Now Ye're Talking - to a Political Correspondent

TodayFM: Gav

blapabrew22 wrote: »

Hi Gav, what do you think is most likely to happen first: a government led by Sinn Fein, or Meath bringing home Sam?

:eek: Meath bringing home Sam? Will we ever see those days again?! The last Meath team to do that are only eight years away from their jubilee appearance on All-Ireland final day...

In all seriousness, it depends on the outcome of the next election, but at this moment in time a SF-led government is far more likely. The sheer force of necessity could see FG and FF end up working together (in some format or another) in the next Dáil and if that's the case, Sinn Féin will immediately step up to the plate as the largest opposition party which gives them the perfect platform to challenge for the leadership in the election after that.

Agent Smith wrote: »

What type of horse is Matt Cooper?

Matt Cooper is secretly a Budweiser Clydesdale. Sssssh, don't tell anyone.

Kerrydude1981 wrote: »

Has Gerry Adams ever said this to you?

"I didn't interrupt you, so you shouldn't interrupt me"

Alas, no - I have yet to experience that journalistic baptism. (Generally if I'm interrupting someone I start with a perfunctory "Sorry to interrupt, but...")

5rtytry56 wrote: »

Has anyone who has retired from political life ever come to you and said "I really made a mess of that issue". Or do they all just rest on their laurels and receive their pensions?

Nobody's ever come up to me saying that but the simplest explanation for this is that I'm not in the job long enough - this is my first general election as a full-time political correspondent so I haven't been around for long enough to see a government turfed out and see what they'd be like afterwards.

Anecdotally some of the old Fianna Fáil crew are split between those camps - there are some who keep themselves to themselves, quietly acknowledge that their turn on the merry-go-round is over and who get on with their own lives. But there's a few others who are still sniffing around the edges, hoping they might get another chance in future - and who wouldn't be too quick to accept responsibility for any failings that happened on their watch. Bear in mind: someone who was in Fianna Fáil from 1997 to 2011 presided over nearly a decade of fairly spectacular economic figures before it all went to **** so suddenly in 2008. That collapse was a seismic event to the public as a whole, but in their political lives it was a two-year crisis after 12 years of boom. In their minds that probably mitigates some of the blame for just how devastating the crash was. I'm not saying they're right to think so - but it's probably a by-product of them being paid so well that they would never feel the personal pinch of the austerity they enforced.

mahoganygas

Great responses Gav!
Very interesting stuff.

barry181091

This is so silly but I have always wanted to know; Are politicians from different partiess (Specifically TD's.) friends behind it all? Like the leaders debate last night, I could all imagine them joking after it. In a sort of, "Good match!" kind of way.

I get the feeling that a lot of the promises new far-left parties are offering may sound possible *technically* but are not possible in reality. I feel the experience of actually being in power/politics for so long is that you know how the whole system ACTUALLY works and what is ACTUALLY realistically possible. My question is this; Should the experience that the bigger parties have add to their ability to run the country?

Kerrydude1981

Weirdest experience you have had as Political Correspondent?

robdonn

Kerrydude1981 wrote: »

Weirdest experience you have had as Political Correspondent?

Please say a 7-way with the party leaders...

panda100

TodayFM: Gav wrote:

As regards advice... my own path was a bit random but if someone wanted t get into politics/current affairs reporting, a good start is simply to watch a lot of Dail/Seanad/council proceedings. In fact, a very good idea would be to get into the habit of going along to meetings of your local city/county council, if you can at all, and just sit in the public gallery studying how things work. A lot of this game is simply understanding the procedures and therefore knowing when to expect newsworthy exchanges/events to happen. I remember doing some trial shifts at a previous job and some colleagues would leave the Dáil stream running all day just in case it yielded some news. That's not a bad idea, but it's a far better idea to become familiar with the general scheduling and timetable of Dáil events so that you can spend that time more wisely.

I thought you cut your journalistic teeth on the UCD Forum of Boards.ie

Really interesting insight into the world of a political journalist so far.

TodayFM: Gav

Oasis_Dublin wrote: »

Neil Prendeville suggested, in his interview with Enda last Friday, that the Taoiseach's handlers were trying to interfere towards the end of the interview. How much of a pain in the backside are the handlers?

Are any of the politicians like David Cameron, in that they answer a question, and then immediately walk away from the microphones so that you don't push them on an issue?

There's nobody who would 'do a Cameron' and immediately walks away so as soon as they've said what they want, though Enda happened to do it on his way in and out of the Limerick debate last night!

To be honest with the Neil Prendeville thing I suspect the 'interference' was simply because Enda Kenny is almost always late for absolutely everything he attends. The interview was nearly 30 minutes at that stage and I think it's honestly more plausible that they wanted Neil to wrap up simply so that they could get him to his next appointment. (If they were trying to pull him out of the interview, why would they have let it continue for over 25 minutes first?)

Skrynesaver wrote: »

Why don't presenters turn off their mike and say "You didn't answer the question asked, you have to pay for advertising on this station" when a politician ignores the substance of what was asked ?

It's a decent question but I suspect that it's a case of wanting to give the politician enough rope to hang themselves. Every interviewer or broadcaster has a different style - some of them see themselves more as an intermediary, a vessel through which a politician speaks to the public directly, and who think it's up to the listener to draw their own conclusions. (If an interviewee is evidently crap, the presenter won't really feel the need to state it out loud.) Others prefer to be a bit more adversarial which is equally legitimate, and perfectly fine, but it's just a different style.

I'm sure there's a certain sense of pragmatism about it too - if you basically humiliate someone on air, you're a lot less likely to get them back on the show again when you might genuinely want to hear from them on another topic in future. If you allow them to humiliate themselves, and let the listener reach that conclusion themselves, you don't burn that bridge.

Comic Book Guy wrote: »

Hi Gav,

What are the core principles that differentiate fg from ff? As a non clued in voter they appear much of a muchness in centre right more closely linked together than either are to labour on the left or sin vein even further to the left.

To be perfectly blunt there aren't many - I sometimes wonder whether the large catch-all, slightly-right-of-centre bloc in Ireland split into two parties simply so that there would be a degree of competition and require at least the semblance of a debate about the issues of the day. (Don't get me wrong - I'd much rather have a Jack Johnson and John Jackson situation than no democracy at all!)

It was only recently that I heard a Fianna Fáil member give me what I thought was the most cogent explanation of what the party stood for. He said:

Fine Gael generally measures the progress of the nation by how well its enterprises are doing and how much money the average punter has in their pocket; Labour measures the progress of the nation by how well it treats its poorest. Fianna Fáil tries to strike that balance all the time.

Whether you subscribe to that picture or not, I think it's probably fair to say there's always been a bit of a Labour-y wing within Fianna Fáil - so it might be true to say that historically FF was such a large catch-all party that an overall FF government (in the Lemass/Lynch era at least) had the same social make-up as a FG/Labour coalition did.

A lot of party members will tell you (eventually, potentially after a drink or two) that there isn't much of a difference between FG and FF, but they would rather have the faction split in two than exist as an all-dominating single entity that won every election by a landslide. That's probably a true assessment.

robdonn wrote: »

Last night Lucinda put on a performance that very closely resembles Sarah Palin. Beyond her own new party, is there a lot of support for introducing the failed 3-Strike system of the US?

Also, the debate introduced 3 smaller parties to the larger public audience. As none of these parties are capable of creating a majority, would it be in their interest to become part of the opposition or form a coalition with a larger party and risk disappearing like the Greens did?

The three-strikes policy doesn't have anyone else explicitly supporting it but that's not to say that others wouldn't have an open mind for it. Generally the opposition to it wouldn't be specifically against the policy itself, but against the proposed list of offences it would cover. Renua's manifesto included suggestions for murder, rape and burglary (but wanted the final list referred to the Irish Penal Reform Trust for their feedback). Murder already carries a life sentence and you'd imagine a three-time rapist would also be facing a decades-long sentence so there'd be no opposition there - the question is whether someone should be jailed for life for three burglaries, given the extenuating circumstances that might apply in their lives.

As for whether the smaller parties should join government or not... that's an impossible question to answer really; they'd simply have to decide where they're more likely to be heard and to have influence. To be honest I would personally have a grievance with any party that runs for office but who doesn't actually want power.

A Greens/PD-style meltdown is not inevitable, by the way - you just have to be assertive in power, and appreciate how differently the public sees a coalition to those inside it. Labour has a third of the seats in the current coalition, so within government, Labour probably considers itself to have a third of the influence. But to an outsider, Fine Gael doesn't have the numbers to do things alone and therefore Labour appears to have a veto on everything. If a junior partner was assertive enough (and picked a good enough reason to collapse the government) they can easily survive and thrive. Remember the PDs doubled their size in the election before they collapsed!

blapabrew22 wrote: »

You get to interview 3 players or coaches from Man United, past or present, alive or dead, and ask them each just one questions. Who are the 3 players and what question would you ask each individual?

It would be George Best, Eric Cantona and Roy Keane, and each would get the same question: "Are you honestly telling me you don't regret anything about leaving Old Trafford?"

TodayFM: Gav

Buona Fortuna wrote: »

I think it was Michael Ring

Sure - but he could have said that from the getgo instead of going round the houses and he could then have explained how they intend growing it ...

The answer would have been clear and everyone would know what they stand for. Instead we got several minutes of waffle - leaving people like me thinking - He's hiding the answer or doesn't know.

To be honest, this is the classic example of the answer I gave Skrynesaver - clearly the presenter in this case decided it would be more diplomatic to hand Ringer a shovel and dig a hole for himself, rather than to push him into it. Again, it's a really nifty rule: if they're talking at length, they either know loads about the subject or almost nothing...

5rtytry56 wrote: »

Has been in politics made anybody a better person than when you first knew about them?

A great question, and one that unfortunately I'm not around long enough to answer because I haven't seen enough people come in and out of the halls of Leinster House and how it's changed them. Generally speaking, being in there tends to make people more mature - but that could easily be because they're simply getting older while they're there, or they might get married or have kids or whatever. It's a tiring gig though, so you can't be a total jack-the-lad in the way you might potentially have been as a councillor.

barry181091 wrote: »

This is so silly but I have always wanted to know; Are politicians from different partiess (Specifically TD's.) friends behind it all? Like the leaders debate last night, I could all imagine them joking after it. In a sort of, "Good match!" kind of way.

I get the feeling that a lot of the promises new far-left parties are offering may sound possible *technically* but are not possible in reality. I feel the experience of actually being in power/politics for so long is that you know how the whole system ACTUALLY works and what is ACTUALLY realistically possible. My question is this; Should the experience that the bigger parties have add to their ability to run the country?

Behind the partisan lines, they're almost all perfectly cordial and sound to each other. I've heard Stephen Donnelly (now of the Social Democrats, but an independent at the time) tell a story of how he was due out in RTE one night to do a radio debate against someone from Fine Gael - the two of them went for dinner first, one gave the other a lift to RTE, they went inside and tore strips off each other on air, and then happily shared the car back to the city centre where their hotels were. And that's perfectly routine! Even the party leaders are totally cordial to each other when they're 'off duty'.

You'd often find that TDs from the same/neighbouring constituencies, from rival parties, will work together on certain projects (getting a new school built, for example) and become quite friendly though doing so.

I might add as well - because it seems like a good point to do it - that the huge, huge majority of people in Leinster House get into politics for the right reasons. A few are made crooked by the trappings of power and the relative luxury of it all but fundamentally, being a TD is a full-time, all-consuming and seriously tiring job, and nobody would volunteer themselves for it (even though it's very handsomely paid) unless their deepest motivation was for a sense of civic duty and public service.

As regards whether larger parties should be more pragmatic - it's definitely a valid point. Certainly there are constitutional rules and EU factors that would make some idealistic promises utterly unenforceable - like, for example, a promise to scrap upward-only rent reviews (unconstitutional) or to introduce another special VAT rate for particular industries (against the EU VAT directive).

Ultimately though that's really a question that every voter should consider themselves - is 'having experience in power' something they value, or is it a byword for 'why didn't they implement that idea last time?'...

Kerrydude1981 wrote: »

Weirdest experience you have had as Political Correspondent?

Not so much 'weird' as 'surreal' - I was in Washington last March to cover Enda's tour of the United States around St Patrick's Day, and I thought we were lining up for a quick soundbite and photo-op when in fact we were lining up to get into the Oval Office for a joint press-conference-of-sorts. It was a tightly packed queue and I was four or five people from the front so when the queue moved forward I thought it was because Enda and Obama had materialised before us. But suddenly the queue moved forward another step, and another... and suddenly you find yourself in a room where all you can see is a curved ceiling and you realise there's no corners and holycrapitstheOvalOfficeandIhopeIvealreadystartedmyrecorder...

So, no, sadly the answer is not 'a 7-way'...

panda100 wrote: »

I thought you cut your journalistic teeth on the UCD Forum of Boards.ie

Really interesting insight into the world of a political journalist so far.

In all honesty, it was actually taking minutes of meetings when I was secretary of UCD Students' Union! Though my exploits over on 470 didn't hurt... :cool:

blue5000

Thanks Gav for coming on here.

How many seats do you reckon Labour will have after this election?

TodayFM: Gav

blue5000 wrote: »

Thanks Gav for coming on here.

How many seats do you reckon Labour will have after this election?

It's always dangerous to make a prediction this far out but I reckon Labour is currently set to revert back to its usual 'home' of 10% of the vote, and around 10% of the seats in the Dáil.

It won't be the national bloodbath many of the scale many are expecting - I'd suggest 12-15 seats.

Mrs Shrek

Would or could you ever be tempted to throw your hat at politics yourself?

TodayFM: Gav

Mrs Shrek wrote: »

Would or could you ever be tempted to throw your hat at politics yourself?

There are days where I'd say I'm tempted and other days where I'm not at all. The way the Irish system is set up, it's virtually impossible to make an electoral breakthrough without having slaved your way through the funeral circuit for a few years beforehand and any interest I'd have in the policy side of things would be totally removed by having to do a parochial slog first. The alternative to this is to go for the Seanad which, as it stands, is far less powerful and a difficult place to do anything seriously meaningful.

Another part of me has the same level of fascination as spin-doctoring as someone else asked. Much as I'd be piqued by doing it for a while, could I feasibly go back to journalism after it? Probably not.

This might sound lofty but in my own way I'd like to think I'm contributing in some way. There are many vital cogs in a democracy and a decent media is one of them - what's the point of democracy if nobody pays attention to what your leaders do between elections? The last bit is my job and right now it's one I'm perfectly happy to stick with!

Boards.ie: Niamh

We're going to close this up now as Gav has very generously given far more of his time than we expected!

Don't forget to check out the Election Daily Podcast linked in the OP. Thank you all for your questions and most especially to Gav for your insightful answers