Harney on a limb: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose

NOW that women’s boxing is to feature in the Olympics, if the girls with the padded gloves are short of equipment, they should ring Batt O’Keeffe. He has the punchbag thing down pat.

Batt may be the most sophisticated member of the entire cabinet when it comes to dealing with media, particularly when it comes to coping with interviewer rants. He treats infuriated interrogators with a warm earnest kindness that drives them nuts. It’s like they’re a toddler lying on the floor of the supermarket, banging their heels and screaming. He waits for them to complete the tantrum, then verbally nods at some aspect of their proposition and whispers his way to a better place. He doesn’t fight. Doesn’t get nasty. Just absorbs incoming blows, punchbag fashion, acknowledges ambient pain and gets right back to whatever he was announcing in the first place.

Batt O’Keeffe personifies one wing of the problem the opposition face, coming into the autumn. We tend to forget, because the Taoiseach and Tánaiste are so inept on TV, how very good the rest of them are. Some of them, like Dermot Ahern and Noel Dempsey were always good. Some have got markedly better than good in the last 18 months. Micheál Martin used to spend an awful lot of time in the warm shallows of a TV programme, trying not to splash anybody with what might be thought of as contentiousness. Now he actively seeks enough depth to get a turn of speed going and doesn’t care who gets sideswiped. Mary Hanafin, who used to get snappy under pressure (with inevitable resultant snideries about her being a schoolmarm) seems to have abandoned tetchiness. Brendan Smith keeps his head down, Pat Carey has copyrighted a mix of resignation and resolution that exhausts even Vincent Browne, and the diligent Willie O’Dea, like death, never takes a holiday.