Terry Prone: Nphet members will have to learn to deal with the fickleness of fame

It can be difficult to shake off, especially if you become famous in a way that defines a period of public life

Faces of the pandemic: Dr Tony Holohan, Professor Philip Nolan, and Dr Ronan Glynn. Picture: Paddy Cummins /Collins Dublin

THE Government is reported to be winding down the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet), although the precise nature of that wind down is, as yet, unclear.

What is clear, however, is that some members of Government would love if some of the more famous and vocal members of Nphet would just go away, stop being famous, stop appearing on media, stop sending letters influencing, if not dictating, Government policy — essentially, just go gently into the dark night of silence. Exercising their right to be forgotten would be good, too.

It’s doubtful that is going to happen, since the coronavirus has the look of just being the start of a series of pandemics likely to make the world an unhappier and sicker place in the next few years. However, if it did happen, how would these guys, who went from unknown to household-name status, cope with fame deprivation?

Without naming names, it’s fair to assume that a few of them would be markedly grateful for the possibility of Nphet members ditching their celebrity and returning to their previous status. The only thing is that this never easily happens.

I can think of only two really famous people in this country who managed to successfully walk away from their fame. Only two — and even at that, media references to each do still surface intermittently.

Fame is difficult to shake off, especially if you become famous in a way that defines a period of public life. In five or 10 years from now, many people in this country who hear a reference to the pandemic will find their brains proffering pictures of Tony Holohan, Ronan Glynn, or Philip Nolan. Or they will hear in their heads the boundlessly optimistic tones of Professor Luke O’Neill — and that’s assuming Nphet gets put to bed and all its high flyers push their personal mute buttons, which isn’t likely.

Fame changes how others see you, how they behave to you, and, as a consequence, how you see yourself.

To put it bluntly, it is addictive. Hugely addictive. The addiction goes back to the lad in Greek mythology drowning because he got so fascinated by his own reflection in a lake. It doesn’t require the instant feedback and reinforcement of social media ‘likes’.

In the 19th century, for example, his private secretary noted of Lloyd George: “Every day he is crazy about the letters — not what is in them, but ‘How many are there'?”

Lloyd George, in his time, and Princess Diana, in hers, were oddly alike in their attention addiction. According to Michael Levigne, who worked for her, each morning during breakfast Diana “devoured reports of her activities in the Daily Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and Daily Express”. Once these were digested, she moved on to the more serious papers, where she figured less. The volume of coverage informed her self-perception: “Not a bad day for me.”

Today, anyone who’s famous can, in a few dawn keystrokes, check if it’s a good or bad day for them. They know how they’re doing and can gauge their level of public approbation before they hit the shower or head out for their run. Even that run will provide more evidence of their current popularity or prominence.

While we have heard stories of threats to some of the public health doctors, what most of them have experienced on their outings is either the respectful nod that says ‘I know who you are but will leave you the hell alone’, or the generalised positivity driven by the need to almost physically consummate the fallacious sense of intimate acquaintance delivered by TV and social media.

'Half-life' prominence

Any of them who totally disappear from popular media after Nphet is stood down will experience the ‘half life’ prominence delivers: the sense of being watched, the positive comments, the reminder pictures in coverage of any post-pandemic public inquiry. Each will use that half-life differently.

Some people work their fame productively for years after whatever event or issue gave them national or international recognition. The classic example is the woman who became known as The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Margaret Tobin Brown was the daughter of Irish Catholic emigrants to the US. Poor herself, she married a poor man who struck it rich as a miner, so she was a millionaire when she climbed on to the Titanic. When it hit the iceberg, she first of all devoted herself to trying to get the timid into life boats. That was up until some nameless officer decided to take action and physically tossed her into one of those lifeboats. She then, taking an oar and rowing vigorously, tried to persuade the men in the lifeboat to go back to rescue some of the drowning.

Her post-Titanic fame allowed her to be highly effective as a feminist between the wars in New York, as a child protection advocate and as a trade unionist at a time when virtually no other women were powerful across all of these areas.

By the time she was played by Debbie Reynolds in a movie about the Titanic tragedy, her renown had faded and she had died alone in a Manhattan hotel room.

Political leaders frequently parlay their renown, first into memoirs, then into prestigious and well-paid posts heading up international organisations devoted to telling us — or world leaders — how to think, govern or manage their elections. Tony Blair did both.

No such precedent offers itself for public health experts made familiar to us by the coronavirus. Until the pandemic, the acronym CMO would have required an internet search, and personnel in bodies such as the National Immunisation Advisory Committee would have appeared so rarely and in such a narrow area of public communication as to have been no more than vaguely familiar to a discrete minority of the general public.

Now they, together with the Nphet folk, must think of media calls as just another part of their job. That may continue, but it’s unlikely. For many of the medics rendered transiently familiar by the events of the past two years, it’s time to adapt, with joy or sorrow, to a changed status.

On the positive side, they will no longer have the irritation to which, in another context, Lord Halifax referred when he said: 

In a war, everybody who was not running it thought that they could run it better than the people who were.

Those retiring from fame need to understand how comments from the public can become less warming over time.

Early on, someone asks if you are who they think you are, then says: “I’m a big fan.” That’s good.

A few years later, they say: “My mother is a big fan.” That’s middling. Due south of middling is: “My grandmother is a great fan.”

Sooner or later, the worst happens. That’s when you agree you are who they thought you were, and they say: “Oh my God, I thought you were dead.”