Terry Prone: Every time 'populist' is used it creates a pointless distraction

 Manifestos also allow broadcasters to ask opposition party spokespeople what their various provisions would actually cost to deliver, which permits the opposition party to say they’ve had their figures reality-tested by the Department of Finance or DEPR and everything is tickety-poo.

Political parties have to produce manifestos, despite those manifestos never being worth the paper they’re printed on. Broadcasters and print journalists have to read them and ask questions about them. But they’re even more boring than they used to be. At least in the nineteen seventies, Fianna Fáil might come up with a manifesto with surprises in it, like doing away with rates. But today, no matter which party produces the manifesto, it’s fifty shades of grey and we don’t mean sexy. Nobody goes for surprises. Political parties dread surprises, and many of them are concentrating, right now, on the possibility that the referendums on changing the wording of the Constitution might surprise them by going down the tubes. The belief is that this would damage Government parties going into the general election. Nonsense. If the referendums are lost, the losses will have damn all repercussions for Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil or the Greens.

Why? Well, for starters, virtually everybody in the Oireachtas is for “yes” votes. It’s not like any of the government parties was fearlessly facing down a Dáil-wide consensus that the wording should be left as it is. They cannot, therefore, be “beaten.” They can lose, but not be beaten. Now, the possibility of losing is pointed to by the discourse. Or lack of same. Remember, coming up to the referendum on changing the law on pregnancy terminations? Everybody was talking about it. Long before those evocative photographs of young women pulling their wheelie bags as they headed home to vote, it was being talked about by ordinary people. Some of those ordinary people sharing their bitter personal experiences.

The same was true of the equal marriage referendum: brothers and sisters describing their siblings’ situations and squaring up on their behalf. Parents making firm statements to their own age group. Organisations jostling each other to be heard, to be registered. 

It wasn’t just that the campaign was well organised. The campaign carried the reward of striking down the worst of the past while creating a golden future, not just for gay people, but for Ireland. People were talking. It wasn’t an argument. It was an outpouring.

Nothing comparable has thus far happened in relation to the proposed constitutional changes. Dutiful coverage in mainstream media does not add up to an outpouring, nor does it give any sign of provoking an outpouring. My own age group are the ones who’ve had to live longest with the statement about women’s contribution in the home, and their silence is interesting. Hazarding a guess, I’d assume that the ones who fought, in the seventies and eighties, for equality, contraception, and abortion, always regarded that Constitutional statement as a ridiculous but irrelevant throwback to de Valera’s time. Like a Child of Prague statue with a pencil to keep the head on: God be with the days.

That age group does, however, have experience of the nation forcing new wording into the Constitution to reflect the “values” of the time, and that experience is not good. Adding more words now holds the promise of instant gratification and long-term problems. Especially since people outside of vested interests are not a-buzz with the possibility of adding a phrase or two about carers. 

Eavesdropping with intent, in the last few weeks, I have heard no chatter in shops or public transport about the referendum. And the fact is that when people don’t talk about an issue, they tend not to vote about it.

 Plus, people never vote when they’re told they should vote or how they should vote. If the “shoulds” had any efficacy, Hillary Clinton would have become President. Never was any candidate so thickly encrusted in shoulds. Shoulds are abstract concepts, all of them worthy, that bore the arse off us and that we never vote for.

You want to know what Ireland’s big “should” over the past fifteen years has been? “Corporate governance.” You want to know why, this very week, we all lost interest in Toy Show the Musical? Because every report used the deadliest two-word combination available: corporate governance. It doesn’t matter how blunt Grant Thornton is. It doesn’t matter in any scandal how hot the controversy is. The minute anybody starts talking about corporate governance, it’s all over. Eyes glaze at the phrase, mouths dry up and someone sends for Professor Niamh Brennan, who owns corporate governance like Professor Marie Cassidy used to own dead bodies.

Corporate governance is where good scandals go to die. Corporate governance is what people study when they’ve been eased out of their job and want to get a directorship. Corporate governance is worthy and worth referring to and means damn all to most people in the country, but it’s such an impressive phrase, it silences opposition. Everybody’s for good corporate governance, and anything that goes south is due to bad corporate governance. But despite its vaguely agreed centrality in Irish life, the unspoken, the secret truth is that no politician could get elected on a good corporate governance manifesto. Because we don’t vote for abstractions, any more than we vote for manifestos. Or economic stability. Or good governance. We vote for people. People who amuse us. People who make us feel good about ourselves. Shocking, isn’t it?

All of which pose huge challenges for Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and the Greens in this coming year. All three own all problems, because they’ve been in situ for so long. Sinn Féin own nothing and represent possible change. The problem is that some government spokespeople have fallen in love with a word which is up there with “corporate governance” as an attention-killer. That word is “Populist.” Many people hear it as “Popular” and don’t see how being popular is a bad thing. The floating voter doesn’t smack the back of their hand to their forehead and swear off voting for Mary Lou & Co.

Every time it’s used it creates its own pointless distraction. It’s a deadly switch-off.