unless that salary increase is ginormous. Although you might think otherwise, listening to the responses of some RTÉ stars to the suggestion that the national broadcaster might reduce their income somewhat, in these straitened times.
Gerry Ryan, for example, was quoted as saying he makes millions more for RTÉ than they pay him. Now, I would never want to fight with Ryan, not least because he once said on radio that I looked like Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds. (I’ve never, before or since, seen this Thunderbirds thing, but I think it was meant as a compliment.) But the fact is that when Gerry goes off on his summer holliers and someone less famous and immeasurably less well paid takes over, the world doesn’t come to an end and the listener figures don’t drop beyond the point of recovery. Independent radio stations manage to build up solid audiences without poaching RTÉ guys and without paying their presenters (with a handful of exceptions) that much.
Anybody in showbusiness, as is Ryan, needs to realise that there’s always someone coming up behind you who could do the job cheaper and maybe (hush, little broadcaster, don’t you cry) even better. When Eamon Dunphy left Today FM and Matt Cooper slid into his chair, an initial die-off of committed listeners was turned into a steady gain. Mary Wilson has brought listenership to Drivetime up, despite the programme’s long-term identification with its earlier presenter. Broadcasters who reject any possibility, in a dire recession, of the State saving a little money on their salaries are not going to be in a great position to thump the Minister for Finance and others for their refusal to share the public pain. And if the Government does decide to share the public pain by taking pay cuts, then it’s going to be plain embarrassing for the interrogators.
WHAT puzzles me is that, in so many businesses currently under pressure, the first port of call, when it comes to making savings, is getting rid of bodies. Companies which relatively recently recruited young graduates eager to go places are being helped to go places they never intended by employers who want to cut their salary bill. Never mind that those young people may not easily get another job, in the present climate. Never mind that they may have to default on their mortgage and hand back the keys to their negative-equity home. Last in first out. And statutory redundancy for people on €30,000 a year for only a couple of years isn’t that costly.
In many cases, the strategic cost-cutting plans are drawn up by top executives who are paid perhaps 10 times what the lower orders are on. They could save the jobs of perhaps two youngsters apiece by halving their own salary — and their own take-home pay, courtesy of the income tax variation, would be considerably more than half what it was.
It never occurs to them. Maybe there’s a CEO or a bunch of deputy CEOs out there who have cut their outrageously high salaries and are keeping it a secret, but I beg leave to doubt it. The pseuds in business who warble to the effect that “our people are our greatest asset” are precisely the folks who are comfortable taking home salaries eight or 10 times what lesser mortals on their team take home. Because they’re worth it, they tell themselves.
Sorry. I just don’t believe that. For example, while the day my ticker turns nasty, I want to have a good cardiac surgeon do the operation, I don’t see any reason why they should be assisted by a theatre nurse paid less than €30,000 a year and be paid nearly €500,000 a year themselves. Without the theatre nurse, they couldn’t operate. The theatre nurse is as essential to the process as they are. The theatre nurse enables them to do what they do. The extra skill, risk, concentration and years of study entitle the surgeon to be paid twice as much. Three times as much. Four. Even five times as much. But 10 times? No.
The day that top managers in the public and private sector make a symbolic gesture of solidarity with the rest of the recession-hit population will establish the birth of a great new era and be marked by a blue moon.
While we wait for it to happen, somebody should buy Enda Kenny a pint. Just don’t mention the paycut to him. Or the truck.
Monday October 6th 2008
Terry Prone of The Communications Clinic
Counting one’s blessings is not easy in the current context
GORDON Brown has one success under his belt. He set out to campaign, on Saturday, at the emergency meeting of leaders of the biggest EU economies, for a support plan to shove under small businesses like a sheepskin, so they wouldn’t get bedsores as a result of inactivity during the recession.
One would not have expected those leaders to pay that much attention to Gordon, in light of his limited popularity in his home country. In addition, the choosy way Britain commits itself to the European project might, perhaps, influence Europe’s eagerness to bail out Britain’s entrepreneurs. (If Brian Cowen were to have joined him, that would have completely put paid to Brown’s chances of success. Europe was just coming to terms with Ireland’s no vote when we went off and rescued our banks in a spectacularly insular way. Pan-European popularity, at the moment, we don’t have.)
However, the importance of small businesses right across the continent undoubtedly persuaded Silvio Berlusconi, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet to pledge to help SMEs in dire need of credit, by speeding up the release of $41.5 billion in European Investment Bank loans.
Even though they failed to come up with a systematic solution to the banking crisis, this, at least, is some small consolation.
No doubt, as the radio ads say, “Terms and Conditions apply.” Those terms and conditions notwithstanding, this intervention will hopefully be useful to Irish businesses currently under crippling pressure.
I met the MD/owner of just one such business when I spoke at a conference on Friday. This individual owns a household brand whose products sell heavily in the US and Britain. They boast €15 million in annual turnover. And, in the past year, their profit margin has had a huge bite taken out of it by currency problems. The low level of the dollar, for example, has elevated the price of their offering beyond what any normal purchaser could or would pay.
This, in turn, led to their bank hauling them in and telling them that because their margin-erosion had knocked hell out of their arrangement with the bank, the bank was now increasing their interest rate.
Now, how’s that for bad business thinking? The bank knows the business’s track record and its people. It knows they have invested their lives in what they do. It knows the downturn is outside of their control. But it punishes them for it, nonetheless, in a way which will tighten the vicious circle they’re in.
It’s a bit like what one ruthless Native American Indian tribe used to do with captured enemies. They would wrap sodden strips of animal skin around their heads and leave them, tied, in the open air, knowing that the sun would dry and contract the leather, which would agonisingly crush their skulls. But at least this unconscionable cruelty was meted out to enemies. The bank, in the case I mention, was meting out the equivalent punishment to a good customer who has huge potential. I don’t know if the European Investment Bank loans can help in that situation, but I do know that banks which apply such pointlessly punitive and anti-business measures need a severe kick, and would hope the Government, now it’s rescued them, would deliver that kick.
I’d be more confident about the possibility if the budget was not being relentlessly sold as the toughest budget in history.
The danger of the self-righteous Puritanism currently framing the budget ignores the fact that economies do not recover from disaster only through saving money.
Cutbacks in public spending are a way of preventing a country going bankrupt, not a way of stimulating recovery.
Economies and nations recover through the creativity, innovation, energy and boundless irrational courage of business people, particularly entrepreneurs, who are prepared to work longer, harder and at lower salaries in order to keep their business — and the businesses and individuals who depend on it — afloat.
We have to hope that there’s someone around the Cabinet table who can divvy up the cuts required of their Department, but at the same time remind the rest of them that recovery requires help, judiciously applied, and I do not mean to the construction industry. (Incentives for insulation, as proposed by the Labour party, are grand, but injecting Styrofoam into walls, while it makes homeowners warmer, reduces energy demand/carbon footprint and keeps a few of the lads in work, will not significantly revive trade, confidence and cashflow.) It’s time Cabinet and commentators stopped seeing virtue in punishing people who did nothing to bring about the current crisis, but who hold the potential to drag us all out of it. The pleasurable masochism behind the grim unanimity is beginning to be tedious. We don’t need to be told any more loudly that the water’s going to be freezing, and that it’s going to stay freezing. We got that message some time back.
We also know that we face a decade wherein, the minute any of us complain about anything, the mantra’s going to be “Cutbacks.” That is the way it was, last time around. Any failure of professionalism, good business practice, delivery dates, basic standards or customer care was explained away by the C word. (I do wish the Cabinet would bite the bullet and use the real word. Talking with determined spin about “cost reductions on a departmental basis” won’t work and is insulting to the people who are going to be bitten in their vulnerabilities by those cutbacks.) In the current context, counting one’s blessings is not easy, although a series of documentaries running on TG4 might help viewers in that direction. The documentaries, made in the good old days before reality television polluted our appreciation of societal truth, are drawn from the Irish Film Archive and are — appropriately — running under the collective title of Seoda. They are gems. Newly restored gems of outstanding cultural, historical and entertainment value.
The 11 films in the series date from 1948 to 1970 and cover a broad range of topics including emigration; politics; personal saving; TB; diphtheria and architecture.
A new introduction to each film in the series has been written by documentary historian, Dr Harvey O’Brien, and the series is presented in Irish by the inestimable Niall Tóibín. Some of them are dramatised, with great actors like Joan O’Hara, Angela Newman, Marie Keane and a very young Joe Lynch.
They bring to life the bleak Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s, where over-use of antibiotics couldn’t happen because they hadn’t been invented, where diphtheria was an horrific threat to the life of children, where rickets left generations bow-legged, and where TB or “galloping consumption” was not just a killer disease, but one hedged around by secrecy and shame. While new treatments were coming onstream, public health education was hugely difficult, in an Ireland where the nearest equivalent to “mass media” was one radio station broadcasting at limited periods throughout the day. The Department of Health decided to use the cinema. The documentaries they made, currently running on TG4, provide a fascinating corrective to contemporary self-pity…