Gavan Reilly: Fine Gael may live to regret last-ditch campaign slur

You know the old saying, about how a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on? There’s a 21st century equivalent of it, Brandolini’s Law: “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it." In other words, it’s easy to talk crap, and much harder work to clean it up.

This is a phenomenon that we in the media are very familiar with. People will routinely ask journalists why they won’t report on any number of over simplified fictions, with the most common response being that it’s beyond the scope of many media outlets to debunk the misinformation that some will share. If news bulletins spent their days trying to correct people for being wrong on the internet, we’d never get around to anything else.

This principle is beginning to make inroads in politics too. If you’ve been paying attention to the Presidential election this week, you’ll have seen it for yourself.

There has certainly been some opportunism on the part of Catherine Connolly’s supporters, since Ivan Yates offered his “smear the bejaysus” recommendation to Humphreys two weeks ago. His podcast was barely a few hours old when Connolly supporters were sharing video footage – subtitles and all – as a vulnerability of the Humphreys campaign that Yates is, and has never been, attributed to.

Yates’ view is that Fine Gael is best served motivating its own electorate through fear of the alternative. I disagree: given the binary option is between a veteran Fine Gael minister, and a leftist independent backed by Sinn Féin and People Before Profit, I don’t think Fine Gael voters need enthusing. It’s the undecided middle ground you need to chase.

For that cohort, I reckon, a campaign of criticism doesn’t cut it. The last three presidents have been so popular partly because their platforms were inherently optimistic: in representing the Ireland of today, they had aspirations for a greater Ireland of tomorrow.

That’s not to say that criticism of candidates isn’t justified. The questioning of Catherine Connolly certainly doesn’t amount to the “smear” that Yates projected, nor that some of her candidates have claimed.

The reason she keeps facing the same questions about her recruitment of an ex-con and the security complications of it, or her comments on militarism, or her trip to Syria, is because she has yet to address those questions fully.

But a genuine question has arisen in the last few days: is it reasonable, or justified, to question a politician for the work they might have done as a barrister?

The very nature of Fine Gael’s charge has shifted in the last two days. If you watched Humphreys being interviewed by my colleague Colette Fitzpatrick on Monday night, you’d swear she had no problem with the work of any barrister. But if you’d read the Sunday Independent, you’d have seen her directly lambasting Connolly for representing banks in the course of repossessions - comparing this ‘profiting from misery’ to her own day job in the Credit Unions.

By now you’ll have heard that barristers operate under the ‘cab rank’ rule: just as a taxi in the rank can’t refuse the person at the top of the queue, so must any available barrister accept a client that comes for them, without being seen as endorsing that client’s cause.

Since Jim O’Callaghan clarified that point, Fine Gael has retreated and pivoted. The issue now, it seems, is a lack of transparency: that Connolly should have told the Dáil, as she castigated a series of home repossessions, that her legal work had facilitated them.

They are correct to a point: it wouldn’t have been any harm to mention it. By never broaching it in the Dáil when the issue came up, Connolly might now look like she was hiding something, a sin of omission through lack of candour.

But that’s not how being a barrister works, nor is it required by the Dáil: TDs have to file a register of interests each year, so that their conflicts of interest are already on the record when they speak.

And I’m not yet sure how you can recognise on one hand that barristers are mercenaries, and on the other hand accuse her of being a hypocrite for taking the work that comes her way.

Nor, by the way, do the Dáil rules require any such disclosures. One of Fine Gael’s current TDs previously acted on behalf of Drew Harris as Garda Commissioner. Harris was a witness at the Public Accounts Committee earlier this year and was questioned by that same TD. The TD didn’t mention this link out loud. It might have been good practice to do so, but he didn’t have to.

This is Brandolini’s Law in full flow. When there’s only one remaining head-to-head debate between the candidates, Fine Gael is offering inconsistent arguments in the hope they stick.

Connolly is not a succinct speaker and is not great at refuting things concisely; their hope will be that she doesn’t stick the landing when it comes up on Prime Time.

Whether it works, we’ll find out on Saturday. But when all of this is over, I wonder how longstanding Fine Gael supporters – the type who read the papers, who listen to Radio 1, who already understand what the ‘cab rank’ rule is – will feel about their party’s campaign ending in such half-baked misrepresentations.