AT FIRST I was puzzled by Ciaran Cannon's comment that the PDs needed to disband because, by staying in politics, they would have "only weakened the brand further", writes Frank McNally
He appeared to be hinting that the "brand" would continue after the party's demise. Was he planning a PD memorabilia store, I wondered, selling commemorative T-shirts, badges, and toy watchdogs? Or maybe a line of cleaning products (mould-breaking a speciality)? Perhaps the party was just preparing a "Greatest Hits" collection for the Christmas market, sales of which might be undermined by any new and sub-standard studio work.
But no. On closer reading, it appears the PD leader's comments were merely intended as a poignant variation on the old saying that it's better to get out at the top. Or in this case, the top being long out of reach, at least a little above the bottom.
Behind the clinical marketing-speak, Cannon can protect his party's brand now only in the sense of a cornerman whose boxer has a broken nose, a split lip, two cut eyes, and a 10-point deficit on the scorecards, and who thinks it might be time to throw in the towel and save the brand from further punishment.
Everyone and everything is a brand these days - a remarkable turn of events given the origins of the term. In Tudor times, if you were the subject of branding, you could only dream of "weakening" it, since it was something burned on to you with a red-hot iron, after the fashion of the Greek and Roman treatment of slaves.
Under a 1547 statute, vagabonds and gypsies had a "V" permanently seared on to their chests, while public brawlers were awarded an "F" (for "fray-maker"), and runaway servants an "S".
Branding's ascent towards respectability took in a brief period under William of Orange when, for thieves, the mark was burned on to the left cheek of their faces instead. After that, the marginally more civilised method of "cold-branding" was used until the punishment was finally abolished in 1829.
Even then, according to Brewers, the British army continued to brand reprobates - with tattoos below the left nipple - until 1879. Deserters were marked with a "D" while "incorrigibly bad characters" got a "BC". In the US, by then, branding was mainly associated with cattle. And this is where another word that has since infiltrated political life comes in: "maverick".
The man who gave it to the language was Samuel A. Maverick, a Texan rancher who became famous for not marking his cattle in the traditional way. Various motivations have been attributed to him, including bovinitarianism: ie, that he thought branding cruel. Against which it has also been argued that his stance was as profitable as it was enlightened, allowing him to claim any unbranded cattle he found as his own.
At any rate, calves without a brand were soon known as "mavericks" and, even before the rancher died in 1870, the word had also leaked into American English for people who did not conform to the rules.
By the 1880s, it was being used in US politics for those who did not follow any leadership. This at the same time as, on the other side of the Atlantic, a certain Irish politician was creating the first party in which every member spoke and voted as one. Nowadays it would be called branding, but the mechanism by which Parnell imposed discipline was named after a different form of torture - the whip.
In 1915, Kipling gave the M-word an Irish context in his short story, the Mutiny of the Mavericks: ". . . Her Majesty's Royal Loyal Musketeers, commonly known as the 'Mavericks', because they were masterless and unbranded cattle - sons of small farmers in County Clare, shoeless vagabonds of Kerry, herders of Ballyvegan, much wanted 'moonlighters' from the bare rainy headlands of the south coast, officered by O'Mores, Bradys, Hills, Kilreas, and the like."
You would think that being called a maverick, then or now, would be a badge of honour. And in some places, I suppose, it is.
A self-proclaimed maverick - indeed the "maverick's maverick", according to his supporters - is currently running for the White House. Even so, the term still carries some of the stigma that Kipling attached to it, implying not just independence, but unpredictability and a volatile temperament, and other qualities you wouldn't always want beside you in the trenches.
It is a triumph for the marketeers and corporate propagandists that being a maverick should mark you as unreliable (except in the case of Golden Maverick, which is the milk replacer can really trust, apparently, especially to prevent scour), while branding has come to be considered essential, for individuals and companies alike. But there you are.
I seem to have veered off the subject of the PDs. Except to say that when the party winds up, which now seems inevitable, its two remaining TDs, Mary Harney and Noel Grealish, will become, by definition, mavericks. And the worry must be that, as they wander around the country without a brand, there is a very strong risk of them falling into the hands of cowboys.