The Big Debate was noisy, chaotic, statistic-stuffed and a regression to a political broadcasting we thought had died 25 years ago, but was grist to the media mill and was hashed and rehashed for hours afterwards, writes Terry Prone
Media and public are at one on the terminal boredom of this election campaign, but boredom is just the presenting symptom. The cause is a radical shift in the public perception of politics and of elections.
What this election shows is that the shadow of politics is now bigger than politics itself.
Witness the Big Debate. Noisy, chaotic, statistic-stuffed, it was a regression to a political broadcasting we thought had died roughly 25 years ago. Any viewer sitting down to watch it in the expectation of harvesting fresh food for thought could forget it.
With the exception of one reasonably new nugget to the effect that Luxembourg doesn't have a national debt, what was on the menu was reheated claim and counter-claim, diced and sliced and repeated ad nauseam. Even the injection of passion could not make those claims tasty; 2,000 gardaí, as a soundbite, doesn't improve if you microwave it and add a few drops of Tabasco.
In the real world when something boring happens, we move on to something else. However, in the media-saturated world, when something boring happens, it's still grist to the mill.
So, for at least 24 hours after the debate, journalists, professors of linguistics, opinion poll experts, politicians and spin-doctors ground away on the airwaves and in print. They ground the Big Debate exceedingly small and had a high old time about it. The reflection became more interesting than the reality.
Never mind the politics, parse the process.
It was, in microcosm, the summation of the campaign and of where the body politic has reached: the point at which party politics has ceased to be the lone fulcrum on which we expect to effect changes in society.
The political process is just one of many available. The frequent regretful references to the diminishing numbers of people voting in elections tend to assume a disengagement and disempowerment on the part of the public. Disengagement, albeit partial, it may be. Disempowerment it isn't.
The general public has moved way ahead of both politicians and media on this one, although media and politicians have been instrumental if not intentional in achieving this state of affairs.
The electorate knows precisely the limitations on what its vote can achieve and it also knows it has access to a wide new range of pivotal options, including the courts and the media.
The modern equivalent of the cloth-capped crowds listening with rapt attention to political speeches in the old black-and-white photographs now live in what Francis Fukuyama calls a "post-political" and Fergus Finlay calls a "post-soundbite" world, in which the celebrity of the speaker has more pulling-power than the themes he or she articulates.
ONE OF the contributing factors has been the virtual completion of the liberal bell-curve. Personal freedoms have been validated by legislative changes on homosexuality, divorce and abortion. Thought-control by the Catholic Church is now a rare memory. "To die for" is now a description of sexy high-heeled shoes rather than a definition of issues engaging the public mind.
Another key contributor is the proliferation of interesting alternatives to political discourse. In the past, politicians upstaged each other. Just as a generation of actors dreaded being on stage with the late Cyril Cusack, who, if he had no lines to say, was quite likely to haul out a snowy white handkerchief, all the better to distract the audience with, so the competition for the contemporaneous generation of politicians usually took the shape of another politician.
Recently, however, Dáil Éireann invented its own equivalent of Cyril Cusack, and did it more than once. Tribunals during the life of this Government have generated more coverage, more commentary, more comedy and more emotional involvement than much of what has gone on in mainstream politics.
Realism about national power has also played a part.
Public reaction to the Nice Treaty was complex - and simple.
At its simplest, it was an indicator that Irish people already believe much power has shifted to the European Union. They don't believe European elections lead to any very direct expression of their views, but they do believe local politicians to be less powerful than in the past.
The lost generation, in all of this, is made up of 40-somethings and 50- somethings who not only vote but who look to find a reason to believe in more than "bursar politics", where the priority is on the husbandry and distribution of unimaginably large funds. The problem throughout the campaign wasn't just the lack of a cause with the emotional imprinting capacity of the old Just Society theme, but also lay in the failure of outrage as a rhetorical tool.
It was obvious, from day one if not earlier, that the public liked Bertie Ahern and were not to be moved from liking him by accusations of sleaze. Yet some Opposition strategists never accepted that reality. Instead, they seemed convinced that if they barked louder up this wrong tree, it would become the right tree.
Indeed, some self-evidently believed that barking progressively louder up the wrong tree was intrinsically principled and virtuous. They were like the concerned parent of a nicotine-addicted 20-year-old who predicts long-term health disaster to their offspring, achieves no change in behaviour, yet feels better about themselves as a result.
It's a tough lesson in parenting and in politics alike: if the end doesn't justify the means when the means work, it sure as hell doesn't justify the means when the means don't work.
Terry Prone is an author, media analyst and director of Carr Communications