In 1974, Frank Dunlop was appointed press officer for the Fianna Fáil party. He suggested it was a badly needed development, as at that point, Fianna Fáil was “useless at communicating with the media”.
At the same time, Muiris MacConghail, the new press secretary for the Fine Gael/Labour coalition that had defeated Fianna Fáil in the 1973 general election, was briefing journalists twice weekly after Cabinet meetings, and Dunlop suggested “FF found it difficult to come to terms with his organised professional communications strategy.”
One Fianna Fáil party veteran was puzzled at the new dispensation. “What is it exactly you’ll be doing for us?” he asked Dunlop.
Politicians were soon to learn what the new communications landscape meant, and that included improving their ability to handle interviews. In her new book, I’m Glad You Asked Me That, Terry Prone illuminates the early years of the media training of politicians in Carr Communications established by Bunny Carr, and where Carr, Prone and Tom Savage worked.
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Before Prone schooled Charles Haughey, he was “like a dead man talking to camera in the RTÉ studio”.
A few other things were apparent in the early days; politicians seemed incapable of saying “I don’t know” and too many tended to talk “like a party manifesto made human, or nearly human”.
The media training eventually saw Carr Communications involved at different stages with all the main political parties, and Prone traces the wider evolution of media tutelage to the point where today, she believes too much training amounts to “whatever you do, don’t be yourself”.
In 1979, Fianna Fáil minister Des O’Malley made an unusual admission: “I accept that I have not concerned myself unduly with the public relations side of being a politician and that given my personality I have often gratuitously insulted and been rude to people. I regret the latter for it is obviously indefensible to be needlessly hurtful. But I do find the self-projection of politics somewhat repellent, and I find myself quite incapable of dealing with it”.
Such personality traits, however, were not a great disadvantage. Six years later, O’Malley, having left Fianna Fáil, established the Progressive Democrats.
It was a tall order at that stage to take such an initiative given the dominance of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, but O’Malley and his new party, despite its relatively small number of TDs, were instrumental in bringing an end to single party government in Ireland and setting the tone for the policies and ideology of the 1990s and 2000s.
O’Malley’s prickliness was part of his appeal and in its early years, his party members knew he was their greatest asset. “Dessie can do it!” was their slogan. His stubbornness did not mean the Progressive Democrats were averse to media management; far from it, they brought more US election techniques to Ireland, in particular the decision to segment the electorate and target small groups with appropriate messages.
O’Malley used the services of Carr Communications when preparing for an ardfheis speech. But he also remained consistently irascible and that was part of what made him seem different.
The 1990s brought focus group research and a heavier reliance on advertising agencies, researchers, and spindoctors, as was the case elsewhere. Alastair Campbell, for example, as director of communications for Tony Blair, was central to the New Labour project in the UK.
Ironically, as a former journalist himself he had a remarkably aggressive relationship with the media; another British journalist, Charles Moore, called Campbell “the most pointlessly combative person in human history”.
But for all the sourness generated as coverage of politics became saturated and constant, there were mutual dependencies.
Journalism academic Bob Franklin has observed that “the packaging of politics rests on a particular understanding of the relationship between journalists and their political sources, which is characterised by collaboration more than conflict. This is not to deny that on occasion the relationship may become extremely combative and conflictual. But the typical pattern is a relationship in which the two parties are judged to work in complementary, if not collusive, ways.”
[ Ivan Yates ‘deliberately’ didn’t tell Matt Cooper about Jim Gavin trainingOpens in new window ]
There are other crossovers. Numerous political journalists have gone to work for politicians and some of those engaged in media training of politicians broadcast about politics.
It is a small pool, and the recent Ivan Yates controversy has led to concerns being expressed about conflicts of interest.
But another question to consider is whether the preoccupation with media training achieves much. Authenticity matters more, and charisma cannot be contrived.
Ironically, given his current travails and his advice to Jim Gavin during the presidential campaign, it was Yates who, when interviewed on RTÉ after Catherine Connolly’s victory in the presidential election, noted that key to her success was her perceived authenticity.
Connolly never looked like someone who was being over trained in media techniques. There is a lesson in that.
