Aim of state-of-the-nation addresses is to give people faith and confidence

I can’t address last night’s State of the Nation address by the Taoiseach, because it was broadcast too late for this column.

Not for the news pages, but we columnists have to file our thoughts a lot earlier than 10pm.

Today, of course, every radio programme that doesn’t major on music will carry mega commentary on what the Taoiseach said, where his eyebrows were when he said it, and the semiotic significance of the colour of the tie he wore while he was saying it.

The media consensus is that state-of-the- nation addresses are significant. That consensus is not absolute. TV3 undoubtedly wrestled with itself before someone over there said: “You know something, lads? We’re not breaking into the X Factor for this. Because the X Factor gives us ratings a state-of-the-nation won’t give us.

“And furthermore, our X Factor viewers will have a conniption and throw a hissy fit if they tune in and find themselves facing Enda Kenny telling us how bad things are. We’ll run him later.”

That’s the first difference between contemporaneous state-of-the-nation addresses and those in times past. We can take them or leave them. We have media choices.

The second key difference is the layer of commentary immediately superimposed on whatever the Taoiseach says. The nature of that commentary inevitably leans heavily towards performance, rather than content: Did the Taoiseach deliver it well? Were there killer quotes in it? Were his gestures appropriate?

The third difference lies in the fact that the Government has chosen — for reasons as yet unstated — to request time from RTÉ in a way which permits, or rather, obliges the national broadcaster to provide time for opposition parties to respond.

All of which diffuses the impact — positive or negative — of last night’s broadcast somewhat, although great power will be retrospectively attributed to it because, as a species, we yearn for definitive moments and hark back to historic state-of-the-nation addresses. We hark back to the effrontery of Charles Haughey telling us to tighten our belts at a time (as we now know) when he was living in a loosened-belt fashion out in his Gandon mansion, on handouts from the rich and infamous.

Outside of Ireland, state-of-the-nation addresses have had a disproportionate power to crystallise how leaders and their administrations are seen by history. Herbert Hoover, for example, is remembered, as one historian puts it, as “a cold, heartless man who let millions of Americans suffer needlessly during the Great Depression of the 1930s because of his supposedly doctrinaire belief that the government should leave the economy alone”.

According to this view, it was only when Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Hoover as president that the federal government did anything to fight the Great Depression.

That’s not fact. Even at the time, commentators such as Walter Lippmann said it was not fact, pointing out that a lot of FDR’s much-vaunted New Deal was just a more elaborate version of measures already undertaken by Hoover.

In his study of the Depression, The Worst Hard Time, published four years ago by Mariner Books, Timothy Egan pointed out that by the end of 1930 “eight million people were out of work. The banking system was in chaos. The big financial institutions had once looked invincible, with the stone fronts, the copper lights, the marbled floors, run by the best people in town. Now bankers were seen as crooks, fraud artists who took people’s homes, their farms, and their savings.”

Hoover understood all that and took the requisite actions. The fact that he gets little credit for it is because he did not understand the power of communication. It was left to Roosevelt to decide to make what he called his “fireside chats” to the nation. Less than three months into his presidency, on May 7, 1933, he sat in front of a radio microphone and in casually intimate tones, told America: “Two months ago we were facing serious problems. The country was dying by inches. It was dying because trade and commerce had dwindled to dangerously low levels; prices for basic commodities were such as to destroy the assets of national institutions such as banks, savings banks, insurance companies, and others. These institutions... were foreclosing mortgages, calling loans, refusing credit... We were faced by a condition and not a theory.”

Because it was radio, people felt Roosevelt was talking to them as individuals. Because of the dearth of commentary, except in newspapers few could afford and many could not read anyway, his content was unmediated, uninterpreted. Because it was before focus groups, he came under no pressure to stick in positives to make everybody feel more hopeful. So he laid it all out, portraying the hopeless state of economic affairs he encountered when he began his presidency. Inevitably, the Taoiseach’s address last night will have had to follow the same pattern.

Roosevelt described the legislative moves his administration had made, (that was the boring bit, and, again, the Taoiseach will have had to go through much the same palaver) before moving into the present and future tense.

“Today we have reason to believe that things are a little better than they were two months ago. Industry has picked up, railroads are carrying more freight, farm prices are better, but I am not going to indulge in issuing proclamations of overenthusiastic assurance. We cannot bally-ho ourselves back to prosperity.

“I am going to be honest at all times with the people of the country... I know that the people of this country will understand this and will also understand the spirit in which we are undertaking this policy. I do not deny that we may make mistakes of procedure as we carry out the policy. I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average, not only for myself but for the team.”

He ended with a statement of faith in the American people and in their capacity to trust his government with their lives and futures.

The end result was a palpable lift in national morale. People who listened to him developed faith in their own future — a faith which, up to that point, they had grievously lacked. Herbert Hoover had known and had stated that the major issue facing America in the Depression was not the failure of the banks or of the economy, but the failure of confidence. But it was Roosevelt who meshed together man, medium and message in a way that reached the hearts and minds of America while generating a bipartisan worship of FDR and a myth which sustains to this day that he single-handedly wrested his nation out of the jaws of the Great Depression.

In theory, last night, Enda Kenny had all of the advantages of modern mass media. In reality, Roosevelt had the edge. He could use radio, which had no visual distractions, to talk directly to a population eager to listen. He could, uninterrupted and uninterpreted, change the mood of a nation.