If any foreign power ever decides to invade Ireland, it will not need aircraft carriers, tanks or bombers. Its shock troops should be photographers, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Its weapons should be Canons, not cannons. All they need to do is to march in to the Department of Defence and tell the Minister, Willie O'Dea, to order the Army to assemble on the Cliffs of Moher. Then they can tell him to make the soldiers jump into the Atlantic. So long as they pretend to take pictures while all of this is happening, he will suspect nothing.
As Willie O'Dea told RTÉ last week when he was being criticised for posing with a gun pointed at the camera, the lens acts as a mind-control device: "You're there, there's a whole lot of photographers, you're looking at various pieces of equipment . . . they say 'hold it up, look here, hold it up so I can see it'."
Willie O'Dea's explanation for his faux pas (they made me do it) was greeted with derision but it was in fact entirely honest. It was a genuine reflection of the dire state of political life, in which our rulers and would-be rulers have become, in Hugh MacDiarmid's phrase, "surf-riders merely on the day's sensations". As they lose their passion for ideals and values, politicians become obsessed, not with issues of substance, but with their own reflections in a distorting media mirror.
A vicious circle is set in train. The media devote less space to serious politics because they think their audiences don't take politicians seriously. Politicians respond with ever more desperate attempts to grab attention by waving trivialities in front of journalists. The triviality increases the public contempt for politicians. And, as the circle turns, everyone wonders why public engagement with politics is declining.
The worst aspect of all of this is that even politicians of real substance diminish themselves in this way. Two of Fine Gael's more interesting figures, men who have ambitions to be part of an alternative government, have recently provided sorry examples.
Jim Higgins proved himself to be a man of some courage when he took on the persecution of the McBrearty family by gardaí in Donegal at a time when few others in politics or the media were interested. It was a brave thing to do, and it helped to move Fine Gael away from a simplistic law-and-order brand image. Jim Higgins lost his Dáil seat. What's he at now? Spotting what he thought was a populist law-and-order issue - the controversy over the Pádraig Nally case - and urging people to attend a march to "pressurise the Travelling community". As it happened, the wheels fell off the bandwagon and the people whose anger he hoped to tap proved to be rather more thoughtful and responsible than he had, perhaps, expected.
Michael Noonan has been doing a superb job of rehabilitating himself after the traumas of the Brigid McCole case and leading his party into a general election massacre. As chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), he has reinvented himself as a people's champion, almost above party politics, and used his sharp mind and tongue to real effect. But he became addicted to the regular infusion of good press and when there was no PAC business to keep him in the headlines, he reached for a clapped-out pseudo-story that had already run its course in the British tabloids: banning the wearing of hoodies in shopping centres.
The whole hoodie hoo-ha is a classic example of junk news. The extensive use of the word "ban" suggested some kind of change in the law - which is, after all, what politicians do. But if you looked more carefully what you actually found was that Michael Noonan wasn't proposing to introduce a ban at all. He knows that the notion is absurd. So what he was actually suggesting was simply that shops already have the right to refuse anyone they don't like the look of entry to their premises. There was, in other words, no story whatsoever.
Michael Noonan's views on whether shops should admit people wearing hoodies, or grass skirts, or platform boots have precisely the same public substance as his thoughts on whether Manchester United should play four-four-two or stick with five in the middle. But they filled column inches and airwaves for a few days, and he will no doubt have concluded that his profile has been enhanced.
But has it really? An ICM survey in Britain last May tested public views on the banning of hoodies from shopping centres. The top line was that 44 per cent of people thought it was a good idea - apparently justifying the tabloid fuss. But look deeper and the figures revealed that just 4 per cent said they had often felt threatened by youths in shopping centres, compared to 84 per cent who never felt threatened.
Of six measures that might make them feel safer, the least popular was banning hoodies - chosen by just 3 per cent. People, it seems, will nod in agreement if a proposition that has had enough media coverage is put to them. But they also know that those propositions are hollow, cheap and irrelevant, just like the politicians who latch on to them.