Be careful how you work the media because it may just work you back
SVP rescue the victims of wealth creation. But the two organisations achieved amazing unanimity over Fine Gael's post-Budget party political broadcast. They were like two joyriders fighting for possession of a Lada.
It all started when Fine Gael went out into the highways and hedges to get speakers for their Árd Fhéis. At a Fine Gael conference, candidates get to hide their light under a bushel or a Begg, because Fine Gael brings in a bunch of external worthies to take up the party's TV time.
Like Voltaire, Fine Gael don't necessarily agree with what David Begg says, but they'll defend his right to say it and give him a platform on which to say it at enormous length.
So, at its conference, Fine Gael had Begg and IBEC and SVP on stage. Some of those guests rubbished Fine Gael policies, thus furnishing FG with yet another opportunity to show forbearance. It's a Fine Gael thing, forbearance.
Fianna Fáil does not look for opportunities to express either openness or forbearance. At an FF Árd Fhéis, the faithful are enthusiastically faithful: una voce. If, at a Fianna Fail Árd Fhéis, you feel a dissident thought coming on, you either stifle it or say it in such coded terms, nobody can make sense of it for at least a week.
If you suggested to Fianna Fáil handing over their platform to David Begg and IBEC and SVP, they'd call for the guys in the white coats to take care of you. Showcase lads we don't own? Give a platform to fellas that want to whip the party in public? Hand over TV time to the whip-wielders? What are you, nuts?
Fine Gael, on the other hand, is convinced public flagellation stimulates the party at a deep and visceral level. So it invites David Begg and his cyclone-styled hair to flog it at its own conference.
It invites IBEC to dominate at the same conference, and, to prove it pays attention, Fine Gael then includes some of the key points made at that conference in its post-Budget party political broadcast. And, guess what? IBEC (and, later, SVP) get picky about being quoted.
Now, think about that. IBEC didn't want Fine Gael giving further publicity to stuff IBEC had said at Fine Gael's conference.
IBEC gave quotable quotes and got ratty about having their quotable quotes quoted. Remind me again this is the umbrella body advising the big business brains of Ireland, right?
IBEC never, normally, has a problem with being quoted. In fact, IBEC lives by being quoted and by measuring its coverage. If you're a high-flier in IBEC, you're judged partly on column inches.
Armies of people with scissors slice out every cutting achieved by each IBEC executive so that when they go to meetings, each has a little pile beside him or her.
(Someone will even cut out this Irish Examiner column and include it in someone's pile. Trust me. They will. They won't like it, but it'll be cut out and kept.)
IBEC yearn and lust after coverage. Yet it doesn't want FG to give a public replay to something IBEC said on FG's time a week ago. Does this mean it has ceased to believe in what it said, back then?
Hardly. It must be that it doesn't want its skirts sullied by association with one political party. In which case why the hell did it take its skirts to Galway and dip them in Fine Gael taint a week earlier?
To any outsider, it looks pretty simple. If you say something at a conference sponsored by a political party and the political party thinks what you said was worth quoting in a later broadcast, you get two bites at the cherry, two swings on the roundabout, two for the price of one.
You don't suddenly start trying to retrieve your virginity. You don't try to prevent them quoting the quotes you put into the public domain. All by your little self, you put that material into the public domain, and now, not only do you want to take your purity back, but you're huffy that Fine Gael is not respecting you in the morning.
If I were Fine Gael, I'd have told IBEC where to stick it when they ordered me to take its clip out of my party political. But Fine Gael behaved like ladies and gentlemen and said: "Okay, we'll amputate your quote. No problem. Think nothing of it."
IBEC achieved its amputation and probably felt great, since it clearly doesn't understand how mass media works and had no clue what would happen next.
WHAT happened next was that RTÉ found out about the IBEC/FG fight. RTÉ's news people, hearing about the amputation, logically asked: "Which bit got cut off, exactly?"
And because RTÉ, having broadcast the FG conference that Saturday morning, has all the footage, its news guys were able to identify precisely the clip FG had been planning to use.
The RTÉ news guys then announced in the middle of its main news bulletin that Fine Gael's party political had undergone a forced amputation at the hands of IBEC and wait for it RTÉ then showed the amputated bit. Right slap bang in the middle of the high-viewership evening TV bulletin:
"Here's the bit IBEC didn't want you to see, folks. Have a good look. This is the clip from FG's conference, which very few of you will have seen because who watches political TV on a Saturday morning?
"So, for all those of you who missed it when it was first broadcast, and for all those who won't get to see it after this bulletin because IBEC have forced its removal from the party political broadcast, here it is on prime time news."
Paradoxical, this outcome. IBEC looks precious and ridiculous. Fine Gael looks good. But puzzled, too, like a golden Labrador rewarded, rather than whacked with a newspaper, for chewing its master's slippers to pulp. First of all, they get their party political plugged on the news.
Then Pat Kenny comes on warbling about the Toy Show just before the Party Pol, so they get handed an excited and enlarged audience. Afterwards, SVP gets publicly ratty over Fine Gael quoting something THEY said at the conference, so FG get post-factum coverage, too.
With luck, this episode will have taught a lesson to organisations like IBEC: If you don't want to be quoted by a political party, don't go and talk to that political party while RTÉ cameras roll.
On the other hand, there is also the awful possibility this controversy may have made people actually watch a party political broadcast and thereby given the moribund genre a further lease of life.
The PPB is the cockroach of political communication. It's been around since pre-history. It's ugly as sin. It has no friends. But you can't kill it. And if you see one, you can be sure there's another hiding somewhere ready to come out as soon as it gets dark.
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