Pipped at the post
As a "where were you when you heard...?" moment, it wasn't up there with JFK or 9/11. Still, Mary Harney's resignation as Progressive Democrat leader had an undeniable element of surprise – "bolt from the blue" was the phrase of the day. If "where you were" was RTÉ, you heard about it slightly, but significantly, later than if you were tuned to rival broadcasters.
This fact was not lost on Today FM or Dublin's NewsTalk 106, which delivered the news of Harney's step-aside a good half-hour before RTÉ did at 5pm. (Even the RTÉ website was 25 minutes behind NewsTalk's, but still slightly before Harney started talking at her press conference, so the State service cannot claim it was waiting to hear the words uttered publicly from her lips.)
George Hook on NewsTalk gloated as he came back on air from the station's live coverage of Harney's statement: if you'd been tuned elsewhere, he said, instead of history in the making you'd have heard the weather forecast. No surprise, then, that RTÉ's David Davin-Power, when he did report the story, was among the most insistent on its bolt-like qualities.
At the risk of impinging on our beloved radio reviewer's territory: it was a bad day in a bad week for RTÉ Radio 1's new Drivetime News. Whereas most of the week the audible problem was Mary Wilson's nervous-sounding flatness, on Harney Thursday it seemed the trouble went deeper, with a time-poor, inflexible format and an apparent incapacity to clear the decks for a big story. The first half-hour of the show featured no interviews with significant Irish political players, and gave more time to the same-old-news from Britain's political skirmishes than to Harney and the PDs.
On the blanket
Of course, in the following hours and days, RTÉ and everyone else more than made up for any early shortfalls in coverage of this story. Whatever its merits as a human-interest (ie soap-opera) story, was the PD drama really of sufficient political importance to justify the blanket that was spread over our news pages and airwaves?
Obviously not. Even if you accept that the jockeying for position among ideologically-indistinguishable pols constitutes an acceptable definition of national politics, it is very hard to argue that Mary Harney giving up the PD leadership is a very important matter. At the extreme end of dramatic possibility, as forecast by Vincent Browne in his Sunday Business Post column, it could cause the next general election to occur a few months' earlier. The earth fails to quake at the prospect.
And though Harney will no longer be Tánaiste – a post the electorate was always highly likely to relieve her of anyway come that election – she remains as health minister; so the remote possibility of a slight technocratic policy shift in an undeniably important sector must also await that election.
And Michael McDowell is leader? So what else is new? The possibility of raising his profile any further must surely be beyond the combined engineering efforts of all the cranes in Dublin.
Political inflation
The most stupidly funny element in the media frenzy was the frequent comparison between Harney's situation and that of Tony Blair. Journalists who'd obviously been reading too many British papers talked about the support for McDowell among "the majority of the parliamentary party" – when you can count off a majority of PD TDs on the fingers of one hand. (Oh, go on, take another hand for the whole Seanad group.) You'd nearly be quicker just naming them off than using a mouthful phrase like that.
The slightly-departing Harney got wonderful press considering her disastrous on-going spell at the health helm and leading her party into near-oblivion. Ah, but she looked so happy.
If anyone pointed out that her resignation displayed characteristic ineptitude, I missed it: at her press conference it was clear she expected a leadership contest, but quickly everyone else realised that wasn't going to happen and her least-favoured candidate strolled into the gig. Oops. The bookies' initial odds, making Liz O'Donnell the favourite to succeed, were presumably based on yet another over-estimate of Mary Harney's political skills.
Can you imagine the leadership of the far-more-popular Greens, even if they were in government, being treated with such uncritical excitement? The PDs are in every respect creatures of the Dublin media.