It is time, perhaps - especially in the light of the usual round of recriminations between media and politicians which accompanied the general election - to remind the public that spin-doctoring was not invented or discovered only recently, and that it is, at least as far as Irish politicians are concerned, almost as old as the profession itself. John Horgan writes
Start, if you like, with Daniel O'Connell, whose Repeal Association once seriously considered setting aside the sum of £15,000 (an enormous amount of money in the 19 century) to bribe journalists. His opponents were doing it already, of course. O'Connell himself was highly sensitive to press comment, and managed to cow most journalists into believing that to criticise him was to sabotage the nationalist cause. He failed only once or twice: Stanton of the Morning Register stood up to him; and so did Thomas Davis, who rejected his attempt to shoehorn his son on to the board of The Nation.
Twilight activity
Throughout the late 19h and early 20 centuries, journalism and nationalist politics were so entwined that it was often impossible to make out where one ended and the other began. Journalist/politicians could be - and sometimes were - prosecuted for making speeches which they subsequently wrote up for their own newspapers. In effect, given the difficulties that Catholics had in climbing into the professional classes in those turbulent times, journalism was a sort of twilight, para-professional activity that fitted in well with their other agendas.
De Valera was a past master of the art, even before founding the Irish Press. After the end of the Civil War, he took the media war against the Free State government to the United States, where he lambasted Cosgrave on a New York radio station much listened to by Irish-Americans.
An angry Cosgrave had to negotiate, and record, a rebuttal for the same station, and was even angrier when some of it was cut before transmission.
The same Free State government itself was no slouch at spin-doctoring during the Civil War: one of the cruder instruments it employed was to withdraw state advertising from provincial papers that were sympathetic to the anti-Treaty forces. The surviving papers from that government suggest that, had Michael Collins survived, he would have been a spin-doctor par excellence.
Sean MacBride was obsessed with the media. He had once worked as a journalist in London (for a Tory newspaper, under an assumed name) and, once in power in 1948, set eagerly to work on his favourite project, the Irish News Agency, which was to spread anti-partition propaganda to the four corners of the earth. The INA failed lamentably in this task, not least because journalism and propaganda remained obstinately incompatible, but by the time of its collapse it had employed, and often trained, a band of Irish journalists who were the ornaments of their profession for many years afterwards.
Charmed life
Jack Lynch was no slouch, either. Apart from the fiasco of the Markpress saga, when he employed a peculiar Swiss-based PR outfit to publicise Ireland's case abroad in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of violence in the North in 1969, he led a charmed life with the media. This was not due entirely to his own easy-going personality, although that helped: his round-the-world trip as Taoiseach to the US and Japan, on which he was accompanied by a small group of senior Irish journalists, helped to create a bond which was difficult to break.
The forerunner of modern spin-doctoring, however, was probably Lynch's immediate predecessor, Sean Lemass. He learned how to manage the press during the second World War when, as Minister for Supplies, he operated an open-door policy on government information for reporters which had them eating out of his hand even as the rations of tea dwindled for the populace. He could use reporters to fly kites which would be subsequently disowned if the idea proved unpopular. Michael McInerney, then political correspondent of this newspaper, was once used by him to float the idea that Ireland might have an honours system. In the face of public and political outrage, "Mac" had to haul the kite down again, without being free to tell his readers who had given it to him to fly in the first place.
My favourite Lemass quote about media and image comes from a speech he gave to visiting members of the (British) Institute of Public Relations on April 29th, 1966, less than a year after winning his last election and shortly before his own retirement as Taoiseach. It was one of the few formal speeches he made in which he allowed his celebrated deadpan sense of humour out for a walk.
Selecting photograph
"At the beginning of a recent general election here," he told his listeners, "the public relations experts who were assisting my political party had to select a photograph of myself for reproduction on posters and so forth.
"I wished to have one chosen which might, with some touching up, depict me as a dynamic, keen-eyed and determined sort of person, and project a general image of competence and efficiency. I found that our public relations people would have none of this and were determined to present a photograph which was supposed to depict me as benign and good-humoured - almost placid, in fact.
"It was the idea of these experts that the public, in selecting their political representatives, prefer those who look most human to those who look most competent. I suppose this does credit to the good sense of the ordinary voter. In most walks of life, and not only in politics, humanity is valued more highly than efficiency."
Methinks Bertie has read the script.