Bringing out the Hellman’s may help more than having God on your side
The Ancient Order of Hibernians decided at the end of last week to have a go at Michael McDowell.
Now let’s be honest, many people would buy into the notion of having a go at McDowell. Publicly creasing the Minister for Justice is an idea which would have its supporters.
They had another thing going for them — surprise. Nobody knows them. When they rose up from the body of the hall and started yelling anti-gay slogans at the minister, the general first reaction was “The Ancient WHAT?” If they’d managed it well, this weekend’s papers would have been awash with profiles of them. But they didn’t manage it well. Maybe the certitude that God was on their side made them too complacent to do good contingency planning.
For starters, they failed to anticipate their target’s behaviour. McDowell didn’t get huffy or pompous.
He didn’t try to keep talking and eventually — as happened recently to an English minister — get led off the platform in embarrassed defeat. On the contrary, he enjoyed it.
The Minister for Justice leaned on the podium, smiled and got himself eight minutes of a rest before the lads got rounded up and removed.
The McDowell smile provoked one of the AOH members into fecking a copy of the Constitution at him by way of a parting shot. We must hope this doesn’t become an election tactic. Custard pies are soft and tomatoes and eggs are light. All three, particularly if they’re past their sell-by date, are cheap, too. The Constitution is neither light nor soft nor cheap.
Firing the output of the Government Publications Office at politicians could be both costly and dangerous.
You wouldn’t mind being on the receiving end of a leaflet about planning, but a well-thrown copy of the Census could break your jaw.
As it turned out, the AOH aim wasn’t that good, so the Constitution didn’t physically connect with its target.
This allowed the minister to good-humouredly announce that he was happy to receive the Constitution at any time.
If provoking all this buoyant good humour from Michael McDowell wasn’t bad enough, the follow-up coverage of the protest allowed the inestimable David Norris to take pot-shots at the AOH and the Vatican and to remind us that gay men get murdered in Ireland with an unacknowledged frequency.
One has to doubt that the AOH had intended to give Senator Norris another go on the media roundabout.
The fact is that the end result of the AOH assault on Michael McDowell is right up there with the 1913 Epsom Derby and the Kerry Katona tomato episode as examples of how not to do public relations.
The 1913 Epsom Derby was when Emily Davison, a member of Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, which fought for the enfranchisement of women, flung herself under the hooves of the King’s horse, killing herself, upsetting a perfectly innocent horse, ruining everybody’s day out and allowing anti-feminists to point out that giving the vote to suicidal head- bangers might not improve democracy.
Davison died a heroine. That’s true. But her identity was quickly forgotten: when the King’s Horse episode is remembered, people often assume it was Pankhurst who got trampled to death.
And it took until 1928 for women to get the vote in Britain on equal terms with men.
ACHIEVING publicity is not the same as achieving your objective. Kerry Katona achieved dollops of publicity for Hellman’s last week, but whether she achieved their objective is arguable.
The photo op showed her delightedly popping a tomato dipped in their mayonnaise into her mouth, then visibly having doubts about it, and finally up-chucking it into the hands of a helper.
But hold, the AOH would say. Ms Katona (plus or minus a tomato, hold the mayo) was not in the same business as we were last week. Sorry, lads.
She was. You lot were in the conversion business. You were setting out to make the people of Ireland decide that letting gay people have their relationships recognised by the State was a desperate step on the way to hell and would destroy the institution of marriage.
Ms Katona had a more modest objective: to make people buy a particular brand of mayonnaise.
And you know the really annoying thing lads? She may have done better than you lot did — because, at this point, simple brand recognition is enough for most products, even if the association is less than positive.
The AOH getting their tweed knickers in a knot and tossing the Constitution — badly — at a minister didn’t change anybody’s plans, didn’t persuade the Irish public that civil recognition of gay unions amounts to endangerment of the civic fabric of Ireland and did less than nothing to support the institution of marriage, which is much more endangered by recent divorce law moves in Britain.
The difference between the Ancient Order, in the aftermath of their outing, and the promoters of the mayonnaise, in the aftermath of Ms Katona’s episode, is the difference between commerce and fanaticism.
Commerce demands that the brand manager sits down with the PR company and rigorously investigates to what degree the published pictures of Ms Katona will impact, negatively or positively, on the sales and brand-integrity of the product, short-term and long-term.
They may also review her fee, since the least they could have expected was that she’d practice with a tomato and mayonnaise in advance so her digestive reservations could be revealed in private, rather than in public.
If the AOH were to do the kind of post mortem the mayonnaise people will do, they would realise that, short-term and long-term, they have not only achieved the square root of damn all, but have further tainted the public perception of believers and of God, hammering home a notion of Irish Catholicism as predicated on only two stances: being anti-abortion and anti-gay.
Groucho Marx famously said he wouldn’t be a member of any club that’d have him as a member. The problem for Christians these days is being a member of a religion promulgated by people like the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the former top manager at Enron. Especially when both have such a profound conviction that they know God personally, and have him on their side.
The Enron chief defrauded millions, showed massive contempt for ethics and law alike and is headed for jail. But he’s happy in himself, he said last week, because he knows God is with him.
The AOH, having provided a vivid contradiction to the old axiom “See how these Christians love one another,” have the same conviction.
They may both be right.
After all, weren’t we always told that the Almighty’s tolerance and compassion is infinite?
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