Among this week's Leaving Certificate essays in English was one that required students to address the "Importance of Understanding the System". It was an apt topic. The previous day the Government had published a self-proclaimed, self-assessed, self-regarding "progress report" to mark its first year back in power, writes Eddie Holt
The report was, predictably, as self-aggrandising as grades that would be granted by self-assessing Leaving Cert students. The electorate hadn't been conned; economic difficulties were due to the global slowdown; the Government's stance on Iraq was "sensible and principled".
The arrogance underlying the document allows us all to understand much about the system. While self-assessment in state exams is, rightly, not permitted, the state's government clearly believes such rules don't apply to itself. This coalition has decided to coalesce the roles of examiner and examinee when it comes to being answerable to the electorate.
As the Government grows daily more despotic and less democratic, perhaps its castration of Freedom of Information legislation should have prepared us for this latest insult. External assessment is, it seems, to paraphrase Leona Helmsley's attitude towards taxation, for the little people. In contrast, self-assessment is for the powerful and the "principled".
The brazenness and calculated misnaming of the "progress report" show contempt for the public. It is not a "progress report", even less "a school report card" (as one radio station called it), in any acceptable sense. It is pure spin and PR. It is a document of dissembling. Its substance, despite its 80-page bulk, is negligible but its existence is telling indeed.
The full title of the insult is "Progress Report on the Implementation of an Agreed Programme for Government between Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, June 2002-June 2003." An honest title would be "Propaganda Report on. . .". Few among us expect governments to do honesty but the stage-managing of this latest gimmick disdains democracy.
As 120,000 state exam hopefuls prepared to start this year's state-sanctioned memory tests, we must hope they will remember the insult that preceded them. Facing into Irish, irregular verbs and integral calculus, they probably won't. They have other matters on their minds. They know they are at the mercy of markers - occasional rechecks notwithstanding - and accept that.
But if they had time to consider the sheer insolence of the very idea of the Propaganda Report, they could only give its authors and sponsors an "A" grade for cheek and an "F" for respect. More than four in every five adults believe the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrats coalition has failed to keep its election promises. They have - and the Propaganda Report adds insult to injury.
Of course, all political parties must engage in persuasion and that implies disproportionate trumpeting of successes and muting of failures. Fair enough; without propaganda, political parties could not survive. But this latest self-assessment, which aims to say that the Government did not buy the election and cut back once it had been returned to power, is an abuse too far.
Labour leader Pat Rabbitte termed the report a "pointless exercise". Unusually for him, this is an understatement. The report is not merely "pointless" (like a Leaving Cert student with no marks whatsoever), it is worse than that. The production, publishing and even presentation of the document should earn minus marks for all involved with it.
In presenting their Propaganda Report, Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney attempted to use the media as compliant disseminators. They tried to bypass journalists' questions on the document by distributing it just five minutes before its launch. Clearly, Ahern and Harney were in no mood for an oral examination of their propaganda. That might actually reveal something to the public.
That such a charade should take place on the eve of the state's formal English exams reminds us how contemporary politicians abuse language. The revised Leaving Cert English syllabus includes a section dealing with "the language of persuasion". Another essay topic required students to "write a persuasive article or essay in which you attempt to convince people of the meaning and importance of heroes in life".
Who could find anything heroic about our most powerful politicians? Who can believe the contempt they show for the public is necessary or even acceptable political cuteness and cunning? Who could be persuaded by the insulting document's gross abuses of language, such as "progress report" and "leading as promised, not misleading as alleged"?
Indeed, the truth of "misleading" is no mere allegation. It is a fact and it is compounded by the Propaganda Report.
Promises about health and education, for instance, are nowhere near being met. Governing is not always easy and reasonable voters know that. But our leaders and their little army of propagandists should feel ashamed.
The system is increasingly based on glossy deceit and consequently, voter apathy is inevitable. Apathy however, is giving way to anger and rightly so. Even the most thick-skinned will absorb only a finite number of insults before they fail politicians who fail them.