Barnes: guilty of guilelessness in venting his private opinions on-line

THE odds are that Ben Barnes didn’t plan to leak his ‘longest suicide note in history.’

I’m betting that when he wrote his e-mail giving out about his Board and shareholders, he meant it to be read only by the fifteen people to whom he sent it. When guys want their private correspondence to figure in media, they usually tidy up the syntax before sending it out. Sentences missing the odd word are OK for friends, but leakers always want to be seen to write perfect English.

Since Ben Barnes’ note missed out on a word here and there, the benign assumption is that he didn’t intend it for public consumption. Although those warm comments about the Minister and the Government standing by him will have gone down a treat in Fianna Fáil circles.

The old saw about there being many a slip twixt cup and lip has been given new meaning by the development of texting and e-mailing, mainly because, in electronic terms, there’s now damn all space between cup and lip. You have a thought. You input that thought to your gizmo. And before you have time to consider it, your mad impetuous transmitting finger or thumb has landed the thought in someone else’s In-box.

If you’re not deadly careful, your thought may even land in the wrong In-box. There is no chill chillier than the chill that goes down your spine when you know you can’t retrieve an e-mail that the recipient, for various reasons, should not receive.

Ben Barnes, as far as we know, did not make the error of cc-ing his missive to

Eithne Healy, Chair of the Abbey Board. He did, however, make the error of sending it to fifteen of his closest friends, forgetting the eternal verity of the old Mafia adage that “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

If you ask people to pass on a piece of information, they forget to. If you ask people NOT to pass on a piece of information, they leave scorch marks on the carpet, rushing off to share it.

Similarly, give a journalist a press release and if they’re polite they’ll wait for you to move around the corner before they scrunch and toss it. Give a journalist the same info in a “you-can’t-use-this” behind-the-hand mutter and watch their pupils dilate.

Official communications are never as thrilling as unofficial communications, not least because unofficial communications tend to have the lively, judgmental, emotive language (like Barnes’ use of “disgraceful”) official communications tend to eschew.

Any PR person will tell you that when their client turns down an offered appointment, their e-mail (or text) to the PR person will be much more interesting than they want the official communication to be.

“Tell the w***** to stick it,” it will read. “Miserable anally-retentive control freaks.”

It’s the PR person’s job to chew the flavour out of that, doing away with the clarity and brevity, so the official version reads like this:

“Mr Bloggs said he was profoundly honoured by the confidence in his competence and vision demonstrated by the Board’s offer, and regretted that he could not, at this time, accept the post. He added that he believed the Board’s Strategic Plan for the organisation would require vesting the incoming CEO with a level of autonomy and financial commitment unlikely, if not actually impossible, given the current context and in present circumstances.”

So Ben Barnes sends an interesting unofficial communication to fourteen more people than he should have, (if he wanted to keep it secret), and one of them obligingly passes it on to media. Oh, the betrayal, I hear you say, as you smack the back of your hand to your forehead.

Well, unsmack that hand, if you will. Where’s the betrayal? The people he sent it to weren’t life-long friends he played marbles with when he was six. They were international artistic peers. You got that phrase? “International artistic peers.” Translation: “Possible contenders for the post of Artistic Director of Ireland’s National Theatre, stupid.”

Even if they’re not contenders for Ben’s job, they’re in a business where a leak to media buys them slack the next time they make a mistake on their own job. Or buys them the infinitely seductive transient warmth of a correspondent’s approval and gratitude. Or buys them the adrenalin rush of opening a newspaper and knowing they were responsible for the story on the front page.

NOW, before I move further, let me do the conflict-of-interest confession. In pre-history, I was on the Abbey acting staff. More recently, I served on the Arts Council with Eithne Healy and think the world of her. My husband did a job for John McColgan and greatly liked him. However, I haven’t spoken to either Healy or McColgan, on this or anything else, for more than a year.

Don’t they face an interesting dilemma, they and their colleagues, though?

On the one hand, Ben Barnes is entitled to his own view of the Board and Shareholders. The Board and Shareholders would want to be singularly unrealistic to suppose that view was warm and cuddly at the moment.

Ben Barnes is further entitled to share his view with his friends. Indeed, his

career advisor would tell him he’d be a fool NOT to share that view with fifteen influential contacts in the international arts world, because he needs them to spread his interpretation in the concentric circles within which each of them moves, so that any international coverage portrays the story as the board stabbing the Ben back while the Ben back (and front) are out of the country. A secondary reason would be to ensure that if he should need a job with any of them in the future, their view of him is informed by his slant on the crisis.

Nonetheless, it’s a private communication, and Abbey Board-members have no right to be outraged at what is said in a private communication.

Or do they?

The e-mail raises important questions about the delicate, wavery line around personal privacy. A cookery school operator and a judge know to their cost that e-mails are as private as a credit card number and co-operating international law officers say they are.

While someone in Barnes’ position would have been best advised to talk, one-to-one and ideally face-to-face, rather than write or e-mail, Ben Barnes would undoubtedly point out that it isn’t possible to talk face-to-face with such geographically dispersed people and fifteen telephone conversations would have taken more time than he, in his jet-lagged state, had at his disposal. He needed simultaneous transmission.

What he’ll now have to do is convince his Board that he didn’t have a Cunning Plan to get his real views into the media in a hands-off way.

Therein lies Ben’s dilemma, and it’s just as interesting as the Board’s dilemma:

If he wanted to get his views to media without his fingerprints on them, his method was naïve.

If he DIDN’T want to see his views in media, then he needs training in anger management and related use of the internet.

And maybe he should also take a second look at some of his ‘friends.’