Friends in high and low places may not turn out to be friends indeed

I RAN into a former Fianna Fáil minister at the weekend.

It didn’t seem tactful to start talking about how well Taoiseach Enda Kenny had done in Washington, so instead, I asked the former minister if he’d been having the odd chat with Brian Cowen.

“Recently? No.”

It turned out that not a word had been exchanged between the two since well before the general election. He seemed surprised that I was surprised. I pointed out to him that he’d been one of the former Taoiseach’s most reliable public defenders over the previous two years. He nodded as if that was a given.

“You’re a friend of Brian Cowen,” I said, trying to make sense of it. “How could you not be talking to him for, what, nearly two months?”

The answer came back, clear and toneless.

“I was never friends with Brian Cowen.”

“You must be kidding. He picked you and made you a minister. You had cabinet meetings every single week. You worked through one crisis after another with him.”

“What’s that got to do with friendship? In politics, you work with a lot of people. You’re friendly with a lot of people. But they’re not your friends.”

When I wonderingly repeated this comment to the man in my life, he treated it as just the latest reminder that I suffer from chronic in-grown naivete and quoted Michael Noonan. Apparently Noonan, more than 20 years ago, told him that all politicians are essentially sole traders.

Never mind all that tribal guff. Never mind all that civil war politics rubbish.

Some of them may share a few common ideas or values. They may be friendly to each other, but they’re not friends, and when they lose power, that lack of a long-term personal relationship becomes obvious to anyone who’s watching. But then, of course, when they lose power, fewer people are watching. The road-kill gets pushed to the side of the motorway.

While that is happening, the focus turns to the new power people, and the first month in the life of a minister or minister of state is like being assumed into heaven.

Everybody loves them. Every journalist wants to interview them. Every snapper wants to take pictures of them. Every vested or un-vested interest in the country sends them letters that start with congratulations and good wishes before moving speedily on to a request for a meeting in order to sort out whatever is curtailing the happiness of the correspondent or of the correspondent’s colleagues/employees/lenders/patients/customers/clients.

Any experienced minister knows this for what it is: the tidal shift in direction characteristic of court life down through the centuries. It has nothing to do with either affection or friendship. Yet one might have believed that working closely with like-minded colleagues would make friends of those colleagues, particularly when (as was the case of this minister vis-a-vis Brian Cowen) real admiration was added to the mix.

Not so, apparently. The phones of the former Taoiseach and his former ministers have become so quiet, their SIM cards must be curling up at the edges from lack of use.

They are spun loose and lost, left with the photographs of the VIPs they met along the way and the dusty cut-crystal gifts commemorating this opening or that award ceremony.

Of course former Government office-holders still have friends, but what is grimly apparent is that few of those friendships were built during their political years. Mostly, they pre-date and survive those years, which seems oddly contradictory, since so much of a politician’s time goes on the creation and maintenance of a simulacrum of friendship. With everybody.

Even Roman senators had a slave who walked closely beside them, muttering the names of people they were about to meet, in order to flatter those individuals with the belief that the senator remembered who they were from the last encounter.

Irish politicians write letters, respond to texts and emails, go to funerals. The motivation is irrelevant. The gesture makes the other person feel like a friend. The end result, after a meltdown election, must be doubly painful for ministers who fail to be re-elected. They no longer have power, influence, office or perks. They also suffer the cutting-down of the surrounding protective barrier of apparent friends and the harsh realisation that most of them were never friends in the first place.

What’s interesting, according to a recent Newstalk documentary about men suffering from cancer, is that those patients experience a variant on that same trauma.

The three well-known men who featured in the programme, all of whom are either in remission or believe their cancers to be cured, said that one of the most surprising outcomes of the disease was to make them re-assess their friendships. Some people they would have regarded as close friends, they said, simply could not or would not cope with their illness and effectively disappeared. This was counterbalanced by people they had not regarded as close friends at all but who, when surgery, chemo, radiation and malaise settled on the sufferer, came through like the marines, delivering constant support of the right kind, no matter how much time or effort it cost them.

LISTENING to the programme, I couldn’t but wonder about the gender of the friends who came through and of the ones who went AWOL. They didn’t say. When I asked around, the general assumption was that men were more likely to have been absentees, rather than women, because “women are just better at coping with illness”.

Objective data supporting this seemed thin on the ground, although there do seem to be qualitative differences between all-male friendships and all-female friendships, at least because men seem more amendable to a form of teasing women tend to reject. Men give each other an awful time over being bald or fat. It’s doubtful that the targets enjoy it, but they surmount it in a way women don’t.

The classic example of the kind of deliberate humorous friction men inflict on each other was provided by the Chilean mine crisis. The target was a man named Yonni Barrios, who became an unlicensed medic during the episode and managed — fair dues to him — to extract one of his own teeth when it became infected.

“Above ground, Barrios had an even more complicated operation — keeping separation between his lover and his wife, both of whom were battling for him in public attacks that had the media in a frenzy,” wrote Jonathan Franklin, a correspondent at the San Jose mine. “Below ground, the men never ceased to rib Barrios about the controversy... instead of respecting Barrios’s delicate dilemma, the miners plumbed it for every ounce of laughter, teasing and taunting...as part of the daily conversation.”

The global audience for the rescue of the miners may have hoped that the friendly ribbing below ground had created a lasting bond. But it’s possible that, once released, they have no more need for contact with each other than do defeated former cabinet colleagues. Friendly. But not friends.