Ten years is a long time for politicians to stop talking dirty

WHEN Albert Reynolds did it, he got mired in it. When Mary O’Rourke does it, she steps over it.

The issue is the public use of the word crap.

In 1992, in the middle of a period of conflict, controversy and contention, an irritated Albert Reynolds described a point put to him as crap. He did so in public, with the cameras rolling and the microphones recording and the nation, led by a noisily swooning media, suffered an attack of the vapours.

The Taoiseach had said a swear word. (clap back of hand to forehead and suck in breath). The prime minister of the country had referred, in public, to excrement. (Butler, the smelling salts, quickly!).

The Leader of the Nation had lowered the general tone by using an analogy appropriate only to the lower orders. (Loosen her stays and open a window, someone!). The crisis was greatly exacerbated by prime ministerial bafflement at the shock and awe occasioned by his crap comment.

Albert just didn't get it. Indeed, let's be honest, Albert didn't even come close to getting it. He genuinely couldn't understand why a word in constant use by almost everybody would cause a national hissy fit when publicly used by him.

He even resorted to the dictionary to establish that while the word could of course mean the product of defecation, it could also be a simple and acceptable slang term for rubbish or nonsense.

Eventually, Albert was persuaded to withdraw the term and indicate regret about any feelings its use might have ruffled, but he did so with the sulky resentment of a child forced to divvy up pocket money to mend a window broken by the child's brother.

This week, roughly 10 years after that incident, Mary O'Rourke used the same term in the Seanad when telling off an opponent.

Media did not swoon. The vapours did not happen. Albert Reynolds must be wondering what changed so much, in the intervening decade, to allow a senator with a leading role in the Seanad to use precisely the term he had used and get away with it.

The lack of outrage is at least partly explained by the absence of a media feeding frenzy around Mary O'Rourke.

Such a feeding frenzy was raging around Albert Reynolds 0 years ago. He didn't even have to swear: at that time, if the former Taoiseach had sneezed, he would have been found guilty of some serious social malfeasance.

Context decides perception, and the context, in the case of Albert's crap

was so negative that his use of the word contributed to an overall perception that he was somehow unfit for office. Fair? No. But anybody who goes into politics hoping for fairness is too naive for the job.

Fairness is not a characteristic of either politics or media. Feeding frenzies, on the other hand, are very definitely characteristic of modern media. The mutual contagion of media by media can and does grievously damage individuals.

Media, however, tend to regard that damage as: a) well-earned by the victim or b) a bit tough, but like a house set on fire by a thunderbolt essentially an act of God and beyond human control.

Anyway, media are notoriously frail when it comes to taking on Mary O'Rourke, largely because they can't cope with her swirling mix of words, relentlessness and schoolmarmish put-downs.

They also get distracted by her willingness to set fire to any and all colleagues past or present, starting with Albert Reynolds and most recently including Seamus Brennan.

However, even in the absence of an ambient controversy, Mary O'Rourke's use of crap was inevitably going to evoke a greatly diluted intensity of outrage, given the times we're in and the soup our politicians are in.

The notion of a politician as a role model who should keep it verbally clean in order not to give bad example was dying even in the early nineties.

Nowadays, it's not a runner at all, as proven by the opinion poll in yesterday's paper. Passing time reduces our regard for politicians and softens our attitude to "bad" language.

If you doubt the latter, just listen to the best-selling CD, Give up Yer Auld Sins. You'll hear small working class children in the 1950s telling stories without a single four-letter word. It's extremely doubtful if the contemporary equivalent of those children could get through the same stories without those words.

Or look at show business. In the early days of the Abbey Theatre, the actor FJ McCormick objected to the profanity as he saw it of O'Casey's plays.

TODAY, if one compares any scene from any O'Casey play with the sustained (and very funny) swearing at the beginning of the film Four Weddings and a Funeral one will be astonished at how pure-mouthed were O'Casey's tenement dwellers and soldiers.

The same applies to the mortification of the toffs in My Fair Lady when Eliza, forgetting to be a lady at the race meeting in Ascot, encourages the horse she's backed with a sudden yell of "Move yer bloomin arse".

Passing time isn't the only factor behind the shrugging tolerance that met Mary O'Rourke's crap. Role and perceived importance played their part, too.

Journalists think the Taoiseach of the day is important. They may not like him, but he's important. They don't think the Leader of the Seanad is important.

Individual senators may be beloved and ritual obeisance may be paid by the broadsheet print media to the Seanad, but Senator O'Rourke would need to say a whole lot worse than crap before it got media excited about something happening in the Seanad's dinky chamber.

It does have to be said, though, that journalists getting high-minded about politicians swearing was always, even in Albert Reynolds' day, a serious case of pot calling kettle black.

If hacks and politicians were ever in a contest as to which profession could pack most profanities into the average sentence, the hacks will win by a whisker.

The miracle, for both professions, is how two groups of people so verbally dependent, in real life, on "bad" language can represent themselves on radio and TV on a daily basis and give the impression that the cleaned-up version is the way they normally talk.

It's certainly not an improvement on the way they normally talk. Most politicians are much more lucid with a bit of bad language thrown in. Half a dozen guys in Leinster House scrub up well, in language terms, but become colourless and boring in the process.

In the Dáil Bar, language lurches out of them unscrubbed in great ungoverned outbursts. On radio, they fill their sentences with the big grey words of the lexicon. Like infrastructure.

That little word crap, on the other hand, has at least the distinction of having made Mary O'Rourke and Albert Reynolds sing from the same hymn sheet, albeit a decade apart.