A little communications planning might have averted political disaster
The first principal of good communications is to start with the audience — with the people who will be affected by a communication. In the case of the medical cards withdrawal, the primary audience was the over-70s, the secondary audience was Fianna Fáil backbenchers and the tertiary audience was media.
The medical card issue was one of those you file under “Bleedin’ Obvious”. It was bleedin’ obvious that every family in this country has a parent in their 70s, 80s or 90s who is kept alive and functioning through a daily cocktail of expensive drugs, and who, thanks to Fianna Fáil’s gift of the medical card, abandoned the VHI and now faces at least €5,000 in extra medical costs.
It was bleedin’ obvious that the offspring of those parents, already impoverished by the events of the year and — in many cases — by the crippling cost of long-term nursing home care for their father or mother, would tot up the implications, add in the emotional distress of the Mammy or the Daddy, and tell at least 20 other people of the resultant trauma to them, the offspring.
It was bleedin’ obvious, in consequence, that every radio programme would be inundated with heart-rending personal sagas illustrating the general pain, and that print media would go find recognisable figures (think Anna Manahan and Gemma Hussey) who would personify the wounded middle class reaction to the measure.
It was so bleedin’ obvious that RTÉ’s commentator-on-the-fly, KPMG tax partner Donall Gannon, was able to spot it on first hearing and predict, live on the air, that it would be a major problem.
Now, if that’s the inevitable forest fire of reaction to the story you have to tell, what, in communication terms, should you do?
The first thing you do is establish who, in the over-70s, is not going to be hit by this, develop clear, understandable profiles of them and ideally find real-life examples of them to put on media. Divide and conquer. Place the majority of the elderly in the safe zone and make sure the ones who are safe know, from the outset, just how safe they are.
The second thing you do is establish who, in the over-70s, is going to be hit by it and find the extreme, dislikeable multi-millionnaire personification of them.
Nobody then will come out crying, because they’d be laughed off the stage, and the rest of the public will say “The hell with them, they should never have had the medical card in the first place.”
If you do that, and share the details with all cabinet members, then you obviate what happened, with the cabinet a) doing sums on the TV which nobody could understand, because it isn’t the medium for mathematics on the fly, b) countering emotive personal anecdote with statistical data, which never works, or c) blundering into wider issues, thereby laying traps for colleagues appearing on later programmes.
At the same time, you take care of the secondary audience by realistically assessing their position.
The position of the Fianna Fáil backbenchers is FF takes care of the elderly and always has. They know we have more elderly, and more vocal elderly than at any time in political history and that their families are suddenly under unprecedented financial pressure. All of which was going to add up, once the penny dropped, to a mutinous fury, based not just on fear of returning to the constituency to be smacked in the kisser by dozens of voters, but on a sense that their party was abandoning one of its core values.
IF the communications problems implicit in reaching the backbenchers and making them agreeable in the face of this move had been addressed, early on, I personally doubt that the move itself would have been made, so problematic was the communication required.
But they were not addressed. Instead, the cabinet looked at the figures, at the rising tide of the demographic, and were persuaded to take a stance which ran counter to Fianna Fáil DNA and was likely to deal a blow to the Greens from which they may never recover.
All of this was going to feed into media coverage. It had the slimmest of chances of working if Brian Lenihan were present at all media events, because his sweetly reasonable relentlessness allows him to cope, even on programmes where Joan Burton and Alan Shatter sub-machine gun him.
However, he couldn’t battle it on his own, and colleagues who went to help him clobbered him worse than the media did.
The Taoiseach’s pre-emptive strike on the News didn’t work, and the other cabinet members who spoke tended, with the best of intentions, to complicate and reinforce the problem.
Even if great communications strategies had been crafted around each of the killer issues in this budget, it wouldn’t have been enough. Other issues should have been addressed in advance. Issues like the standing ovation. In political terms, the standing ovation is rarely spontaneous, and is always one of the most coercive forms of collective communication. No single individual does the insisting, but the insisting is done, nonetheless. The crowd insists that each person stands. The individual who doesn’t want to stand ends up standing because staying in a sitting position when a standing ovation happens carries disproportionate significance. Failing to join a standing ovation is never seen as neutral. It is felt to be as hostile as sending a nail bomb.
Failure to stand indicates contempt for the person celebrated, defiance of the general consensus, and disloyalty to the emerging cause. It requires spontaneous courage in a situation where the implications are difficult to work out.
The cabinet was misled by the standing ovation into sitting, the following day, in the Dáil chamber smiling at the opposition and joking with each other. While the cameras rolled. The visual disconnect between their casually happy demeanor and what the public were facing was lethal.
That disconnect repeated itself in the Tánaiste’s utterances throughout the week. Mary Coughlan’s communication errors caused the fastest destruction of a public image in living memory.
Media loved her before she became Tánaiste. Especially when she lost weight and jazzed up her appearance. Nothing goes down as well with media as a makeover. In addition to liking her as a source of column inches, they liked her personally, as did a substantial cohort of Fianna Fáil backbenchers. The self-chosen shift from jolly pint-drinking swear-like-a-sailor, bit-of-all-right girlhood to threatening gauleiter was ill-judged.
Public reproaches freighted with warnings of retribution are always a mistake. Fianna Fáil’s tradition has been the tug at the jacket and the quiet word, escalating, in Haughey’s time, to the terrifying phone call in the small hours of the morning.
You just don’t publicly tell embattled Fianna Fáil backbenchers they’ll be carpeted if they bitch while the Taoiseach’s away.
Someone should tell the Taoiseach that communications planning around tough decisions should not be dismissed as PR.
Its real function is reality-testing.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
