A predicament of predictions

It is easy to imagine that Brian Cowen launched his Government team with a deliberate kick in RTE's arse....

No amount of ingratiating, sycophantic coverage – and the national broadcaster was not short of that stuff, even before the Cowen honeymoon officially began – is likely to dissuade the Offaly man from his apparent core belief that the meeja in general, and Montrose in particular, is the enemy.

His fear is unjustified. It's not like Biffo can complain that, for example, those nasty RTE-types have been scrutinising his performance as foreign minister, when he played a vital role in facilitating the US “war on terror”.

Maybe he just doesn't like the way they keep playing that audio-clip of him singing ‘The Town I Loved So Well'.

Whatever the reasons, on the day of a major, predictable set-piece, the unveiling of a new Cabinet, Six One News was transformed – at least in part by Cowen's paranoid passion for secrecy – from a smooth news vehicle into a stuttering banger, misfiring wildly and embarrassing its passengers as well as those of us who pay for it.

For about half the programme, the combined wit and wisdom of Brian Dobson and the Two Davids (Davin-Power and McCullagh) could not decipher who had got what job in Cowen's Cabinet. That wouldn't be so bad, except that they had begun the programme with a clear promise that they would be bringing us that very information within a few minutes.

For such a collection of experienced political journalists to get so wrong-footed by parliamentary procedure and press-release-deficit was, at first, painful to behold. Inevitably they got stuff wrong: Barry Andrews was allegedly Chief Whip (persnapper), we were told, rather than, more accurately, Minister for Children (of former TDs – this latest front bench collection underlines the depressing dynasticism of our politics).

Whoever precisely can be blamed, or credited, for making this mess, after it went on for a while the pain subsided and it was a refreshing blow to the image of omniscience cultivated by the media. Dobson and Davin-Power, standing outside Leinster House, and McCullagh, stuck in that silly Dail studio where he casts a shadow on the “location” background picture, could tell no more than any of us could with the sound switched off: that the first three happy pols out of the traps and into their seats were Cowen, Coughlan and Lenihan, making them pretty solid bets for Taoiseach, Tanaiste and finance minister.

And we could safely ignore the journos and make our own observations, eg that Mary Coughlan has been watching Michelle Obama for fashion ideas.
That was scarcely the only American intervention in our recent political life. In merciless pursuit of what new boss Cowen has emphasised as his Government's first priority, ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, Dick Roche has been sinking his teeth into Libertas and its connection to “right-wing Americans”, as he charmingly called them on Morning Ireland.

Yes, the Government that in the UN Security Council was happy to rubber-stamp George Bush's licence to kill, and which has smoothed the assassins' path through Ireland to the bloody fields of Afghanistan and Iraq, is now worried about the baleful influence of the US on our political life.

To be sure, Roche's red-white-and-blue-baiting of the Lisbon opposition is a heartening sort of hypocrisy, since the snarling minister obviously knows what most Irish listeners think of right-wing Americans. But it has been made potent partly by poor journalism in the run-up to the referendum: newsrooms everywhere in Ireland have lazily reached for the press releases from the well-resourced, PR-endowed, but rather shadowy Libertas group, rather than reflecting the much wider range of opposition to the Treaty.

This has been compounded by the failure on most journalists' part to engage critically with Libertas itself, despite solid exposes in places like Phoenix and Indymedia.

How will this year's apocalyptic zeitgeist impact on the Treaty vote? Don't look here for prognostication – really, don't: it's a form of journalism even sillier than reviewing TV and radio shows. But I've been intrigued by one manifestation of our growing sense that it's all gone horribly wrong: for a few days there recently it seemed like everyone was telling us that we'd better start growing our own food.

Yep, the craziness in the global food market has inspired some good people to convince us to think very, very local, like the back garden, when it comes to nourishment. US food writer Michael Pollan was on BBC Radio 4, while George Monbiot in the Guardian was reminding us that Britain got 40 per cent of its calories from gardens and allotments during the second World War, and Stan Goff was writing online about getting 100 pounds of food a year from 12 square feet of soil. Even a guest on Derek Mooney's radio show was advocating “guerrilla gardening” to raise food. None of these grow-your-own advocates sounded panicky, but nor were they talking about the few ornamental strawberries and blackcurrants beloved of traditional gardening programmes. So I turned to the TV gardeners to see if their antennae were picking up and transmitting this new message.

They weren't, much. The trouble with gardening shows, though they proliferate like weeds this time of year, is that they've often been planned, and shot, over the previous 12 months. So, for example, the BBC's Gardeners' World has a trendily 2007 organic outlook – eg a lovely garlic solution as an alternative to pellets for keeping slugs away – but is still showing us an awful lot of pretty, inedible flowers. Can we afford such luxury?

Voltaire wrote, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” – but he failed to add, 2008 style: “…if we don't want to starve.”