Even doing the right thing decisively doesn’t have the PR payoff expected

SHE told them to put him in the bath and melted all the jelly she had, poured it into the hot water with which she had surrounded his comatose form, and left it to solidify around him with a spoon on the ledge, together with a note reading ‘Eat your way out’My phone made its text noise when I was starting to cook. I ignored it.

It shrieked again as I slid the food onto the plate. I disregarded it. It did it for a third time when I was handing over the spaghetti carbonara to the man in my life.

Meal served, I checked the texts. The first was a breaking news bulletin indicating that dioxins had been found in Irish pork. The second was that all Irish pig meat products were being recalled. The third was that the products of every Irish pig killed in the last several months were to be thrown out. I considered snatching the plate from himself, but decided against it, on three logical grounds.

First, there isn’t that much bacon in carbonara sauce. Second, given his addiction to ham sangers, what bacon he was consuming with the pasta was insignificant. Third, it was a tiny serving. (This is not a man given to ploughman’s lunches.)

As I cleared the fridge and went through the dates on items in the freezer to find out which ones needed to go in the wheelie bin, I thought about getting worried about the crispy streaky rashers served to clients at business breakfasts over the past three months, but decided against it. I’m all worried out.

At this stage, it’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning to face the day, particularly because we have one of those memory foam mattresses which forms a carapace around sleepers during the night. It reminds me of what Helen Hayes did to her serially drunken husband, writer Charles McCarthy, when he was delivered home to her, once too often, footless, by a bunch of his hard-drinking friends.

She told them to put him in the bath and when they were gone, melted all the jelly she had in the house, poured it into the hot water with which she had surrounded his comatose form, and left it to solidify around him with a spoon on the ledge, together with a note reading “Eat your way out.”

Right now, the people who must find it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning are the men and women around the cabinet table. The Greens must be gobsmacked at finding themselves on the road to hell, since they joined when it was paved with good intentions.

It’s worse for Fianna Fáil, the older ministers from which party — must realise, with a sinking feeling, that GUBU is back. Remember GUBU? Charles Haughey described the confluence of circumstances dogging his Government (including a murder in the Phoenix Park done by someone staying in the home of the attorney general at the time) as Grotesque, Unprecedented, Bizarre and Unbelievable. Conor Cruise O’Brien reduced the sentence to the acronym GUBU and in the process, handed commentators and historians a ready-made summation of an era.

What’s brutally unfair about a GUBU period is that half the things that happen have damn all to do with the Government of the day. They are coincidences. Individually, they are as random as Acts of God. But when they come in a cluster and work their way into a pre-existing negative context, they create a backwash of assumed blame: in some way the Government is responsible for all this disaster.

Of course, it’s not responsible, but it is in charge, and that, in GUBU times, can be dispiriting. Because, in those times, even doing the right thing decisively — as seems to have happened in relation to the pork problem — doesn’t have the PR payoff a government might expect.

Let’s face it. It was a Fianna Fáil-led government that kept foot and mouth out of Ireland, and the current Minister for Agriculture is a quietly competent individual who knows his brief better than most. Hence the measured optimism of the initial response to the pig emergency: this Government may not be winning high marks right now on most fronts (ask any of the people whose necessary journeys in Dublin on Saturday were screwed up by a phenomenally well-attended education protest) but maybe they’ll be okay on this one… That measured optimism doesn’t and didn’t survive the GUBU context. Because once you have a GUBU context, conspiracies abound, and one of the first to emerge was a question deriving from the earlier FÁS controversy. Coverage yesterday suggested that warnings had come from Europe as early as 2002 about financial imprecision within FÁS. Along parallel lines, questions began to surface about how Ireland’s precious pork industry found out about its disaster.

Had the Government received warnings earlier than last week — perhaps much earlier than last week — about dioxins in Irish pigmeat? Even if the answer to that question is a straight, provable “no,” then a rake of negative questions still surface. On the one hand, you have instructions to take anything you own that has ever said hello to a pig and get rid of it. On the other, you have reassurances coming from a state agency that pork products will probably be back on the shelves before Christmas.

What? Now, I’m a city woman. What I know about the life cycle of pigs would fit on the end of one of their curly tails. But unless someone’s come up with a way of force-growing pigs that gets them from birth to maturity in three weeks, how the hell can Irish pigmeat be back on sale, pre-Christmas? Yes, some farms can be found innocent of dioxin-laden product, but what proportion of Irish pig farms will be able to prove themselves innocent, given that we don’t seem to have the capacity within the country to test pigmeat for this carcinogenic toxin, and given the fact that it took nearly a week to get the tests (which established the current problem) done in Britain? Of course the recall is precautionary. Of course people shouldn’t annoy their doctors this morning with questions about feeling a bit queasy. Because the threat is much less urgent, and much more serious than that. The folks who, on a daily basis, eat rashers and pudding at breakfast time, or rashers in a breakfast roll, and go on to eat pork chops at lunchtime and pizzas involving pork fats or sprinkles of ham at dinner time, now have a hidden problem. They have ingested, every day, 200 times the safe amount of dioxins.

They’re not going to get cancer tomorrow. If they have the right genetic make-up, they may never get cancer. If they smoke, their chances of getting the disease — already high — may increase. The issue is how long the meat has been contaminated and how much was consumed by at-risk individuals. Medical researchers must already be crafting proposals for the seeking of grants to permit monitoring of cohorts of potential cancer-sufferers.

Ireland will present a globally useful case study in dioxin damage. What an achievement.