Empty mansions make no comment as bankers head for sun and silence

NIB is the financial institution that gave new meaning to the phrase ‘bank holiday’. Normally, around now, everybody significant is missing in action. Gone. Covered in SP30.

Eating high-quality food. Reading low-quality books. Drinking a cross between a fruit salad, a chopped-up iceberg and a dose of methylated spirits in a big glass with a little paper parasol.

This year, not only is the Tánaiste still at her desk, but Charlie Bird and George Lee have put off their holidays, too. Having written the ‘Once Upon a Time’ for the top of this story, they had to be here to finish it off with ‘And NIB All Lived Unhappily Ever After’.

Bird and Lee are a deadly combination. Like Noddy and Big Ears. One of them all bounce and excitement and high blood pressure, the other all Old Testament gravity and hushed negative prophecy.

The bell on Noddy’s hat was working overtime this weekend, causing the rest of media to grit their teeth and make generous acknowledgment of the fact that Noddy and Big Ears broke the story, got dragged through the courts as a result, and were vindicated with a capital V by the report.

If Noddy and Big Ears were happily talking themselves hoarse, the silence from the bankers they’d nailed amounted to a brand new version of ‘no comment’. Even the old version of ‘no comment’ has its limitations. It’s like shouting “don’t panic” when the flames are halfway up the audience’s trouser legs: it may think it’s neutral, but neutral it ain’t.

The new ‘no comment’ adopted by the 19 named-and-shamed is physical absence. Every one of them seems to have got the message that being overseas makes it amazingly difficult to get a quote from them.

It reduces reporters to an infuriated statement that ‘so-and-so was unavailable for comment today’. It reduces the photographers to taking pictures of the mansion where the person who was unavailable normally lives, in the process establishing two new laws of media:

1) Those unavailable for comment always live in mansions.

2) A mansion can be annoying, but is never as annoying as a picture of its owner.

Now, I don’t suppose the NIB folk heading off on their nicely-timed holidays paid much attention to the interrogation provided by airport security. After the questioning they had to undergo to provide the material on which the NIB report is based, a few routine questions about the prior whereabouts of their luggage must have been so unthreatening they could have answered them with only half a brain engaged.

The predictability and repetition of the verbal communication involved in airport security should worry us just as much as those photographs of the 9/11 guys setting off electronic alarms and then being let onto their planes, complete with box-cutters.

Any communication that happens repeatedly, using the same phraseology, dampens down the attention of all participants. That’s why actors in long-running shows are in such danger of a ‘dry’ where they suddenly find themselves on stage, facing another actor, knowing they’re supposed to say something important but unable to think what it is.

In airports all over Ireland today, security people will line passengers up and go through this sequence of questions they’ve asked in the same words of thousands of earlier passengers. The list starts with “Who owns the luggage?” Every time I quietly respond “I do,” I’m stifling the desire to attribute my ratty bags to Britney Spears, Mary Lou Mc Donald or the Pope. This question may, at some point, have jolted a confession out of some naive person who borrowed their Samsonite from Osama Bin Laden, but somehow I doubt it.

Then they ask “Who packed the luggage?” Oh, come on. How many people have luggage-packers at home? How many people hire luggage-packers to visit their home and do it for them? Who do you know who makes money doing bag-packing nixers?

After that, you get “in whose possession has it been since it was packed?”. At this point a mad little voice rises in me, aching to yell “Look, how often do luggage owners rent their cases to strangers before going through security? And, assuming I lent my luggage to a terrorist so he could stuff a little Semtex into it, what are the chances he would let me discuss it with you, a security person?”

I never say any of these things, of course. I stand there, like everybody else, giving ritual answers and hoping there’s some cunning plan behind the questions. It’s the same when I’m seated in the plane and they go through the safety instructions. Two things bother me, always, about this routine.

The first is the bit devoted to teaching you how to fasten a safety belt. Now, unless you’re a camel-riding Bedouin let out of the desert for the first time, the overwhelming likelihood is that you’ve encountered a seat-belt before.

Since the majority of fliers are not Bedouins on educational tours, the safety-belt tips are so ludicrously irrelevant that they undoubtedly contribute to the almost total inattention delivered to these instructions by the vast majority of passengers. They’re the switch-off ensuring that many passengers never really hear the rest of the safety instructions.

The safety instructions are important and should be heard. Knowing where the nearest exit is could save your life. But these instructions, in common with the security questionnaires, are allowed to become routine, to fade into the aural wallpaper. Which isn’t good enough.

The fact that a vital communication is routine or recurring (like the “please drive carefully” messages delivered coming up to a bank holiday weekend) means that those delivering it can never allow it to become just another ritual to be got through. If a message is not heard, understood and acted upon, it might as well not have been conveyed in the first place.

Just as routine makes listeners less attentive, so does nervousness associated with air travel. Air travel isn’t the only thing to make people so nervous they can’t hear what’s said to them.

According to legend, US President Franklin D Roosevelt got bored on receiving lines where he had to shake hands with hundreds of worshipful citizens, one after another, murmuring something pleasant to each.

During one particularly tedious receiving line, it struck FDR that the people to whom he was murmuring pleasant inanities were so nervous, they weren’t actually hearing anything he said to them. To test if this was true, he decided to vary what he was murmuring.

“I strangled my mother this morning,” the president confided to the next person in line, who nodded and moved on, so dazed by the presence of the president that not a word of what he’d said registered with them.

Roosevelt was so tickled by this that he kept doing it all morning. Out of the total number of visitors, only one reacted differently. That man absorbed what the president had said and stood in silence for a moment, considering it.

Then he leaned forward and murmured an equally restrained response.

“I’m sure she had it coming, Mr President,” he said.