Tapping into the public mood can make you seriously hacked off

DURING last week’s pinking of Dáil Éireann, courtesy of Mary Mitchell O’Connor, one politician after another, one ex-politician after another, told us we shouldn’t be talking about the Miss Piggy episode.

There were, we were sonorously instructed, more serious things to be talking about.

Now, the choice of serious things we might be talking about includes how broke we are, individually and severally, how much broker we’ll be after Michael Noonan has his way with us on budget day, and whether we’ll still be saving soap scraps and living off baked beans in 30 years’ time.

Most of the more serious topics available are distinguished by the fact that: A) only a handful of people in the country understand them and they disagree with each other; B) they’re outside of our control anyway, so what the hell is the point of talking about them?

And wherein lies the virtue implicit in, say, pointless discussion of the economy, as opposed to pointless discussion of a TD’s wardrobe? We laugh that we may not weep, and we fastened on the clothes issue as a merciful relief from the grim tedium of the norm.

The censors who wanted everybody to move away from the wardrobe issue thought that TDs and commentators going on about one woman’s dress sense was not taking life seriously enough at all, at all.

They seem to think taking life seriously and not gossiping about someone’s preference for pink will in some way ennoble us.

Those who don’t want time wasted on fun stuff like Mick Wallace’s little clothing coven are of two types.

First is the head prefect or head girl type, whose constant striving for perfection would be grand if they didn’t want to involve the rest of us in it.

The second sort of naysayers are public figures who’ve been caught doing something bad. These guys not only lecture us about what we should be talking about — which is anything other than their hand up a skirt or in a till — but when truth catches up with them and they’re forced to resign, insist on presenting their removal from office as a virtuous resignation designed to stop them being a distraction from the more important things.

That’s what former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks communicated, although she talked about not wanting to “detract” from the more important issues, which I’m not sure is what she meant.

Rebekah should have been gone 10 days ago, which was when Rupert Murdoch’s son James, her direct boss, did an interview on the BBC website which designed the In Memoriam card for her career while he was letting on to be totally supportive of her.

When a man asked a specific question about an individual moves into the plural and the general, you know the individual is in trouble. Rebekah didn’t go then. She went much later — clutching four million smackers as a parting gift.

Why she hung on so long is a mystery, but what’s not mysterious at all is why she went. She went because of the sound of shareholder value gurgling down the tubes. Not because she was a distraction preventing serious discussion of more important matters.

Yesterday afternoon, she was arrested in relation to hacking and corruption. So — even though they may once have been a tad too close to her organisation — the police have now concentrated their minds on the questions being asked of James Murdoch 10 days ago: “How could someone at the top of an organisation not know about sizeable sums being paid to private investigators? And if she didn’t know, what did she know and what was the definition of her job?”

The manner of her going adds another question. What made her so important to the organisation that its parting gift was four million quid? What she found out, even before yesterday’s arrest, is that when advertisers turn against you, they turn shareholders against you, and those twin forces can create a collapse like that of the old Soviet Union.

It has little to do with morality and everything to do with companies deciding that their brand values will be tarnished by association, as Tiger Woods discovered some time back.

What we all discovered last week is that our phones have yet another in-built capacity that few of us use but that gives evildoers the option to misuse.

But then the Data Commissioner came out and said: “There, there.” He’s going to fix it.

We further discovered that a bit of dog- eating-dog was going on. One bunch of journalists was hacking into the voice mails of another group of journalists, not, it would seem, to catch the other journalists having affairs or padding their expenses (not that any journalist would ever do either) but to find out what stories they had, in order to either nick those stories or write spoilers taking the shine off them.

Now, there may be the odd person who, having suffered at the hands of a journalist, would not be overwhelmed with sympathy for the ones at the receiving end of the hacking, but that is to ignore the wider pool of fear generated by the news that they, too, had found their mobile phones being tapped into.

IT’S FAIR to assume that if you’ve been a whistle-blower, giving data to such a journalist, it would put the heart crossways in you to know that others have tapped into what you told him or her, and your discomfort would be exacerbated through knowing that Scotland Yard is on the job.

Even for the journalists, the experience won’t have been fun. They will have experienced that peculiarly nasty sense of invasion consequent upon knowing that a third party has eavesdropped on what they thought was a safe one-to-one relationship.

Decades back, when a telephone conversation I had with a client was printed in a newspaper, it shook me badly. Reading in print the casual unguarded chat we’d had was sickening, even though I wasn’t named in the report. I was just described as Female, which was true.

The gardaí arrived the day after the story was published.

They came with impressive equipment, to find out if someone had broken into my home and put a tap on the phone wire. They trooped in, took one look at our phone and trooped right back out again. Job done. Investigation over.

If I wanted to have one of those phones you can pick up so that you walk around the house while talking, they told me, I was saving the phone tappers all the trouble in the world. They could park outside the house and pick up the signal, any time.

So why, I hear you ask, do I, many years later, have precisely the same kind of phone in the house?

The sad truth is that the only time I use the landline is — three or four times a day — to ring my mobile phone in order to find where I put it down in the house. Which makes the landline expensive. But very definitely not worth hacking into.