A clever Sinn Féin person came up with the idea of referring the Brian Stanley issue to An Garda Síochána. A clever person who wasn’t nearly clever enough.
The cleverness lies in the chilling effect of anything being hospital-passed to the policing system. It buys time, like a Dealz version of sub judice.
The more fearful within the fourth estate would figure nobody can say anything at the moment until the guards have decided whether to refer stuff onto the DPP, and that could take months. Enough months to close the topic down on mainstream media, allowing Sinn Féin to get on with its recovery task.
But it wasn’t nearly clever enough. It immediately led the forensic/chronology-minded to go: “Hang on a second. If it was that serious, why wasn’t it referred to the forces of the law three months ago?”
It specifically led RTÉ’s magnificent Mary Wilson to ask why the complainant against Brian Stanley hadn’t taken their issue to the guards themselves, creating bafflement on how the Sinn Féin leadership could take it upon themselves to forward a complaint from within their ranks to the gardaí.
Inevitably, this leads to further puzzlement about the level of permission given by this person who had chosen not to involve the gardaí themselves.
No matter which way you look at it, this one drops the inevitable cliché on Mary Lou’s early morning Monday appearances; that the interviews raised more questions than they answered.
As a communications case study, this entire episode is a doozy.
The fact that it was communications officers from within the party who gave references to a child sex offender (also formerly in communications within Sinn Féin) cast a hell of a cloud over the earlier view of the Sinn Féin comms operation being second to none among political parties. The lack of communications judgment — even setting aside moral judgement — implicit in those references, is astonishing.
Mary Lou’s communications have also been rare and tonally off for the last half year at least, excused — within media — by reference to her own illness and that of her husband.
For the first major outing in the new Oireachtas term, someone decided that Ireland AM on Virgin Media would be a good choice, and so it was.
The platform wasn’t the issue. The content very decidedly was the issue. Who, within Sinn Féin, thought that Mary Lou discussing her husband’s cancer using the terms she did (“his bowels had burst”), would improve the party’s slipping fortunes or make people feel more warmly about its leader?
Not since the late President Hillary announced — out of the blue, unasked — that he didn’t have a mistress, has any political communication been so gratuitously barking.
Remember, when the Sinn Féin leader talked of what happened to her husband, this wasn’t a revelation dragged out of Mary Lou. This was something offered for free.
So, maybe someone thought, when the Brian Stanley controversy erupted, that lashing it over to the guards would be a great way of silencing one of the current stinker Sinn Féin issues, with beneficial implications for the leader in almost all circumstances: she could shrug off questions about dipping popularity by vague attribution to issues about which she couldn’t properly talk. Cool and groovy.
That faded during Mary Lou’s Morning Ireland interview on Monday. Not quickly, because Wilson, a former legal affairs correspondent for the station, knows the difference between performative argument and clever interrogation.
The first of these is an unwillingness to shut up when she’s made her point. She doesn’t seem to realise that only the anxious feel the need to fill every second of airtime and that “talking the clock down” doesn’t work when a senior RTÉ producer has the discretion to go “to hell with later items, keep at it, Mary.”
The Sinn Féin leader has been so long in condemning speech mode that she can’t let go of it. Which is just about okay when you’re in the right. Questionable when you’re in a more equivocal position.
The second habit nobody has helped Mary Lou to break is referring to her own discourse. “As I have told you repeatedly,” is one of her favourites. A variant of this is where she sets out to solve a problem with which nobody had presented her. “I make no apology,” she announces, apropos an action that no one would suggest merits an apology.
The combination of all of these makes her sound pompously older than her years and achieves nothing positive in her interviews. They are self-comforts only, and tend to expose her when she makes a mistake like the long hesitation when asked if she made a pivotal decision, followed by the ambiguous “I was party to it, yes.” Party to it? Who’s the leader, here?
One of the worst things that happened to Sinn Féin, in communication terms, in the past year, was the departure of Leo Varadkar from the leadership of Fine Gael. Leo never saw a Sinn Féin jibe he didn’t feel the urge to make.
Leaders Questions brought out the old undergraduate debater in him, thus creating eminently quotable quotes about Sinn Féin, which duly ran during the following 24 hours on mainstream and social media. Gotcha, you Shinners. Except that what Leo was actually doing was doing the Shinners’ publicity for them.
Of course, it’s not just about communication.
Mary Lou’s failure to move her diligent brainbox housing spokesman to some other portfolio allowed Eoin Ó Broin to become part of the establishment, weirdly becoming part of the housing problem rather than its solution. Cosying up to capitalist institutions amused the powers that be in said institutions while making the party look naïve.
Sinn Féin’s current communication and operational problems will of course feed into the debate about the timing of the general election.
One side will be hammering the idea that the time to go is now, when Sinn Féin is spavined and spancelled by self-created problems. Don’t let them recover or re-group, goes this argument.
The other side — the ones looking for the Government to run until spring — shrug off the very notion that Sinn Féin can seriously recover its cool or re-group. Not in five weeks. Not in five months. Not in five years.
