Minister’s broadcast 40 winks brings snores to the fore

SOME of us always knew that Conor Lenihan had within him the power to bring to national attention an issue which might otherwise be overlooked.

He delivered, this week.

The details are a bit fuzzy, but the general narrative goes like this. A radio station wished to get a Fianna Fáil spokesman for their early morning programme. They wished to get said spokesman to speak to them from the Fianna Fáil gathering in Cavan. They identified Conor as a good talker. Conor agreed, possibly to the proposition that he was a good talker, certainly to the proposal that he get his mouth to the business end of a phone early the following morning and give of his best.

A little in advance of the item, the production staff telephoned him. Now, those who know and love Conor would figure he was already shaved and showered, his notes for the broadcast lined up in front of him in serried ranks. Those few who know and DON’T love Conor would say: “Yeah, right.” Or: “serried WHAT?”

One way or t’other, the phone call established that Conor was wakeful and willing. Willing to be interviewed, I mean. So the producer put him on hold and the programme progressed, as programmes do. This little interregnum between contact and going live on the air is crucial. If you listen hard, you can check what’s happening directly before your item, and if it’s a vox pop filled with people rubbishing you, it allows you to gird your loins.

It would not be appropriate to discuss here the girding of Conor’s loins.

We must assume them to be permanently girded with the best of girding.

What we must address is the fact that he does not seem to have listened to the item transmitted before his item. He may have intended to listen. He may even have started to listen. The absence of listening continuum may be due to the dullness of the item before him, no offence to the persons involved in that item. Listen, however, he apparently did not.

This is an evidence-based assertion: the radio station said they could hear him snoring. Indeed, rumour hath it that the radio station (you know how evil media are, not a decent streak among them) actually RECORDED him snoring. For posterity. Posterity won’t be that grateful for the putative tape-recording, but - to paraphrase Albert - that’s posterity for you.

Conor’s demonstrable exhaustion raises a number of issues. The first is the lamentable notion that politicians, when the Dáil is not sitting, do not work. This is untrue. Some politicians work as hard during the summer as during any other time of the year, and most politicians, coming up to a general election, don’t distinguish between working days and bank holidays or Sundays: it’s all time to be filled with constituent-contact or media-seduction.

All the Fianna Fáil parliamentarians were in Cavan, therefore, working their little tails off. (Well, OK, big tails. For the most part. But don’t forget either the trim Mary Hanafin, the only Minister who can fall over a sculpture and look good doing it, or Micheál Martin, in Cavan annoying the rest of them by eating fruit at every opportunity). Not only were they working hard during the day, after-hours tasks had to be undertaken too. Tables to be moved among, rounds to be stood, flesh to be pressed, gossip to be hoovered up: exhausting, but imperative. Any politician who follows the Ben Franklin dictum “Early to bed, early to rise” is a politician who’s going to be out on their ear after the next election. The night shift is a duty for politicians.

It’s not a healthy duty. Research finds high levels of insomnia, fatigue, and gastrointestinal disorders among night shift workers, presumably because the human body wasn’t designed to be up and about and ingesting in the small hours of the morning.

Hunter/gatherers - from which group politicians clearly descend - needed to flake out in the dark hours of the night in order to have their wits about them when encountering a wolf at dawn. Since the modern equivalent of the wolf at dawn is Cathal Mac Coille or Neil Prendeville, you’d think politicians would get to bed at a reasonable hour, but God love them, as Conor’s experience proves, they have to push themselves past the point of exhaustion. Nor do they get any thanks for it: the week the Dáil resumes will be full of snideness about the long lazy summer the politicians have had.

HOWEVER, let us move on to the even more serious issue raised by Conor’s contribution: snoring itself. Snoring is the stealth tax on sleep. Snoring is the straw that breaks the marital back. Snoring reduces even the most delicious partner to a spouse-abusing enemy, droning away like a malignant pneumatic drill.

Without being sexist, the fact is that the major perpetrators when it comes to serious snoring are men. It’s about time some sociologist or medic did a study to identify how many sleeping pills prescribed for women are occasioned by the exigent snoring of their bedmate. I suspect roughly 60% are so caused, with causal sub-sets. In other words, some of the pill-poppers sleep beside a snoring frequent-flier, i.e., he does it all the time from the moment he rolls over and turns out the light, whereas some snorers lull their partner into a false sense of security by periods of amenable silence, followed by hours of aural assault somewhere between 7 and 8 on the Richter Scale.

Which, of course, further invalidates those polls we keep hearing about which suggest that ordinary human beings spend their days worrying about GDP or crime or the rising cost of living. If one of those polls was taken just after the alarm clock went off in the morning, and didn’t offer respondents a restrictive set of leading questions, many of them would bitterly confirm that the issue which most damages their quality of life is someone else’s snoring.

It is important, in the interests of fairness and balance, to exclude Conor Lenihan’s alleged snores from this context. I haven’t heard the tape, if the tape exists, but I’d go to bat that any snores emanating from Conor are the Louis Copeland of their kind: subtle, understated and very Fianna Fáil.

Having excluded Conor’s hypothetical snores, it is apposite to draw public attention to the dangers of snoring. A new book (“At Close of Day”) gives a couple of historic examples.

“In 1737, a Connecticut husband - perchance while snoring - received from his wife a shovel of hot embers in his gaping mouth, whereas in Derby, the girlfriend of a journeyman stocking-maker named Samuel Smith took a knife to his penis as he lay asleep in the dark. Only after losing ‘a great quantity of blood’ and ‘his pain increasing’ did Smith ‘apprehend what was amiss’.” The 18th century Lorena Bobbit said she was driven to active amputation by Smith repeatedly promising her marriage yet never delivering.

But it was really the snoring that drove her to it.