Gavan Reilly: Blinding the Taoiseach with a ring light, 7,000 miles from home

Something political correspondents don’t often talk about is the sheer energy you need to be a good Taoiseach. Not alone is the breadth of the gig extraordinary but the schedule is relentless, often involving meetings up to 11pm at night and at 7am the next day, each requiring full intellectual investment.

I can imagine two reasons why we don’t talk about it as much as we perhaps should. The first is that journalists will sound like they’re kissing arse by drawing attention to it. The second is that journalists often aren’t exposed to the full day’s rigours. We don’t have an embedded pool who have to be on call to cover the Taoiseach’s every move, as there are in the White House and occasionally in Downing Street; the media shows up when there’s a chance the Taoiseach will address some of the media’s questions. Otherwise, as the head of government of a largely peaceful country who also has extensive parliamentary duties, the Taoiseach is left to his devices.

The latter, however, isn’t always true. The standard practice is when he’s abroad – or generally in a situation where he cannot be presumed to need working time at his desk – the Taoiseach is followed by the press to every engagement. The obvious exemplar of this is the annual jaunt to the United States, where the calendar is often specifically loaded to maximise the benefit of the Taoiseach’s time, and often includes stops in multiple cities to really wring the value out of his trip. It was on these trips – watching him at events either end of the schedule, getting jolted by drinks trolleys sitting in aisle seats, fighting jetlag all the while – that I first appreciated the sheer reserves of Enda Kenny’s energy; how the man fully understood the privilege of the job and the duty of doing it as best he could.

Micheál Martin has that same energy, exhibited firsthand on his whistlestop tour of Asia last week. Arriving into Tokyo after 15 hours in the air, Martin’s entourage were in their hotel only half an hour before his first engagement – a meeting with members of the Japanese parliamentary ‘friends of Ireland’ group (yes, apparently there is such a thing, and no, I hadn’t heard of it either). Someone without any particular loyalties to Martin, and who was familiar with the event, spoke impressively about the extent to which the Taoiseach was already fully briefed on the Japanese MPs in his audience and the issues that might get raised with him during their precious half-hour with them. From there, it was directly into a reception for the Irish community in Tokyo with musical entertainment by the Toyota Céilí Band (again, yes, there is such a thing; no, I hadn’t heard of them either) and an extensive 20-minute media opportunity with the travelling hacks.

Will you get a quick nightcap in, Taoiseach?, we inquired – making conversation, rather than anything else – as that media opportunity finished up. No, came the answer: in fact, the media needed to leave the room so that he and his officials could sit down and discuss his meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan the following day. If he was jet lagged, there was no time to show it: the meeting with his host counterpart took place at the equivalent of 3am Irish time.

And yet, he was not so focussed on the task at hand that he couldn’t show a human side too. On Friday morning, ahead of meeting Lee Hsien Loong, he visited the museum and chapel at the site of the former Changi Prisoner of War camp where his own uncle (not a great-uncle or some elder antecedent, his actual uncle) was held for three years. Martin silently took in the tour guide’s explanations of the grim conditions, the overcrowdedness, the scale of death that occurred there.

Then, passing an interactive database of the 83,000 who passed through its doors, a tour guide had pre-programmed the screen to show the records of Philip Finbar Martin. He recoiled for a moment, seeing the name of his own uncle, who was presumed dead by his family until the names of liberated POWs were published in British newspapers at the end of World War 2. “That’s him,” he said, pointing in stunned recognition, before taking a half-pace backwards and silently contemplating the details on the screen.

There were only 42 Irishmen interred in Changi in its three years in operation. And yet, in a reminder of how small the world is, Martin met another one of them… canvassing in a general election. “You’re Philly Martin’s nephew? I was with him in Changi.”

But given the emotional and physical exhaustion of the whole week, he’d have been forgiven for being a tad impatient when things didn’t go to plan… as they didn’t for me, travelling 7,000 miles around the world without a cameraman (one got Covid, and the other had recovered too recently to pass Japan’s PCR requirements). This left me in the odd situation of having to do all my own camerawork, on a phone, mounted on a tripod with a ring light around the camera. It’s slightly more sophisticated than it sounds – the phones these days have video processing software that makes things look better than you’d expect – but seeing it in person, it’s still a very basic operation.

You can imagine my mortification then, when – on the 41st floor of a skyscraper Tokyo hotel, attempting to avoid him being silhouetted by the Tokyo skyline behind him – I turned on the ring light and, basically, blinded the Taoiseach. For his patience then, in a week where patience might have been on short supply, this reporter was most grateful.