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For Whom The Polls Tell
Read more about: Bertiegate, Coalition, Fianna Fail, Irish Election, Irish Election 2007, Irish Politics, Media, Policy, Polls 
Since the advent of our 24-hour news culture, I have noticed a marked increase in downright lazy journalism in the mainstream media.
Added to the raging torrent of coalition speculation and BertieGate updates, opinion polls continue to drown even the most fundamental policy issues in this election campaign.
Analyzing these surveys is to reporting what diving is to professional football. Though players know it isn’t pretty, it’s an easy option so long as you get away with it, and in most cases, it gets the job done.
Polls allow newspapers fill their front pages with pretty graphs and photo-shopped snaps of candidates in numerous guises.
Polls allow radio shows call in their “experts” and speculate how this tiny sample, almost always conducted by a broadsheet with particular leanings, will translate into seats after May 24th.
They then move on to their next item, safe in their assumption that they’ve “covered” the election. What bollocks.
One peculiar quirk about polls is that a positive result for an old-school-tie party like Fianna Fail can actually be harmful to their campaign. They have legions of loyal supporters who have only two choices on election day – vote for Bertie or don’t vote at all – and if they see him miles ahead in the polls, they won’t bother their arses turning out.
So forgive me if my heart doesn’t miss a beat when I read the latest numbers. There’s bound to be some totally different stats dominating the airwaves tomorrow.
I’d much rather hear about how the nurses are going to be dealt with, who has the balls to stand up for ordinary Irish people against the construction industry, and on a lighter note, why the Green Party felt the need to drop three copies of the same flyer on my doormat this morning.
It’s certainly a fair point, though it’s a process exacerbated by the politicians themselves in becoming carbon cpoies of each other in the race for the so-called centre. It’s a phenonomon that can be observed in other democracies as well, although for “post-ideological” in places like the UK read non-ideological here… elections have always been about personalities rather than issues here.
The ironic thing is that no matter how accurate the polls are – and they’ve been remarkably consistent – many seats will come down to the transfer lottery.
On the other hand, the polls have actually influenced the course of the election; witness the difference in the number of people who believe Enda Kenny could be taoiseach in recent Irish Times polls
I agree. For smaller parties the local is everything and national-polls are less relevant to predicting their performance. But don’t let that stop the media predicting a’PD wipeout’ and getting it as wrong as they did in 2002.
Don’t overestimate the Transfer Lottery, last time less than 10% of seats changed from the position of the candidates after the first count..
Hello!
I just bought an Irish Sunday Independent by mistake in the supermarket here in Hampshire, and read about the Bertiegate scandal again in great detail.
I keep an eye on the Irish “Bertiegate scandal” anyway because of Paul Goldin , a legendary stage hypnotist who current mind control expert Derren Brown no doubt admires.
I dunno nothin about Irish politics (despite being an eigth irish) but though you might be interested to know Bertie Ahern counts Paul Goldin as a mate.
I’ve copied below something taken from the Sunday Independent Sun May 9 1999,
I was interested in finding out about this controversial stage hypnotist (who was a neighbour of Haughey years ago) cos his discreet apparent stepson called Steven Hamilton (mother’s name Gold) has also been involved in “helping” victims of British justice just like Goldin claims to have done.
In this respect you should research the phenomenon of “cooling out the mark” as it may be relevant :
(see Goffman or http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=cooling+out+the+mark&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
The difference is assumed to be stepson Hamilton has been less successful and is facing jail for the third time having been prosecuted before for contempt of court, assaulting a solicitor apparently and most recently abusing the telephone system with offensive calls to people caught up in fraud litigation, including a director of SAFE an organisation fighting the Banks with some success:
see http://www.safe-online.org/
the person taking out a prosecution being Rob Owen, an acquaintance of mine. I am assuming that Hamilton works to more than one agenda.
My speculation is that (and I do not know what kind of person Bertie is, the media coverage goes every which way), Bertie’s many associations get more interesting with (CIA familiar) Goldin.
There are maybe coded references to the Mafia ( being made) and maybe the Freemasons (squaring up to a problem ) in the text, highlighted in the text thus.
Course, it could be a wind up. like Derren Brown adopting a couple of Masonic motifs in his publicity in the past. I hope he is joking.
On the other hand it is a free country.
It is kind of an undercurrent in my thinking which is likely to get ignored elsewhere as it is so hazy to pin down or risk public speculation.
Anyway, whatever that means, maybe I’m just scared of anyone if they are involved in any way with the current developments who can do some of what Derren Brown can do!
- Even if I trust and hope he is not part of some circle of magicians that “deals with” -”threats” – in the same way I fear Goldin could …for Bertie or Charles as the article seems to be saying to my suspicious mind???
By way of example of how a threat to a group can be “dealt with” see an item by Gerry Coulter on the “point of polaris” copied here from a google group entry
I have just received a telephone report today, Saturday June 19 1999,
from Mr Gerald Coulter. Gerald is one of the many victims of British
Masonic ill treatment. He is also a member of the Japanese Samurai and
an expert in martial arts. Gerald reports:
” I have just learned of the Masonic ritual of Polaris. During this
ritual a scroll of the names of people who are regarded as enemies of
Freemasonry is read out. Masons are of course responsible for organising
and compiling the list of names on the scroll. At the next meeting of
the Lodges, masons then report whatever harm, they have been able to
cause to those whose names are included on the scroll.”
Mr Coulter, who teaches up to one hundred students at a time in the use
of martial arts, has now adopted a similar tactic to that used by
Freemasonry. The Samurai also use rituals most of which date long before
the scourge of Freemasonry. During these rituals, Mr Coulter now reads
out the names of masons along with their Lodge membership details..
I know Mr Coulter personally and have him on tape. Of course, he might be a stalking horse in disguise. I’ve come to suspect much from this bizzare perspective.
I’d be the first to change my mind after meeting Bertie, Paul or Derren, no doubt.
It is a bit like a pantomime with “Oh yes it is” and “Oh no it isn’t” unless others who know more pulls the threads together.
Anyway, this is an unusual news angle and you might like to consider it as a line of thought (with many holes in it) that could have an airing or needs dealing with.
It has been generated through sole ignorance, suspicion and idle speculation and a sense of fishing for the truth but based on some knowledge of victims of justice being “cooled out” by any means in other cases. I think the blogosphere should pursue this.
A wannabe blogger/journalist should attempt to get at the truth. I would like to get to the bottom of this. As if I could if it is true.
TB
The man with the Goldin touch . . .
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He’s come a long way from a family of Eastern European Jews who fled the Nazis for the East End of London; now home is a ranch in Rathmichael. Paul Goldin’s career has had its vicissitudes but, despite his flamboyant dabblings in the paranormal, the hypnotist is remarkably clear-headed when it comes to dealing with other people’s problems. Declan McCormack met the man who could control things
WE CAN thank Battie Brennan for it all. It was Frank O’Donovan, later to become the beloved Battie Brennan in RTE’s soap opera The Riordans, who first brought Paul Goldin to Ireland. The year was 1948. Goldin remembers playing the Harriers Club in Tullamore. O’Donovan was “most honourable”, the takings were mega-big and the mini-tour was such a success that Goldin was able to buy his first car a Morris Minor.
He also fell in love with Ireland and the Irish seemed to fall in love with the 20-year-old “French psychologist with the Gallic charm and the Sixth Sense”, as he was then described.
But not everyone was totally enamoured of him. Paul recalls that people often crossed the street, “thought I was the devil”. Many were warned not to look into his eyes.
One person so warned was a seven-year-old Cork girl, Helen Breen, descendent of Lord Montcashel of Kilworth Lodge near Mitchelstown. She attended a Goldin show in Mitchelstown.
“I remember a neighbour saying `don’t look into his eyes’.” Something to do with the prolonged fixation of eye which is the power of the hypnotist. She went on stage as a volunteer. He said, “You don’t have to look at me.” He asked her if he came back when she’s older would she marry him? She replied rather precociously, “Maybe.” (They met 10 years later backstage at the Gaiety. “Nothing happened.” Just over 10 years later again, they got married. In Las Vegas. Big Gambletown.)
In 1960 controversy engulfed Goldin’s Irish tour when, according to a contemporary newspaper, a “17-year-old hospital ward maid” fell into a three-day coma while attending his show. Goldin denied that he was a hypnotist and, mindful of the times, claimed that his show had been “vetted by leading ecclesiastical authorities”. No names were supplied. The young woman recovered fully but the incident highlighted the perils of playing with the Sixth Sense and the Fifth Dimension in a devoutly Catholic Ireland.
Fast forward to the 1990s. Paul Goldin, now running a thriving hypnotherapy clinic in Dun Laoghaire, is in Miami, USA, lecturing to a packed Oceanfront Auditorium about his new scientific, computer-based personality test-cum-future-predictor: Colorgenics. Goldin confesses to having once been a sceptic about numerology, astrology, and Tarot cards but he feels interest in mysticism is increasing as we approach the new millennium. He seems to be a convert. “Psychological science and the psychic arts are different sides of the one coin.”
While in Miami he promotes the Colorgenics infomercial which will be directed by his actor son (and former fiancé of Baywatch’s Yasmine Bleeth) Ricky Paull. It’s a long way from Battie Brennan.
It’s 8.20pm. April dusk falling. I ring Goldin’s. Before I speak, Paul answers: “Declan.” Wow. Psych-ic! He chuckles at my surprise. But it’s not as impressive as it seems. I’m calling from a public phone in the Silver Tassie pub in Rathmichael and I was supposed to be picked up there by him at 8pm. Add 1 and 1 together and you get the 6th sense.
He’ll be down in a minute, in a silver Merc, wearing a red rose in his hair. I don’t give my description. He’ll know I’ll be the eejit waiting for the rose-festooned Merc-driver. In microcosm it’s the secret of his success. He’s usually the person in control, just as he’s the person always advising others to take control of their lives. And the punter is often impressed and, in truth, often as not cured.
We get on straight away. He used to call that “building a telepathic rapport”. I simply find him polite and fun. I am meeting him in a state of unresearchedness. I vaguely recall some Goldin controversies (dissatisfied stammer-cure seekers, something about a sexually explicit questionnaire) and some Late Late appearances. But I’m not into hypnosis. If I want to be hypnotised I watch TV snooker or listen to Val Joyce on the radio. He laughs. He’s a good listener. Taking me in. He’s good at that.
The car slews through sylvan suburbs and up through Ferndale Road. Twilight is thickening and you sense rather than see the wealth. Through stone pillars, up a long shared drive, ranch-style fencing, to the two-storey mock-Tudor house built on three acres. It commands a view over Killiney and out on to Dublin bay. Psychotherapy pays.
There is lovely wooden deck at the back. The interior is at once spacious and homely. Lovely exposed beams and a huge brick fireplace. There is also some hypnotic-sounding music playing softly in the background. One of the three basic fears, according to Paul, is loud noise. I needn’t have any fear on that score tonight.
Helen Goldin glides in. Svelte of figure, vivacious of manner and sweet of mien. I hear later that she she has a good nose for business. She has a good nose full stop. Susan Hampshire territory.
He’s 71. She’s 48. Paul is a young 71. The scholarly glasses don’t hide the Oriental looks. And the dash of Julio Iglesias. Despite the age gap they don’t seem like a December May relationship. The arrival of their 15-year-old daughter Katie Jane confirms that. She’s doing Transition Year and loves horse-riding. She did her Transition placement in a law firm; she wasn’t impressed “too much walking to court”.
Her dad has done quite a bit of that too. Most recently in May 1998 when he was awarded damages for a serious road accident in 1992 which effectively terminated his stage comeback which had been in abeyance since he started to concentrate in the mid-Eighties on his clinic work. The presiding Justice, Mr Diarmaid O’Donovan, revealed that he himself had attended Paul’s show in Roscommon and that a colleague who also attended had had to go up on stage to get his locked arms released. Paul has in fact many judicial admirers. Interesting.
Katie Jane is a typical Nineties teenager. She’s into designer gear and just loves the Nokia chrome-phone that she was given by her 47-year-old brother David.
David is Paul’s oldest son by his first wife Miriam, an Italian, who died of cancer. He had two other children by her. David runs a hugely successful hair extension company called Great Lengths. He’s setting up a factory shortly in Wales so will be visiting his youngest sis very frequently.
David performed on stage with Paul in the late Sixties and early Seventies. He was on stage when Paul famously collapsed in the Cork City Hall and then mysteriously disappeared. There was supposedly an amatorial angle. Golden returned from abroad a year later with his reputation considerably enhanced.
Ricky Paull, Paul’s youngest son, also appeared on stage with Dad. He recalls fondly as a five-year-old going on stage as a volunteer and being asked by Paul, “Do you know me?” and replying, “No Dad.” He went with his mother Trish, a child actor manager, to Hollywood after she had separated from Paul. Ricky has done Broadway musicals and daytime TV soap.
Helen, who met Paul in her capacity as a showbiz manager, has also done her turn. Apart from co-producing shows and audio tapes, she has starred as cover-model for three audio-tapes which they brought out in the late Eighties to help young mothers to “Return to slender”.
There are some family photos on the wall. It doesn’t require physiognomical genius to work out that Paul’s parents and grandparents were Jews. Paul “still does Yom Kippur for the sake of my father”. Helen is a Catholic. Katie Jane a “Jewlic”.
Like many Eastern European Jews the Zolidkoskis fled to America, ended up in France and in 1939 fled the Nazi murder-machine and settled in London as the Gold family.
Paul and his brother Jack lived in the East End of London. East End boys made gold. Jack became a successful film director (The Medusa Touch, Catholics). Paul and he once swore that the next one of them to be asked for on the phone (ie, is Jack Gold in?) would adopt the `in’ into his name. It was Paul. Thus Goldin.
Paul’s dad was a psychiatrist. “He cured no one merely taught people to cope.” He gave medication. His son studied medicine but was not impressed by drug-prescripting. Paul changed to psychology and logic. His mind is certainly logical. Ruthlessly so.
After a complicatedly circuitous education (involving colleges in Paris, London and Hawaii) he qualified as a behavioural psychologist. “I’m not concerned with what causes problems I want to change behaviour.” Thus his current one-day seminars called Taking Control of your Life.
FOR all his flamboyant dabblings in the paranormal, Goldin is remarkably clear-headed and insightful when dealing with other people’s problems. “I assume the person’s position. I wonder how I’m going to get out of it.” He is a surrogate Houdini wriggling out of various straitjackets of fear, stress, failure. You can sense that for all his dapper appearance he is a tough cookie. A good fellow to have on your side when squaring up to a problem.
He is, after all, a natural hypnotist “by mind control I can make blood stop”. It’s some act.
Paul’s abandonment of medicine owed as much to economic logic as parapsychology. As a Med student he earned some extra shekels giving lunchtime talks. It was always the same talk and in a sense he’s still giving it. It was grandly called “Powerful Strategies with Predictable Outcomes”. He gave the talk at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, was heard by a passing theatre manager and began stage work touring England. He was bottom of the bill, but he was paid. He bumped into a variety of aspiring artistes during his touring years, including Harry Secombe, The Animals and Ronnie Wood (later of the Rolling Stones).
The footlights dazzled him as later his trademark large green eye on stage would mesmerise his audiences. A chance meeting with Sophie Tucker in the USA led to a gig in Las Vegas. Another chance meeting brought him to Honolulu, where he ran a psychological practice with Maurice Silver (“yes, Gold and Silver”) and also counselled after much cloak-and-dagger intrigue Bob Mayhew, ex-head of the CIA and right-hand man of Howard Hughes. He worked on him for a month and was rewarded with a car a Thunderbird. A step up from the Morris Minor.
His most famous assignment also had, he believes, a CIA involvement. In 1978 he was called upon to help cult survivors of the Jonestown mass suicide. He was rewarded with a prestigious Diploma from the American Academy of Traumatic Stress. More recently he was called up by the US government to assist with the Waco tragedy.
Goldin was often hired by rich clients to deprogram family members after they had recovered/abducted them from a cult. “We won’t do it now,” he says. He tackled one case in a castle in Scotland for a week “you stay until one of us breaks it’s hard going. But I know it won’t be me”.
Brainwashing operates, he explains, by “sensory deprivation and sensory overkill”. I’m in no danger. Helen brings in a delicious supper and I consider the pleasant irony of eating spicy wedges courtesy of the people who brought out a Lose Weight Think Slim book and tape some years ago. We watch a tape of a recent Kenny Live in which one of the Derry Four who were accused of killing a British soldier in 1979 recounts how Paul Goldin proved his innocence by getting him to tell his alibi under hypnosis.
Goldin’s services have been enlisted on occasion by alleged victims of British justice.
But then he’s the great survivor. He’s read the trends and he’s surfed with the tides. In the Sixties and Seventies he brought his stage show to South Africa, Scandinavia, Spain and the Nashville Lounge, Longford. His pre-publicity invariably involved a local pretty girl losing something, he and she establishing some “telepathic rapport” over a map and he then triumphantly finding it in some unlikely spot (eg, a fish-tank in an aquarium) before gobsmacked representatives of the local media.
The show was humorous and paranormal (“mirth and mystery”). It could be racy (men hypnotised to be Chippendales) or Oirish (punters chasing leprachauns up lamp posts) depending on the country or decade. As the programme for his May 15, 1978, Olympia show stated: “During the course of the night anything may happen … and it usually does.”
Anything could happen in his life, too. After two marriages and an affair, he married Helen Breen despite her family’s opposition in 1982 in Las Vegas with a toy ring. They got married again in a Registry Office, and Helen’s mother grew in Helen’s words to “idolise Paul”. In 1984 Katie Jane was born and soon got to know and love her ready-made and extensive family. Helen “gets on great” with Paul’s ex, Trish. Paul says he “cares for Trish but doesn’t love her”. Katie loves all the presents. It’s one happy extended family.
CAREERWISE Paul has had his vicissitudes. There was, for instance, the ill-fated airline which he tried to set up and which nose-dived before it took off, leaving him with a $500,000 legal bill.
Things certainly have taken off since he met Helen in 1980. She was a theatrical agent and nightclub manager at the time and she negotiated such a tough deal that he hired Ms 20 Per Cent as his manager. She’s been keeping a good eye on him ever since. “I should have married her years ago,” he says wistfully.
After 1982 he began to concentrate more on his clinic work. The clinic began as the Stress and Phobia Centre; it’s now called simply the Paul Goldin Clinic. Paul and Helen also ran Ideal Weight Clubs during the fat-obsessed Eighties and Nineties. The clinic has gone well and he’s now got an assistant, Tom Ryan, who is a specialist in neurolinguistics and a practitioner of the Buteyko method for the non-medicatory treatment of asthma. It’s also called pneumotherapy.
His clinical success rate is high but confidentiality precludes VIP endorsement. One exception is golfer Philip Walton, whose “inner game” was in tatters in 1993 and who profited from some visualisation and relaxation techniques. So much so that he went on to enjoy Dunhill success and hasn’t been back since.
Goldin also runs day-long seminars. Corporate stress is big business at the moment. But in general he operates on a one-to-one basis “if I could do it by tape I’d be living in Bermuda”.
Another growth area of late is exams. “I’m not interested in points or subjects I’m interested in people overcoming stress at the time of exams.” He’s had a lot of Leaving Cert pupils. Last year he did a series of Exambuster programmes for 98FM. One adult client couldn’t afford the fee and his payback was to run a computer analysis on the colour sequence preference of clients. The result is Goldin’s latest baby: Colorgenics, which has been picked up by a big American operation called Psychic Line which is fronted by Dionne Warwick. They sure know how to market it and it’s mega in the States.
It’s 1.30am. Helen shows me “the deck”, where she hosts parties for her many friends who include many Irish and British showbiz stars. Former chart-topper Lynsey de Paul is one of her best buddies.
Helen is devoted to two canine chums one a pedigree Cavalier King Charles, the other a pedigree Yorkshire terrier. Pedigree is important to her. There is a genealogy chart on the wall. As a Mont Cashel direct descendant, she claims to be able to trace her pedigree right back to Charlemagne and King Alfred.
Helen was an only child, she thought. Very close to her mother. Devastated by her mother’s death five years ago. Then she learned that she had a half-brother. She assumed he was her father’s. Not so. Her mother had had a premarital baby. The child became a labourer and eventually a man of property in Birmingham. They’ve met a number of times and discovered some eerie similarities of character and taste.
It’s 1.50am. A taxi has been ordered but the driver can’t find the house. Playful flashing of outside lights to no avail. The driver is asked to wait outside Rathmichael Church. I expect one hell of an angry driver. Instead “Ah is it yourself Paul. I went to you years ago. Said I’d end up driving Mercs. I’ve three at home now, all crocks.”
The power of Goldin. The power of intuitive as well as rational knowledge and of the cold rational ability to act and advise on the basis of knowledge of self and of others. “He’s a lovely man. His wife is fabulous too.” I agree. I always sensed that Battie Brennan was no slouch.
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I agree that opinion polls drowns even the most fundamental policy issues during elections. And i am sure it happens all over the world where ever there is an election
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