Irish Election are pleased to announce our collection of Irish 
Spin Class
Read more about: Bertiegate, Media, Uncategorized
Perhaps the thing that I find most annoying about politics in Ireland is our national tendancy to import every half-baked idea from abroad and assume that it has equal validity in our little parish. The Americans do ‘presidential’, we need to do presidential. They have TV debates, we need to have TV debates. They use focus groups, we have to do focus groups. They get Frank Lunz to do a thoroughly unscientific though highly entertaining political analysis, we get Frank Lunz to do the same, ignoring the obvious differences of scale, and voting system between the two countries. British politics becomes one of spin, we become spin-focused. Recently a UK political commentator announced that Tony Blair’s departure would see the end of political spin. Hours later, RTE sagely note that this time, our politics have gone beyond spin.
Well can I just challenge that last one? Has political spinning become a thing of the past or has the spin meister just changed? Let’s for a moment put aside the rights/wrongs of Bertie’s recent financial problems (I refuse to put the phrase ‘-gate’ on the end of words as a lazy shorthand and some sort of homage to the ultimate political scandal).
The first two weeks of the election campaign have been dominated by Bertie’s travails meaning that FF couldn’t drive the election agenda. The constant drip feeding of information meant that it stayed on the front pages and became a sort of political death by a 1000 cuts. The PD’s got so embroiled in the ‘will we/won’t we’ response so that immediately they became re-associated in the public mind with dithering and being political watchdogs of a poodle variety. It also made shit out of the first weeks of the FG/Labour campaign. No amount of baby kissing, shop-painting or contract signing could get Enda on the front pages looking all presidential.
When you think about it, all of the information which has graced the media news bulletins and front pages on Bertie is old news. Regardless of the source of the leak, it was all within the gift of the Irish Times several months ago. But like any good newspaper, they have drip fed it to us - day by day. They told us that they’d be telling us the news tomorrow, they told us the ‘news’ and then they told us that they had told us the news yesterday. We even had the ridiculous and lame link which went something like “Parties propose changes stamp duty”, “You know, stamp duty applies to houses”, “Did we ever tell you about the mess Bertie got into over his house?”. And the following day they had the audacity to anounce that Bertie continues to deny what he’d previously denied. Always one to play on its reputation as the paper of record, the Irish Times even had a front page story that Michael McD and Enda both denied leaking the information to the Irish Times!
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we should go lightly on FF or Bertie’s unusual financial arrangements. But who elected Geraldine Kennedy as the election agenda setter? Two weeks into an election, I still don’t know why Enda is fixated on signing contracts with me like some shifty and hastily arranged marriage. I don’t know what message Labour are trying to get across other than the usual, ‘God isn’t Pat a smart-ass all the same?’. If, as is extremely likely, FF or the rainbow need the numbers, they’ll both be in to bed with Sinn Fein, I’d like to know how that party reconcils its vision for a 32-county socialist state with 2007 Ireland. Have the Greens any view on corporation tax, are the PD’s still wedded to a business model of health care? I can imagine if I were an enthusiastic election hopeful of whatever persuasion, I’d be rightly hacked off.
Having started the campaign with the most Barry Fitzgerald-like “the Marquis of Queensbury rules will apply” statements, neither party leader wanted to be seen to get their retaliation in first. But I would like to suggest that if they were owned by Rupert Murdoch, we’d all be up in arms at undue influence of the Irish Times.
For this reason I say, “Forza IrishElection” and keep up the valuable public service role,
Paige
good article.
I agree. The coverage thus far has been appalling, treating the campaign like a drama with the main characters reacting to each other on a daily basis. The papers should be issuing supplements on each of the different sections - health, defence, education, enterprise, communications, agriculture, science, arts, finance - outlining what the parties propose to do over the next five years in each area.
“But who elected Geraldine Kennedy as the election agenda setter?”
I expect the IT, like the other papers, thinks its readers are more interested in the personalities involved and are keen to exploit the obvious human interest angle of Bertie’s ‘crisis’ and the ‘mystery’ surrounding the leaks and the ‘conflict’ between Kenny and McDowell. Considering the media have been trumpeting this election as if it were happening tomorrow for at least two years (I remember references to the ‘countdown’ to the election started being made regularly when the Dail returned after its summer break in 2005, and intermittently some months before that), you’d think that when it actually arrived they would have more of substance to say about the participants.