Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore the Justice Minister

I DIDN’T even know that there was a gay film festival in Dublin until this week. The first I heard of the event was a full-page article given to it by the Irish Times on Monday.

The reason for the article was because the film festival organisers invited Justice Minister Michael McDowell to open the festival and this has caused great controversy within the gay community.

Apparently, he is as divisive there as he is everywhere else.

Whoever came up with the idea to ask McDowell to launch the festival could not have imagined how much media attention would flow. An event on that scale couldn't pay for the publicity the man attracts.

McDowell is a media magnate. Whatever event he goes to, a posse of cameras and journalists is destined to follow.

After the Dublin Gay Film Festival's coup, McDowell's private office will be inundated with invitations from groups and organisations nationwide hoping some of his allure ubs off on their event.

Of course, Justice Ministers in this country have always been high profile and have rightly attracted attention and demands for accountability from the media. In our system, there are few ministers who have responsibility for a department as wide in its scope as that over which McDowell currently presides.

Not only does it cover the usual territory of crime, courts, prisons and police but it also encompasses responsibility for things like childcare grants, equality programmes and even libel reform.

In recent years, immigration, which in most other European countries has a department of its own, has created an additional large set of administrative and policy responsibilities for this department.

When you add more recent responsibilities for growing home affairs cooperation at European and international level, and a role in Northern Ireland policy, it is inevitable that any justice minister will often feature in the media.

However, even allowing for all those factors, the range and extent of publicity given to McDowell, both positive and negative, over the past three years has been out of all proportion.

Even allowing for his ministry, his leadership position in the Progressive Democrats and his larger than life personality, it has to be seen as excessive.

He has become the Princess Diana of the Irish political media; you just have to put his face on the cover or the front page in order to ensure an increase in circulation. In two of the country's main political magazines, one has made him its bête noir, while the other has voted him its politician of the year.

Some journalists have actually become obsessed with the man.

A rough count, for example, of Vincent Browne columns in the Irish Times and the Sunday Business Post in the past 12 months show that about 60% of them dealt directly with attacks on McDowell.

The Browne-edited Village magazine has also relied on McDowell bashing for much of its copy.

In recent weeks not only are there almost weekly feature pieces on McDowell but he has also appeared on about a quarter of the magazine's covers to date, once memorably sharing it with the new Pope Benedict under the joint headline: "Be afraid, be very afraid."

McDowell also features regularly as the primary punching bag of nearly all contributors to Browne's late night radio programme.

Eamon Dunphy is another man who has a McDowell obsession sometimes but at least his is confined to the early morning.

On this page, and on the pages of other national dailies, several columnists regularly take McDowell and/or his policies as their subject.

I can recall no other politician in recent times whose utterances at fringe conferences, in college magazine interviews or summer schools are reported so extensively in the next day's newspapers, or even reprinted verbatim the following weekend.

Neither can I recall any politician, or indeed public figure, who has roused so many passions so often across such a wide range of media outlets.

The clever interest groups, whether operating within McDowell's area of responsibility or not, have cottoned on to the trick that if your press release includes an attack on McDowell by name, it is more likely to get press coverage. Many opposition politicians have successfully adopted the same approach.

On occasion, some of the media coverage has crossed over into the personal.

THE coverage of the controversy about his holiday home falls into this category. In the same vein, one could ask why the adjective "arrogant", which in normal conversation is one of personal abuse, has become acceptable political currency when attacking this one politician.

There is of course a large element of mutuality about the obsession between McDowell and the media.

He is well able to up the temperature of debate when he chooses. Our political lexicon is full of McDowellisms; some of them harsh, although not overly so. He enjoys much of the attention and there is no need for me or any one else to defend him against it, not least because he is well able to do that himself.

My argument, however, is that some of the media prominence given to McDowell and his actions and his views needs to be kept in perspective and to be explained. In part, it arises because much of what he has to say is interesting and is well articulated.

In an era when politics are often very technical and dull, and where so many politicians play it safe, he arouses passions on both sides.

Like many people, I find myself often agreeing with what he has to say, or at least admiring the fact that he is not afraid to say it.

Like most people, too, I find myself disagreeing strongly with him sometimes and feeling that on occasion he has gone too far.

However, one of the most often repeated criticism of our politicians nowadays is that they are too careful, too bland or have no political vision and whatever McDowell can be accused of, he can't be accused of those faults.

Some people, especially in Fianna Fáil, resent the attention McDowell attracts.

They are frustrated that the disproportionate coverage of McDowell serves to distort the Government's overall image.

While McDowell and the Progressive Democrats can pander to a niche audience, the Government needs to have a wider appeal. However, surely this is a failing of Fianna Fáil rather than McDowell's fault.

Frankly, there are times when it appears to suit Bertie Ahern and many other Government ministers for McDowell to dominate coverage and to be the lightning rod for criticism and controversy.

It is, for example, indeed peculiar that when Fianna Fáil backbenchers want to act up, they do so by having a go at the Progressive Democrat minister rather than their Fianna Fáil leaders.

Here's hoping that, for the next few months at least, the media will find something or somebody else to focus their attention on.

Here's hoping that both the media and McDowell give themselves a holiday from each other.