Luntz seems unable to grasp that our capacity to be outraged is limited

You know that juggler’s trick where they yank a table-cloth out from under the crockery, glasses and cutlery so suddenly that the table stays set, with every glass, plate and fork in the same position on the now-bare table?

That’s what I’d like to do with last night’s Week in Politics programme. Yank out the central premise — that political focus groups are profoundly useful — while leaving all the good stuff in place. The good stuff being the set design, production values, panel and presenter.

Noel Whelan, the former Fianna Fáil staff member whose latest Tallyman’s guide is published this week, seems to have come up with the idea and persuaded RTÉ to run three programmes based on the approach of American pollster Frank Luntz.

Luntz passionately believes that gathering 30 people selected by Red C into a room and barracking them with questions about politicians will throw up infallible predictions about what’s going to happen in the election.

He’s wrong. What you get when you put those 30 people in a room is pub talk, made seem more significant than it is by inspired editing of four hours of material so the dross ends up on the cutting-room floor.

The panel helps deliver significance, too. This particular panel consisted of Ivan Yates, former Fine Gael Minister turned bookie, who — thanks to this series — has emerged as one of the most vivid, funny and insightful political commentators around.

Noel Whelan matched him with growled brilliance. The third panellist (me) lurched from pomposity to triviality, occasionally visiting complete incoherence.

Nobody else can produce quite this mixture under pressure. It’s a unique skill I have.

During the recording, Luntz got ratty with the focus group, with himself and with the teacher in the back row. He got ratty with the focus group because half of them were too polite to have much in the way of opinions. They were getting paid, he told them. So they’d better live up to their side of the bargain and develop opinions. Quickly.

He got furious with himself because he couldn’t get the focus group to come up with what he wanted them to come up with.

All this free-floating rage made for exciting television, especially when Luntz also got livid with the teacher up at the back of the focus group. The teacher was pro-Government and wanted to explain to Luntz how Irish politics worked.

The first few incursions by him were tolerated, but after the first hour, whenever the teacher opened his mouth, Luntz did “No bloody way” gestures at him to close it again.

During the programme, clips from each of the six political leaders’ ard fheis speeches were played. This part of the programme (using dial-o-meters) established that 30 people in Boyle, Co Roscommon, think Pat Rabbitte’s speech was mighty, that Bertie Ahern’s and Gerry Adams’ were OK and that – if this was reality TV — Michael McDowell and Trevor Sargent were competing with each other for expulsion. In addition, this group of 30 people went against the prevailing consensus that Enda Kenny’s ard fheis speech had been pretty good, if not his oratorical finest hour.

Luntz then got the group to decide that Pat Rabbitte and Bertie Ahern were the golden team and the choice of the nation. All of which would make sense if Ireland was America, was electing a President, and didn’t have either Proportional Representation or multi-seat constituencies. However, because we are electing a myriad of local candidates, not a President, and because we have PR and multi-seat constituencies, it’s about as valid as adding two and two together and getting six as the total.

If everybody west of the Shannon, for example, agreed with these 30 people about Trevor Sargent’s speech, it wouldn’t affect the overall votes in the election, because the only Green in that area with a serious chance of becoming a TD is Niall O’Brolchain, the mayor of water-free Galway and any sane person planning to give him a vote is not going to hold back because a focus group didn’t like his leader’s oratorical style. In addition, if, as opinion polls suggest, a Green tide is underway, the Greens would increase their vote even if Trevor Sargent had sung his Árd Fheis speech to a Karaoke track, wearing a suit trimmed with organic bananas.

Political parties who use focus groups do so in privacy. Entertainment is not the objective. The objective is finding out that Minister A has to be kept off TV in the run-up to the general election because the very sight of him gives viewers the bends.

They’re highly effective in this regard and deeply infuriating to the ministers involved.

Frank Luntz’s focus groups, in contrast, are info-tainment, that hybrid of entertainment and information which requires the expression, not just of passionate views, but of indicative passionate views, providing a prophecy of how the election is going to pan out.

A multiplicity of parties and of national and local issues goes against the development of such clear conclusions. Possibly to compensate, Frank Luntz operates at a high level of emotional engagement. It’s like he has chronic road-rage. This makes for great TV while distracting from the fact that he is much less impartial in his information-seeking than, say, the programme’s presenter, Sean O’Rourke would have been in the same situation. Luntz really likes Pat Rabbitte and really doesn’t like Enda Kenny.

When the main body of the programme was in the can, Luntz addressed three extra issues, the first of which was Enda Kenny’s ‘contract with the nation.’ Luntz told the focus group that he — Luntz — had written a ‘contract with America’ into a speech in the nineties for some American politician. He clearly expected shock and awe. Instead, they looked at him blankly; So? They hadn’t been that pushed about the contract thing in the first place, so why should they care where it came from? They sat like wet sponges, refusing to give Luntz credit or Kenny discredit.

Still in search of shock and awe, he showed them posters of Bertie beaming at representatives of different demographics. Bertie, he announced, had never even met the people in the pictures with him. It was all cobbled together in a computer. How did they feel about the posters now they knew their filthy secret? Pretty much the same as they had before they knew the filthy secret, was the reaction.

Undaunted, he went back to his Bertie-and-Pat theme, pointing out to them that Pat Rabbitte had said he didn’t want to go into government with Fianna Fáil. Yet they were indicating he should. The group refused to get their ethical knickers knotted about Pat Rabbitte having to do a U-turn. They clearly thought this was a ‘get over yourself’ issue and no more than that.

The teacher in the back row would no doubt have loved to explain to Luntz that between tribunals, public enquiries and Joe Duffy, we’ve had so much shock and awe over the past few years, our supply of outrage is at a low ebb.