Shiny new promises have quickly lost their glossy veneer

SO read the second best headline of the past year which appeared over a picture of a brown blob found on a Nevada cave wall and which kind of, sort of, looked a little bit like the outline of a creature from Jurassic Park if you squinted it at in the right way.

The newspaper in question had superimposed a picture of a proper dinosaur next to the blob to reinforce the legitimacy of the suggestion in the reader’s mind, and the headline then began to ramp up the excitement further, holding out the dazzling prospect of a dramatic break from all that we had previously known — then it killed all that mounting anticipation stone dead with the “...or is it just a mud stain” reality-check pay off.

Damn you, over-hyped newspaper presentation, there I was rushed along in the moment and almost ready to discard my belief in Darwinian rationality and believe the blob really could be the depiction of a happy dinosaur/human interaction — and so laugh in the face of so-called science — and then you put the idea back in my head that it might just be a mud stain after all.

Of course it’s just a mud stain, humans and dinosaurs could never have co-existed together, what nonsense — I suddenly felt so foolish and used.

All of which brings us to our shiny new Government which pledged us such an epoch-making radical change with the past, maybe not something on the scale of dinosaurs and humans getting along, but a new way of doing business none the less, indeed a new reality — and a whole lot of other promises that now look like, well, not so much a brand new world, more a bit of an old mud stain.

Five weeks into the new administration might be a tad soon to pass judgment on it, but as it has already presided over four communications messes in that timeframe, we should at least start to wonder which way the wind is blowing.

After going back on pledges to cut the number of pointless junior ministers and burning the greedy senior bondholders, we had spectacular own goals over the much trumpeted “jobs budget” and the minimum wage reverse.

With Fianna Fáil in utter collapse, Fine Gael and Labour knew the election would be a roll-over, but still they insisted on talking tough anyway — oh, how Frankfurt would do things Eamon Gilmore’s way, oh how Enda Kenny would free us from the EU bailout strait-jacket in one bound — oh, how ridiculous it all sounds now. Even on the domestic front the grip is slippery as shown in the farcical situation of Enda pretending in the Dáil he had no idea why everyone was calling the centre piece of his first 100 days a jobs “budget” when it was really just an “initiative”. Erm, that would be because you talked it up so much Enda, remember when you kept calling it a “budget” every chance you could?

On the backfoot, Mr Kenny insisted it didn’t matter if it was called a budget or an initiative, as long as it did the job of giving people jobs, which is completely correct — so why make such a big fuss about what it was called in the first place then? Especially as the upshot is it meant it looked like Mr Kenny was downgrading the whole package.

But ministers suddenly realised “budget” spelled tax hikes in frightened voters’ minds and backpedaled furiously as they were at pains to point out there would be no tax pain in it for punters — but unfortunately, with the limited resources devoted to it under the IMF/EU memorandum yesterday, it looks like there will be precious few jobs in it either.

And then there was the good news that the miserly minimum wage cut performed by the last government would be restored — but snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Enterprise Minister Richard Bruton directly linked the move with getting rid of long-standing labour agreements covering up to 240,000 workers.

While there are certainly some unjustifiable anomalies in that system, it generally acts as a financial floor for low-paid workers in areas traditionally open to exploitation such as construction and the hospitality industry.

So, what should have been a victory for the social justice agenda just looked, not so much like robbing Peter to pay Paul, but more like robbing the poorly paid to pay the even more poorly paid.

But then, while Labour opted for fresh faces, Fine Gael did make the very strange decision to keep on both Brian Cowen’s and Mary Harney’s press chiefs after the election, so what change in PR attitudes should we have expected?

Cowen and Harney were the two worst communicators in a Cabinet notorious for its lack of empathetic outreach ability.

Indeed, whenever Cowen or Harney tried to get a message across it usually met with the same level of success one imagines CoCo The Clown would achieve if he attempted to broker a ceasefire in Libya.

Which brings us to what I’d rank as the best headline of the past year.

No, not the one from the same newspaper that brought us the fake human/dinosaur hook-up hope, which read: “Was The Bible A Forgery?” Though, it must be said that is an engagingly stupid headline, as either one believes the Bible to be the word of God himself, or one believes it to be a collection of fables, but either way the suspicion of plagiarism does not usually pop into the reader’s head — “And on the seventh day God sued his publisher for infringement of intellectual property rights...”

No, my favourite headline of the year is also strangely redolent for the Government as it concerns the humbling of BP — an arrogant giant brought down by its own hubris.

BP thought it was too big to fail and its own slickness would wipe away that little local difficulty when 40,000 gallons of oil per day were spewing into the Gulf of Mexico — instead, the slick engulfed BP and ended up costing it $14 billion and a shredded reputation.

The low point in the PR calamity came when BP chief Tony Hayward insisted he was keen to sort the mess out because: “I want my life back.”

When he was finally ousted, one news website ran the brilliantly sardonic, brilliantly disdainful headline: “Hayward Gets Life Back, Eleven Workers Still Dead.”

The Government, with its record Dáil majority, may feel it is too big to fail, but by failing to manage expectations and succeeding in mangling its message, it is in danger of not just leaving the public feeling hoodwinked, but ready to turn against it very quickly as well.