The lesson learned from making ‘mistakes’ is one of the best

FOLLOWING Bobby Kerr on any platform is the gig from hell. Following Bobby Kerr when you’re so awash in germs that breathing feels like trying to inhale through particularly thick porridge is even worse.

On Friday, I was a speaker at a Small Firms Association (SFA) celebration for 38 finalists in the SFA National Small Business Awards. These may be small firms, but they’re trading like blazes and exporting to China, among other markets. The atmosphere was electric with that specific excitement that comes of being with people who have invented something, or improved something and decided to go it alone, with all the terrors and financial problems going it alone generate.

I sat through Bobby’s speech trying to blow my nose subtly (contradiction in terms) into Olbas tissues donated by the SFA person in charge, Sue O’Neill. I hadn’t brought enough of my own tissues, mainly because I use kitchen rolls and it wouldn’t have helped the image, but also because it would have required a second taxi. In the event, begging the Olbas tissues worked a treat, because they have some infusion of something herbal that clears your head, so I could actually hear Bobby Kerr as he briefed the audience on how he built the Insomnia coffee shop chain.

He included the incident where he was telephoned at home at the weekend by one of his managers. Bit of a problem, the manager told him. Customer had nicked an Easter egg. That didn’t sound like a huge issue to Bobby. The caller explained that he had taken off after the Easter egg nicker, and chased him the length of the street before rugby-tackling him, bringing him down and calling the guards. That being the point at which the problem arose. Because that was when the man produced a receipt for the Easter egg.

Joining the laughter as Kerr went on to explain how he had apologised to the customer, it struck me that the story had two points of relevance to the general election. The first is that no politician could ever tell such a story, lest media decide that it established some fundamental gap in their make-up, rendering them unelectable and unfit for high office.

The second thing that struck me about Bobby Kerr’s story is how it parallels Enda Kenny’s progress over the past few years. Substitute the Fine Gael leader for the poor suspected Easter-egg thief and the story pretty much applies. For the last don’t-know-how-long, Irish media has been lashing down the street ready to rugby tackle Enda Kenny for making Fine Gael a success. It never strikes them he might actually have the receipt in his pocket. In fact, if a little thought went into the pursuit, it would be clear that media have the receipt in their own pocket, in the form of the opinion polls.

The problem is that media fastens on each opinion poll to confirm what they already believe. Because media see Eamon Gilmore as a fantastic leader, a great orator, powerful communicator and generally brill boy, media, for the past few years, fastened on his high personal poll ratings and largely ignored the fact that his party’s ratings did not match them. Never mind that, was the reaction. He’s so obviously the star of the show, he’ll drag the rest of the party up.

The reverse applied to Kenny. True, Fine Gael was building approbation hand over fist, but never mind that, went the unspoken (and sometimes spoken) rule: look instead at the fact that Enda Kenny is not as popular as his party. That’s fatal, so it is. Fatal. You can’t have that disconnect between party and leader. It’s perfectly OK to have that disconnect as long as it goes the other way, with the party trailing the leader, but if the leader is down the banks, Omigod, how can his party have a future? You can see that he’s pulling them down. Admittedly, they’re high in the polls, but they’d be much higher if he would disappear.

Then Kenny gave them the gift of non-appearance on Vincent Browne’s Big Debate. The key phrase recurrently used about this absence was that he had “done himself no favours”.

Talking to Christopher Rooney, one of the SFA guys, who’s dreamed up a great app (SafeText.ie) for reminding women to take the contraceptive pill, I realised I want to produce an instantaneous translator app for the phrases of this election. “Done himself no favours,” means “I didn’t like him before the big debate, so I’ve decided him getting out of it has done him damage but I haven’t worked out precisely what damage or with whom”.

The reality, of course, is that the only disfavour Kenny did himself by not being present in TV3 last week was missing the sniffer dogs and the purple security wristbands they put on you, as if you were a newborn who might be stolen from a maternity hospital. I couldn’t get mine off for several days and people admired it, thinking it was jewellery.

Aside from that, Kenny did himself a rake of favours. The first was that Micheál Martin, undistracted by the Fine Gael man, went at Eamon Gilmore like a labrador/ rottweiler cross: he managed to hook his teeth deeply into Gilmore’s shin while looking sweetly sad about it. The second favour done to Kenny by his absence is that Eamon Gilmore now has to prove his manhood by creasing Martin next time around and chewing a lump out of Gerry Adams as well.

The third favour he did himself was to prove that the debate had no effect on the opinion polls which some of us had stated way back, but which was proven by yesterday’s Sunday Business Post Red C poll. If you want to claim that Gilmore’s performance dropped Labour by a couple of points, you then face the palpable contradiction that Martin’s performance didn’t raise Fianna Fáil by a corresponding level.

This is because the plain people of Ireland can distinguish between entertainment and Government. Big Debates are entertainment, particularly for media, which understandably prefers them to slogging around constituencies in the cold with tired candidates. But that’s all they are.

Much as Micheál Martin loves Vincent Browne, the fact is that looking Vincent Browne in the eye is something that can be done — and, indeed, IS done, quite successfully, every week by dozens of people. It’s a hell of an adrenalin rush, but it’s not a key qualifier for high office.

The next Taoiseach doesn’t have to be able to look Vincent Browne in the eye and come out of the encounter intact.

The next Taoiseach needs to be able to look Angela Merkel in the eye and come out of the encounter intact.

But let’s get back to Kenny’s absence. Did him no favours, I hear you say? Big mistake on his part, I hear you add?

Well, as a Labour supporter muttered to me over the weekend, “If Martin won the debate, and Enda made a mistake by not showing up, how come Fine Gael are up 3 and Fianna Fáil and Labour both down 2? If Enda makes any more mistakes, Fine Gael will get an overall majority.”