The real problem is not that Cowen can't communicate – but that communication has long disappeared from official discourse, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
THE FUNERAL elegy for Fianna Fáil has already been written, by TS Eliot: “We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!/ Our dried voices, when/ We whisper together/ Are quiet and meaningless/ As wind in dry grass/ Or rats’ feet over broken glass/ In our dry cellar.”
Here is the sound of hollow men whispering meaninglessly: a Fianna Fáil politician writing in the Sunday Independentabout the Twitter rage that followed Brian Cowen's now infamous Morning Irelandinterview last week. He uses words and phrases from which all meaning has been drained. He bemoans "ill-judged and flippant remarks". He asks: "Why is it now unfashionable for some in the political arena to take time to think and consider before speaking?"
He warns that “public representatives need to consider their words carefully”. And he finishes with a blast at the “coarsening of debate”.
Who is this last-ditch defender of high-toned political discourse, carefully considered remarks and subtle debate? Willie “I suppose I am going a bit too far when I say this but I’d like to ask Mr Quinlivan, is the brothel still closed?” O’Dea.
We have gone far beyond the point of hypocrisy. Irony is barely a receding speck on the horizon. This is not a case of language being used in the usual political way – to distort or distract, to evade or mislead. The language is simply dead. It signifies nothing. No one believes it and no one is expected to believe it.
Even in the bubble of self-importance he inhabits, Willie O’Dea must know that he is a notorious slanderer whose calls for civility in political discourse are as meaningful as a vampire’s vegetarianism. There is no real pretence at persuading anyone of anything. There is just empty noise.
Willie O’Dea himself is, of course, an utter irrelevance, but he does speak for the hollow men of Fianna Fáil. He reminds us of the real problem. It is not that Brian Cowen cannot communicate. It is that communication itself has long disappeared from official discourse. Communication, of its nature, is a two-way process. It involves both speaking and listening. It seeks a response.
For two years now, official speech has been a one-way process. The Government decided that it would do things of immense consequence, knowing there was very little public support for those actions. Never in the history of the State has a government adopted policies of such significance in the absence of any kind of public consensus in their favour.
Once you go down that road, real communication ceases. The Government can talk, but it cannot listen. Anything it would be likely to hear – public opinion, objective evidence, expert analysis – would tend to undermine its chosen certainties. So the talk has to be one-way. It has to be aimed, not at engaging in debate, but at getting across the idea that there is nothing to be debated. There are no choices, no alternatives, no legitimate differences. The purpose of all official speech is not to communicate, but to kill communication.
This is why the question hovering over all the fuss around Brian Cowen’s infamous interview is not “was he hung-over” It is Dorothy Parker’s response to the news that president Calvin Coolidge had died: “How could they tell?”
If you read the transcript without listening to the voice, Cowen’s interview on Morning Ireland is almost indistinguishable from the one he gave a few days earlier to RTÉ radio’s This Week programme. And that in turn is the same as almost every interview he has given in the last two years.
This is not because Cowen can’t communicate. In private, or on semi-formal occasions, he is articulate and engaging. It is because, as Taoiseach, he must speak a language as dead as Manx or Crimean Gothic. When words are used, not to stimulate discussion, but to deny the possibility of discussion, they die. They wither into verbiage. They become spin that has stopped spinning, propaganda that no one expects to fool anyone. And the first official language of the State is no longer Irish or English, it is this system of empty sounds, spoken into a void.
Cowen’s real failure is that he cannot disguise his contempt for this language, even as it is spewing from his own mouth. There is actually something admirable in the way he has refused to animate it with his own personality. He has withheld himself from the verbiage. He speaks in the dead voice of a captured soldier making a videoed “confession” for enemy propagandists. He does not pretend he really believes it, and nor does he pretend he expects us to believe it. There is a certain dignity in his implicit acknowledgment that his words have no meaning.
They’ll replace him, of course, with someone who is better at pretending to believe the words mean something – someone less embarrassed by this parody of communication. But the language will still be dead, and the men who speak it will still be hollow.