You have to pick the right political medium — that’s the bottom line

ONE OF them is a Minister of State. One of them is a student volunteer. Each of them made a point. The minister did it by sending a letter. The student/volunteer did it by public mooning. It’s such a pity they didn’t swap methodologies, so that Éamon Ó Cuív did the mooning and the student out in Senegal sent the letter.

Mr Ó Cuív dropping — even lowering — his trousers would have ensured that the Aer Lingus re-routing to London swept all other stories off the front pages for weeks. If, by contrast, the student had crafted a letter, it might have helped us all understand what message he wished to send to the Governor of St Louis in Senegal.

As it is, each man took too predictable a route to the selection of the medium for their protest. The Cabinet getting a letter from Mr Ó Cuív has roughly the same effect as your mother telling you to button up your coat: it drives you nuts, gets heard and ignored, and is oddly comforting because the ritual is so reliable.

You can just see Minister Mary Hanafin impatiently speed-reading the letter the way any former teacher can speed-read. You can just hear her saying “Arragh, Éamon,” in that cheerily contemptuous way she uses to deal with opposition of any kind.

But you can also figure that it wouldn’t be “Arragh, Éamon” if he mooned the Cabinet in the corridor on the way into their discussions. Take their breath away, it would. Shock them out of their little socks, because men of bilingual gravitas and Dev DNA do not often lower themselves to mooning.

Therein, however, lies the communication problem. Picking your protest medium is key to getting political traction. When the Democrats sent a big yellow chicken around following George W Bush’s father in his attempt to be re-elected as president of the United States, they picked precisely the right medium. It delivered instant political and media traction. Nobody expected a chicken. A chicken was visual — and therefore was always going to be the lead on that night’s TV news. A chicken so astonished the president that it put him off his stroke. (Not that George Bush Snr ever had much of a stroke to start with.)

Now, replace the protest chicken with mooning by Mr Ó Cuív and what do you get? A bit queasy, maybe, but you also get political traction. National attention. Because it’s so unexpected, visual and astonishing.

Most of the time, rude gestures like mooning are done for no good reason other than the realisation by the owner that he is in possession of a bottom and can show it to create shock and awe in passers-by.

Mostly shock. Not many bottoms create awe. In fact, run solo, your average bottom is just that: average. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

Mooning is a young man’s sport, although not exclusively — Monica Lewinsky’s enormously productive thong-flash at Bill Clinton probably counts as a mooning incident. But it’s rarely more than a sport. It is not often used to make a political point.

Now, the student in Senegal seems to be the sort of person who might want to make such a point, having spent the summer in the former French colony working with street children as a volunteer with the Teaching and Projects Abroad organisation.

His point — if he had one — needed some supportive data if it was to be effective. Instead, because he did a simple, unsupported moon, he has ended up in La Maison de la Correction, taken up a lot of Department of Foreign Affairs time (what fun that department must have, looking after holidaymakers and others during the summer months) and found himself surrounded by a few dozen incarcerated companions accused of a lot worse than mooning, consoled only by letters of sympathy from Ireland telling him not to worry, he’ll probably end up on the Late Late Show.

If he does, they will no doubt introduce the item by playing a clip from the film Braveheart, where a thousand Scottish warriors defiantly present their naked posteriors to the British forces. This incident never happened, although there are claims that the Normans did something along those lines at the battle of Crecy.

Indeed, warfare and battles seem to have been the seedbed for some articulatory gestures still in common use. During one prolonged period of hostilities between the French and the English, the French got into the habit, whenever they captured English archers, of amputating the first two fingers of their right hands before setting them free. This surgical intervention effectively rendered the English soldiers impotent, since they could no longer use the lethal longbow, while saving the French the trouble of either executing the captors or having to feed them in captivity.

At the outset of the Battle of Agincourt, therefore, the English archers lined up in serried ranks where the French could see them, and, in concert, raised the two fingers of their right hands to demonstrate that they had them and fully intended to use them to the detriment of their opponents. Possibly because of the drama of its first outing, the gesture survives, shorn of its historic association.

The peculiar thing about rude gestures is how frequently they set out to impugn the mother of the person insulted. In several African countries, to repeatedly extend the hand, fingers extended, palm facing the ground, is the physical method to deliver the message that “Five men slept with your mother the night you were conceived” which, understandably, vexes those against whom it is used.

EVOLUTIONARY biologist Jared Diamond found a variant of this on Easter Island, harking back to the days when — because of food shortages consequent upon injudicious exploitation of natural resources — the islanders turned cannibal.

“In place of their former sources of wild meat,” Professor Diamond writes, “islanders turned to the largest hitherto unused source available to them: humans, whose bones became common not only in proper burials, but also (cracked to extract the marrow) in late Easter Island garbage heaps.”

This radical dietary shift led to new insults joining the Easter Island verbal and physical lexicon. In a fight, an islander might point to his mouth, this being the gesture indicating that “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth”.

Now, there’s a gesture which would rile any good son.

Mooning, on the other hand, manages to be insulting without slandering the maternity of the insulted. In some cultures, it is regarded as a reasonably benign tradition.

The Maoris of New Zealand do it, and when one of them mooned Queen Elizabeth on a state visit and was charged with indecent exposure, his defence was that it was a traditional tribal protest with none of the nasty connotations of flashing.

It can even take on a public holiday-type collectivity: in California, one day a year is informally set aside for the mass mooning of Amtrak trains.

It’s unclear whether this is just done for the hell of it, or is a particularly vivid consumer reaction to poor service.