INSIDE - TOON TOWN

Timing is everything. You wonder why the PDs chose today to launch their, ahem, humorous (I'm laughing so much that my sides are hurting) website rainbowsplits.ie.

It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the Fine Gael Ard Fheis that's starting out in City West tonight, could it?

Or the fact that FF is gearing up to choose today as the day when it begins a detailed rebuttal of Frank Flannery's 30-seat-gain prediction? Coincidence, sheer coincidence, I tell you!

I was thrilled this morning to find out about the PD site. Great, I though. At last they are injecting a bit of humour into the campaign. Sadly, though, when you get through the feeble humour-lite front page, it's the usual over-the-top mixture of rant and scare stories. Is anybody else getting tired about being warned of the dark dangers inherent in two middle-of-the-road centrist parties like FG and Labour oining up together. Isn't there a bigger ideological divide between the PDs and FF nowadays, especially since Comrade Bertie wrapped the red flag around him?

It's worth reading though. Follow the above link but don't expect too many belly laughs.

INSIDE POLITICS - THAT AD: HILLARY'S MAC JOB

This is the ad that has mysteriously appeared on the Internet and has taken the Democratic primary debate by storm. It's a very clever parody of a 1984 ad for Apple Macintosh computers (based on George Orwell's novel 1984) which effectively portrayed IBM as Big Brother and promised to smash the consensus.
In this ad, it is Hillary who is portrayed as the evil and controlling establishmentarian. It certainly puts those wan so-called Fine Gael attack ads from the beginning of the year (see the billboard discussions here!)into the shade, in terms of professionalism, the personalised nature and focus.

There is a clever reference to Barack Obama's website at the end but his camp have hotly denied any involvement.

In the double-cross conspiracy theories, some people believe that Hillary's people put it up so they could put about the suggestion that Barack Obama's people were getting so desperate they had to resort to attacking her.

Anyways, as far as political advertising in this country goes, let's paraphrase a very famous sentence from 1917 in Russia: I have seen the future and it sucks!

INSIDE POLITICS - The Grid

Outside conference season, Sundays are usually quiet days for political journalists. The political parties all know it is a quiet news day. Most of the press releases all have a 'Here's one I prepared earlier' vibe to them.

But in a strange kind of way, weekends have almost been busier than weekdays over the past two months. To be sure, a lot of it is explained by the party conferences and Ard Fheiseanna.

But it's axiomatic that an election is approaching faster than an Atlantic squall.

Sunday was a short straw day. Four separate press conferences - two Government, one PD, and one Labour. At least one of them - and maybe two - was a neat demonstration of the goldfish syndrome. Backroom people know that collective memories last all of about three seconds. So the trick is to announce the same thing over and over again.

But Sunday was the first time that I got a sense of the Grid. The Grid is the diary mode that all parties go into in an election campaign. The schedule everything to wonkish, nerdish, paranoid and exhaustive detail. There's the message of the day. There's the issue of the day. All the effort to get maximum exposure for the party's top personalities across as many demographics, across as wide a geography, as possible.

The Grid will be on the web, on the pod sphere and, yes, on the blogosphere for this election. Political parties will try to fulfill the American civil war maxim of getting there firstest with the mostest. A number of politicians - Dominic Hannigan, Joanna Tuffy, Ciaran Cuffe, John Gormely - have well established blogs. Labour threw up a video of Pat Rabbitte asking us the famous question with the weasel comma: But, are you happy? Mary Harney went one better this weekend with a slick video to accompany the PDs' billboard campaign on health. And here it is but see below for continuation of discussion!




Not so slick though was the actual launch of of the billboard by the Progressive Democrats. Its location was the junction of Stephen's Green and Grafton Street on a busy Sunday morning. That was a mistake. The reason. Politicians might actually encounter what they fear most - the electorate.

It was a very predictable event. The photographers do their smiley shots. Then the reporter huddle around to ask questions of our heroes. All us rabble are missing are the cards with the 'press' legend slipped into the band of our fedora hats.

But there was a guy passing who wasn't reading the script. Con Kennedy threw in a question right at the end of the huddle. The press officers tried to fend him off gently. But he was not to be deflected. He has a four year-old-son who has anaphylaxis which means that Con Kennedy always needs to carry shots of adrenaline. He asked a simple question: why was there no paediatric immunologist in Ireland to deal with his son's rare condition.

No amount of statistics, or general political pronouncements, or aspirations can deal with such direct human experience.

In fairness to Mary Harney, she did her best. But from a public relations perspective, a carefully coordinated press conference had been essentially hijacked.

It was a little like Tony Blair being ambushed by the Women's Institute or John Prescott throwing his famous uppercut. The dailies on Monday morning didn't report the PD billboard launch, rather the fact that an angry young father had rained on the parade.

The Grid. It's not in the sphere yet. In America maybe. But over here, the election will be fought on the streets and in the hustings. Not on the web. Its influence is growing, certainly, though it will take some time before it reaches critical mass.


As an end note, here is one of the vaguely funny parodies that are doing the rounds on You Tube. Do people have nothing better to do with their time except feeds us with such abundant blog fodder?

INSIDE POLITICS - PDs

4pm Saturday
It's still February. The election is still months away. And already I'm beginning to feel like one of the depression-era marathon dancers in the film "They Shoot Horses Don't They"

The pre-election-campaign campaign is in full swing. Nearly every weekend between now and the end of March, there is a party conference or Ard Fheis. From Friday night to Sunday afternoon, each of the parties say 'come hither' and spend the entire weekend shamelessly flaunting their wares at us.

This weekend it's the PDs down in Wexford (for the party's own ongoing coverage of the event, follow this link) With each convention, the names and slogans and messages may change but the format and over-riding atmosphere are the same for all.

For the media, this is how it pans out: The party leader opens the conference on a Friday night with a speech that will include a news line for the TV and radio news at 9pm and for the following morning's newspapers. The news tag from McDowell last night wasn't an announcement but a 'The End is Nigh' speech, warning about the Armageddon that will happen if that useless shower in the opposition ever get their hands onto power.

The Bert is a master of the Friday night newsline - at the last FF Ard Fheis he announced in his Friday night speech that he wanted a referendum on the rights of children (that's the one we may or may not have before the election!).

These are annual conferences and motions actually do get debated. But nowadays you sense (with all parties) the internal debates are mostly for cosmetic purposes. The real deal is the oodles of priceless unopposed publicity all weekend. They get two hours of live TV in the morning. It gets an opportunity to showcase as many of their candidates as they can. The party leader will do a doorstep interview with a huddle of reporters. This is for the benefit of radio reporters. Then there's another hour of RTE coverage, this time on radio with John Bowman, in which three or four of the party heavyweights get airtime.

Things you always hear at party conferences. Morale has never been so high. We are all 100% united behind our great leader (insert appropriate name). I have been coming to conferences for a long time and can safely say that this has been the best one ever. The media have got it wrong.

Things you never hear at party conferences. We're doomed. The media have got it right.

Anyway, like other conferences, the PDs have gathered a big crowd here. I'm in the main hall as I write this, for the afternoon workshops. They used a neat visual trick to portray the hall as full. Every row of seats has its own table. Brilliant! Theres nothing worse on TV to show a half-empty auditorium.

For a small niche party, the showing is very respectable. At this very moment they are debating a few motions on crime. Hey, it's the PDs after all and we're hearing a lot about being tough on crime, but not so much, sadly, about being tough on the causes of crime. Oh, yeah, loads of applause for McDowell everything his name is mentioned.

They have just started an open forum now with the great man, as he does a Q and A session with delegates. He, John Dardis and guest speaker David Quinn have been placed on stage in an informal manner, seated on stools like traditional musicians but without their instruments (ie they all look very uncomfortable).

Of course, the main event will be McDowell's maiden leader's speech tonight. You don't have to have too much wattage up in the attic to know that he'll go for broke - with tax cuts, or new tougher laws on crime, or the like.

As I wrote in my column this morning, McDowell is omnipresent. In Ireland, the cult of personality has always run deep in political life, particularly in Fianna Fail where the party was personified by its leader, de Valera, Lemass, Lynch, Haughey, Reynolds and Ahern.

All parties approach campaigning, here as elsewhere, in a presidential manner, pushing the personality of its leader. But it seems to me that the cult surrounding McDowell is a bigger one that the one that surrounded Mary Harney.
Everything in the party seems to revolve around him. Sure, Harney is still a senior minister but she now confines herself to the task in hand in Health. Where are the others who should have stepped up to the place. The two other members of the leadership troika, Liz O'Donnell and Tom Parlon, have not asserted themselves sufficiently.

Sure, there's no such thing as bad publicity. But are there perils to being over-exposed, to to the PDs being totally synonomous with McDoweel, to fatigue kicking in. Maybe he and his party should learn that sometimes less can be more.

INSIDE POLITICS - The Hurricane of Hype

WHO is the star of this week’s column? Take a wild guess. If you happened to die and are now pushing up daisies, you might not have noticed him this week.


Of if you happen to be an anchorite monk living on a remote island sometime in the 6th century, there’s a slim chance that he may not have crossed your path.

For everybody else, there was no escape. From the moment he choked on his Corn Flakes last Sunday morning, Michael McDowell has reacted to Labour’s tax coup by invading our every waking moment, policing our thoughts, and trying to wash, like rain, the trashy Labour promises off the pavement.




On Monday, he introduced the techniques of Sumo wrestling to Irish political discourse. In a matter of mere seconds, his ferocious and fierce onslaught removed Pat Rabbitte from the ring. The winning technique? Haiku. “I want to say this about the speech that Pat Rabbitte made the other night. That speech proves that he is now admitting that he has been talking rubbish for 20 years. He has attacked every aspect of our tax policies. He’s voted against them in every Finance Bill.

“He has denied our argument that tax rates matter. And here he is now saying, after 20 years of empty, unsuccessful, hypocritical rhetoric, that he accepts he is wrong. What a sadmoment for him.”

This outburst came during a so-called doorstep interview, where the politician takes questions (usually on the street) from reporters. There were no questions here. McDowell walked up the reporters, delivered his broadside, said “I’m finished” and walked away again. A few reporters sniggered. But for McDowell there was nothing funny about this.

For this was a Labour leader having the cheek to encroach on his territory. Though what came across washumorous, what bubbled inside was toil and trouble. This column has said it before: McDowell is a one-man walking Atlantic weather system. This week, it was storm force 10 stuff coming in furiously with no respite.

The really scary bit is that all this is just the lead-up to the Progressive Democrats national conference this weekend. You might have noticed the sly reference above to Travis Bickle, the anti-hero of Martin Scorsese’s classic film, Taxi Driver. On Tuesday, McDowell did his own bit of scary “you looking at me” stuff when he announced a package of anti-crime measures. The Tánaiste has a tendency to announce his measures in the manner that Twink introduced John Bruton at a Fine Gael Árd Fheis a long time. You initially think, great stuff, and then you think, this is over-the-top, and then you think, oh, God, this is going to finish up badly.

His crime package sounded very impressive on first hearing. Suspects could be detained for seven days. There were tighter measures for bail; further curtailments of the right to silence, as well as provisions to introduce the long-awaited DNA database.

But then we found out it was all based on an interim (and rushed)report of the expert group charged with re-balancing the law.

Not only that, but the package of measures didn’t include legislation — only an intention to legislate.

So what was that all about then? Optics? In reality, by the time that package becomes law, the general election will be but a dim memory.

McDowell wanted to give the impression he was being tough on crime (as usual the “crisis” has been hyped up by politicians and the media). Now he has come up with illusory measures to remedy an illusory crisis.

For one thing hit me between the eyes in the recent Frank Luntz focus group exercise for RTÉ. Crime was identified as a huge issue. Yet, not one of the group had been a victim of crime in the past five years, save for one guy who got his chainsaw nicked. And why were they all scared to walk the streets, leave the key in the door etc? They said it was because the media told them so. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one.

Of course, the Tánaiste didn’t leave it there. He was just warming himself up. On Wednesday, he took on the Mahon Tribunal, claiming its legal bill could top €1 billion. By Thursday, that row deepened into a full-blown crisis. Characteristically, he robustly stood by his word that night, setting up the second grave stand-off with the judiciary in as many months. And that was the same day, he promised he would big it up at the PDs’ conference in Wexford, with his own proposals on tax cuts and stamp duty.

Batten down the hatches folks. A hurricane of hype and histrionics is fast approaching from the South East.

(This is my column from today's Irish Examiner)

INSIDE POLITICS - POLL POSITIONS

THERE are some laws of nature that are immutable and predictable.
Gravity. Death. Taxes. Kerry winning All-Irelands.
And then there are some that are not so precise, more theories than universal truth.

One is a version of Newton’s Third Law — for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

It goes something like this: For every over-the-top reaction from Tánaiste Michael McDowell, there’s an equal and opposite downward traction in the opinion polls. In the relatively peaceful period in the run-up to Christmas, he was uncharacteristically quiet (maybe he was still hurting after being put through Bertie Ahern’s truth-mangling machine).

People do like to hear him speak. On occasion, though. There’s only so much voice that mortal human beings can bear. In the past 10 ten days, McDowell has been on an extraordinary crusade to make his voice more omnipresent, more omniscient than the voice that haunts Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984.

He launched his poster. He made some vague threats about detention camps (letting Enda Kenny know who’s the real tough guy around here). He made pronouncements on tougher sentencing (again), anti-gun and anti-gang legislation (again). In 10 ten days, he opened, released, spoke at, launched, presided, keynoted, addressed, appeared, and stopped just short of walking on water.

He’s a fantastic old genie all the same, capable of many things including shinnning up lamp-posts. But the problem is that once he’s out of the damn bottle it's impossible to put him back in again.

And the result of this ever-so-slightly unscientific theory? When you bang the oven door too hard, the souffle tends to collapse. When you heat up the custard too quickly, it tends to curdle. When you are trying too hard as leader of your small political party, your support tends to plummet.

The latest TNS/mrbi poll for The Irish Times has support for the PDs at 1%. To be sure, there’s a 3% margin of error plus or minus. So it’s not all bad news. It’s worse than that. It’s all drastic news verging on disastrous news.

Statistically (well, theoretically) the Progressive Democrats might be at minus two, a delicious thought for its many enemies. And no excuse about being a niche party is going to magic away such a lousy finding. Bluntly, in terms of national reach, there are almost down to ‘Ming the Merciless’ or Abbey of the Holy Cross
Fitzsimons territory.

Let us enter a caveat. Though couched in the language of science, and festooned with mathematically terms that suggest precision, you
always have to remember how crude, how unscientific and how imprecise polls are. No mathematics will get around somebody who lies, or who says something because it's what they think you want to hear or because it's convenient.

I don’t believe the PDs are quite facing meltdown. In fact, with the margin of error, they could actually be at 4%. But all the same it's indisputable that the party has had a very unmerry New Year.

Beside McDowell’s overexposure (and being exposed somewhat on his crime policies), Mary Harney has also had a cruel January. Nowadays, everywhere she turns, another Socrates is telling her the blatantly and pitiably obvious. You were biting off more than you could chew when you took health. You should have known the monster you were taking on. The biggest ships are slowest at turning. What is the moon, what is the stars, Joxer?

Harney has been brave but has been a little like the new boy, the outsider, in The Lord of the Flies. Those who control the conch are the posh ones, the doctors who call themselves “mister”.

Fair dues to the minister — she has been the first to really tackle them head-on. But she has learned to her cost that there are forces in this land (namely rich business people; rich lawyers and rich doctors) more powerful than any Government.

Will the PDs be vaporised because of the weakness of strategy of its two strongest assets? They will certainly struggle and may end up back in 1997 territory(when the party returned four TDs).

Incidentally, the Greens have jumped to eight points (from four) apropos nothing in particular in January. A 100% leap looks a bit iffy to me but I have been writing for months that the Greens will take huge scalps in constituencies where convention doesn’t give them a prayer. Nobody ever predicts the routing and gougings that takes place at every election. Nobody every sees the tsunami coming.

That’s not a theory by the way. It’s an actual law of nature. And its name? The law of the jungle, otherwise known as the General Election.

This is my column from the Irish Examiner, Saturday, February 3.

INSIDE POLTICS - RABBITTES OUT OF HATS

INSIDE POLITICS - Rabbittes and Hats

 

Michael McDowell's ubiquity on the airwaves has been challenged of late by Pat Rabbitte. If the Cameroonian Tories want people to hug hoodies, well then the Labour Party here want them to cuddle Rabbittes.

 

His Labour handlers have convinced him to ditch the Dail cocoon - where he can use fancy words like obsequies and gravamen to his heart's content - to venture into the dangerous uncharted waters of light entertainment and the peril of having to field silly questions.

 

Has it worked? Erm, the jury is still out. The problem with Pat is this - Rabbitte by name; hedgehog by instinct.

Bertie can blather away consummately about nothing in particular.

Enda can go through his gamut of impersonations from A to B.

Michael can do his weekly residency slot on Pat Kenny.

Trevor can just about escape drowning on Podge and Rodge.

But the problem with Rabbitte is this: He can't do small talk. Oratorially gifted yes, but you see him on Tubridy Tonight and doing the Mad Hatter thing in HotPress and you think of a guy a stratosphere outside his comfort zone.

 

He comported himself well (that's a real Pat Rabbitte phrase) on Ray Darcy, Today FM's thinking person's Tubridy. Still it all falls short on the loaves and five fishes department i.e. converting the masses to whatever your one true faith.
But parliament, debating, the cliched smoke-filled rooms are no longer where it's at. You have to be out there selling the message. You have to be seen selling the message. And increasingly the message is wrapped into the image. And image and leader have become increasingly indistinguishable.

 

We're seeing all the leaders gradually desert Leinster House now and hitting the roads and meeting the people. Kenny's first public rally is on Thursday in Cork. We're all bracing ourselves for the Bertie blitzkrieg. Rabbitte will be out meeting the electorate for half the week and Trevor will go so far and as fast as buses and trains will allow him.

 

There's a perception that Rabbitte has lost ground since becoming leader. And that's something Labour are trying to address with its 'meet the people' campaign. Frank Luntz's latest 'focus group' type exercise on RTE's Week in Politics on Sunday night will tell us a bit more about how that is going for him, and for others.

Respect not adoration is what Rabbitte needs. Electorally, he can't be sold as the guy next door. No magician would have the skill to pull that Rabbitte out of a hat.

Like Soviet leaders announcing to the comrades that the mines and collective farms had achieved record productions for the tenth year in a row, the Irish politburo hailed the triumph and prosperity that the country will enjoy over the next seven years.

There was something a little bit too controlled, a little bit too controlling, about the unveiling of the 2007-2013 National Development Plan (NDP).

It wasn’t so much the bit of flare and the bit of scare that comes with a mammoth E184 billion spending programme over seven years.

It was more to do with all the optics that surrounded the event in Dublin Castle. There was the huge fleet of shiny ministerial limousines lined up like an army guard of honour. There was all the slickness of the presentation, a big-spend PR endeavour. There was the promotional video where Bertie Ahern did a decent impression of Brezhnev at his most wooden as he read his answers from an autocue.

And then there was the blithe optimism. Growth rates will continue at four or four and a half per cent each year. We will build 60,000 social housing units; we will build 40,000 affordable homes. Our capitalist enemies will tell us that inflation will go out of control and that competitiveness will bottom. Reject their lies and propaganda comrades. Hail the glorious transformation.

Perhaps the key target date here wasn’t December 2013 but sometime in May or June in 2007. Are you implying that this is an electoral stunt? Don’t be so cynical! This has nothing to do with the election in, oh, four months time, or five at the most.
Despite all the pomp yesterday, the announcement of this NDP just didn’t carry in the imagination like the one announced in 2000; though this one envisages a whopping multiple of three in spending.

One of the downsides of being a much richer country is that nobody raises an eyebrow anymore when spending plans are announced. Sure the Government is occasionally guilty of pompous self-importance and serial bragging. But Transport 21, Towards 2016 (remember that: it’s social partnership silly) and now the NDP were all significant programmes by any measure. But in the media and public consciousness they soared like dead turkeys.

Still, politically, the Government is still thinking big. None of the initiatives announced were new – most are contained in previous initiatives like the ones mentioned in the last paragraph.

But the numbers are surprising. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) were called in to evaluate the project. The independent think-tank said, yes, the NDP was a good idea but recommended a total spend of E86 billion over seven years.

The Government went for broke and its proposed investment is a whopping E183.7 billion, though it includes a couple of big areas not covered by the ESRI evaluation. That said, the Government proposes to spend some E2 billion per annum than the figure recommended by the ESRI.

The Institute was concerned about the inflationary pressures that would be generated by such substantial increases in capital spending. It was also worried that it might lead to a further erosion in competitiveness.

The Minister for Finance Brian Cowen accepted that it would involve a major acceleration of capital investment, up from 4.7% of Gross National Product in 2006 to almost 6% in 2009 and that it is all predicated on a (relatively optimistic) growth rate of 4-4.5% each year.

But he argues that it’s necessary – this is the only window he says in which Ireland can address its infrastructure deficits.

He also contends that the construction industry will have the capacity to deliver the increased investment without causing an inflationary impact.

Admitting that that’s exactly what happened when the last NDP was delivered in 2000, Cowen promises it will be different this time. He points out that construction inflation had remained steady at less than 4% per annum. The Government and its agencies like the National Roads Authority and the Railway Procurement Agency now get full bang for their buck, he says, with most projects being delivered on budget and on time.

Acceding that the population of the Republic will have bypassed five million, there is a welcome tilting back to the National Spatial Strategy after the headrush that was Government decentralisation all but ignored it. Each of the regional gateways is mentioned by name. And the political imperative that development be regionalised and be balanced (and take place outside Dublin) is included in a stronger fashion than ever before.

As it is the six-year national plan after all, it includes the divvil and all, from broadband roll-out, to prison development, to schools, to courthouses, to childcare, to care for the elderly, to social and affordable housing, to all motorways being complete by 2010, to the new transport initiatives for the Dublin area.

Cowen uses a couple of key phrases to describe this 300-page documents (which by the way isn’t as specific as you would imagine – not by a long shot). “Coherence” is one of them. “Comprehensive Blueprint” is another. As are “infrastructure deficit”; “regional imbalance” and “value for money”.

Two phrases that are not used are “ambitious” and “highly aspirational. It will involve a huge spend, way more than recommended by the cautious ESRI. It is also based on consistent and high levels of growth, without interruption. It is also predicated on the absence of any increase in inflationary pressures or of any sudden jolts to the economy. The more you blow the bubble, the more you realise it is one that will never ever burst.

Of course, there is no such thing as a free NDP. And Richard Bruton of Fine Gael quickly reminded us it will cost E120,000 to every family or over E40,000 to every man, woman and child in the country.


Yes, Comrades. There will be another announcement later this year, when an evaluation will be released of the NDP that’s just finished. And when will that great occasion be? In June. And funnily enough, it will fall just after the elections.

But no matter. We have already seen the future and it works.

from the Irish Examiner

So we finally got the attack poster featuring Michael McDowell yesterday. But it was one issued by the PDs and not by Fine Gael. The FGers lost confidence and went for a wan poster showing an idyllic scene with the same message. I spotted the new FG poster driving in this morning. Because the concept is a 'poster within a poster', the size of the slogans and writing is smaller, and very hard to read. It really lacks impact.

Meanwhile, the PDs one is simple, direct, does what it says on the tin. Judge for yourselves.

And what is it with the Irish Independent and Pat Rabbitte? This morning the Indo suggested that Labour deputy leader Liz McManus's oppostion to her party joining a FF-led coalition was kind of conditional and that she too was beginning to waver. The newspaper had based its assertion on her reference in a radio interview to unforeseen circumstances that can give rise to extraordinary responses.
But in a quote that the Indo itself used yesterday, she made it clear what she meant by those.
"I spoke at one point on radio about the possibility of extraordinary circumstances arising which might change the situation. But I was literally talking about something like a national state of emergency or something like a third world war. That might alter my views but it is about the only thing that would do so.
"My position has been clear and consistent. There is no change from what I said in the Irish Independent last week."
Well, now we know. Labour will have no difficulty going into coaliton with FF in the event of a nuclear fall-out.