How a leak can become a tsunami with Irish Water nowhere in sight

EVERY now and again, I get to meet third-level politics students. Either they want an interview for their thesis or they attend a masterclass.

A masterclass is academic for “great gas with poor coffee where nobody makes notes, even though in theory they should, and somebody tweets their approval of what they’re not concentrating on”.

At a masterclass at an unspecified time on a forgotten date in a location that’s nobody’s business, I met a group of politics students which broke down, as all politics student groups do, into three unevenly proportioned sub-groups. Sub-group A, the largest group, comprised earnest theorists who could quote every opinion poll ever taken and every policy document ever crafted. This bunch produce matrix-type graphics to show how policy is developed, which matrices have no relation to anything I’ve ever seen in actual politics, but — like a good religion — show you how it should be done if you were a better person and had more time.

At this particular masterclass, sub-group B, the second-most populous of the sections, was made up of the career-confused who, having landed in university with a plethora of CAO points, ended up doing weird combinations like politics, philosophy, and history of art. Sub-group B, like the poor, are always with us, and are permanently baffled. They end up doing masters and PhDs in an effort to work out what they should eventually do in real life, failing to note that by this further immersion in academia, they are putting off the evil day when real life starts.

Sub-group C is the smallest and most silent group. That’s because political DNA runs through them like letters through a stick of rock. Their grandad was a minister. Their uncle was a councillor for 79 years. Their mother was or is a senator. Their cousin is a back bencher. They have handed out leaflets, been run from the doors of households that hate the party they represent, craned their necks at count centres as votes vomit out of ballot boxes, grieved with the losers and lifted the winners shoulder-high. They are silent, first of all, because of things they’ve done that they could never admit to having done but aren’t one bit ashamed of having done. They are silent because they’re afraid if they snort and state the facts, their high-minded lecturer will disapprove. They are silent because they don’t want another member of their sub-group to gain the smallest smidgeon of applicable insight from them, lest said smidgeon be used to benefit The Other Lot at some future stage.

So there I was, answering questions and trying to convert down-and-dirty experience into something approaching wisdom, when the topic turned to leaking. Leaking as in political leaking, as opposed to what Irish Water is mopping up all around the country.

Just like teenagers who assume they invented sex and that — all procreative productivity notwithstanding — no earlier generation knew much about it, they seemed to think it started with Watergate and Deep Throat, having, as part of their course, seen that movie.

I explained that it was going on long before Mr Felt, the ratty FBI guy who became known as Deep Throat, got into it, although he did it really well. What, they obediently asked, constituted “really well”?

First, I pointed out, he picked, not the top paper, but the nearly top paper. Number 2 always tries harder. Secondly, he picked the right age and stage of recipients. Woodward and Bernstein were nobody in particular. Achievers, they weren’t. In fact, one of them was hanging on to his job by his fingertips. It’s a big mistake to leak to a hack at the top of their career, when they have become risk-averse.

In addition, one of the two lads, Bernstein, came from a family of outsiders, and not just because of their religion. His parents were the kind of people who combined anti-establishment attitudes with an inbuilt gravitation to noble losing causes.

Having picked his customers, Deep Throat sucked them into a conspiracy of darkness and obscure locations, so that, every time they met him, they were in a mood of heightened anticipation and awe.

Most leakers are so convinced of the value of the material they are about to share that they think not at all about the surrounding theatrics, and even less about whether the leak is a pop-up or a series. Deep Throat not only understood the covert, but also decided that a series, rather than a once-off, was the way to go. He met the lads over a period of months. Instead of arriving with a briefcase of data, like the Pentagon Papers leak, he arrived with nothing but the oblique. Maybe, he hinted. Perhaps, he suggested. Indeed, he half-confirmed. What about? he queried.

The end result was a running revelation which brought down a president, made two reporters into international figures and turned their editor and the owner of their paper, The Washington Post, into global heroes.

But, said a member of sub-group A, as I warmed to this topic, leaks in Ireland don’t happen like that, do they?

Well, I said, in the pre-internet days, one leaker used to have a cup of coffee in Bewleys and stuff his rolled-up newspaper in the turf basket beside the open fire, documents secreted inside, for the newspaperwoman to whom he was leaking. She would then have her cup of coffee in the same bentwood chair at the same table and when she was going, stuff the rolled newspaper into her tote bag. It isn’t just the difficulty of transferring data electronically without transferring details of the leaker along with it that has made leaking more difficult and less fun these days, I pointed out. It’s that whistle-blower and other legislation means that leaking data tends now to be a last, rather than a first, resort.

One of sub-group A climbed onto the high moral ground over me describing leaks as fun. She became covered in invisible tut-tuts. Why would anybody leak? she demanded. Sub-group C looked at her and then at each other as if she had asked why anybody would drink alcohol: Ah, here.

I had to tell her that politicians leak to punish, to express righteousness, to effect change, to get revenge, and — most often — for the sheer adrenalin rush of being perceived to be in the know. I don’t think she’s got over it.

When a leaking tsunami happens, even journalists who are reasonably sceptical about the topic get sucked under and suddenly, every politician, even the most obscure, starts getting calls from hacks to find out what they know.

I give you the current tsunami, where leakers can tell you precisely how Labour feel about Fine Gael and how named ministers feel about an early election.

It’s all “duirt bean liom go nduirt bean lei,” but it has created a tsunami that just might change the date of the election. Because a series of mutually unrelated accidents, most of the time, is what makes history. As sub-group C knows from birth.