REMEMBER Ian Paisley's hilariously partisan reference to "the blue skies of Ulster and the grey skies of the Irish Republic"? Conjuring up images of a Mediterranean Magherafelt and a Siberian Sligo, it was so blatantly biased that it's still impossible not to smirk at the depth of its delusion. Well, the propagandists for Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have been using the same old trick . . . and it's still impossible not to smirk.
The first Party Political Broadcast this week - or, at any rate, the first snippet of propaganda officially acknowledged as such - came from Fine Gael. To the strains of a spaghetti western score, a posse of cowboy builders Hiaced into suburbia. The goodliving townsfolk, mannerly, wellspoken and dripping with the decency of the prosperous are easy meat for the bedraggled, unkempt, mean dudes who have arrived to wreak havoc.
The villains have come on a spurious context: they want to make a buck by fixing things which ain't broken. The bright, sunny lives of the solid, righteous folk grow grim and bleak as the unnecessary repair work begins. Vibrant technicolour fades to slowmo grey as the hombres from the Hiace proceed to knock holes in the roof, dismantle the plumbing and smash the bathroom tiles. Fine Gael's message is clear: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Enter Fianna Fail. Their message is rather different. It focuses on crime and deliberately plays on voters' fears that "crime is overwhelming us". Again, the hype is colourcoordinated, with slowmo grey used to ram home negative notions about the current government. We see exuberant children laughing and leaping about, before the camera, colourfading, zooms in on a syringe on a playground slide. Then we get the hideous guff about zero tolerance macho, Clint Eastwood, spaghetti western in tone.
The FF videonasty is more ominous than FG's quasicomical slapstick. Obscuring the faces of drug dealers and other criminals, it attempts to replicate the kind of security camera footage beloved of Crimeline. Pointedly, the criminals are all young men, wearing either leather or denim jackets. There are no pinstriped, whitecollar on coloured shirts, executive fraudsters featured. It is, just as Fine Gael's is, an appeal to the fears and prejudices of the comfortable.
Over on TnaG, Fianna Fail's propaganda has a different hue. It shows John Bruton with Michael Lowry before bursting into celebratory music when Bertie "Prince of Darkness" Ahern appears. We see planes and tractors and juggernauts the mechanised vibrancy of the Celtic Tiger. And, over images of urban blight and unemployment, we see the three leaders of the current coalition government parties shake hands.
Fine Gael, it is clear, is telling voters that they've never had it so good. Fianna Fail, in focusing on crime and Michael Lowry, is predictably pressurising what it believes to be Government weaknesses. But it is the stereotyping and pandering to preconceived notions that show just how right wing both parties are in their hearts. Cowboy builders and drugpushers . . . what could be more frightening in striving suburbia?
Curiously, Lab our seems to be addressing itself to rural voters. To the sound of a blues harmonica, a tractor trundles by. Then, ICA notable, Bridin Twist explains why she - a hardcore countrywoman - is backing Labour. Ann Gallagher (CavanMonaghan) pitches in with a fighting pledge to keep open "rural post offices and small schools". The broadcast ends with jaunty Irish music . . . the Red Flag can be neither seen nor heard.
For the smaller parties, Gerard Casey (Christian Solidarity Party) did an old fashioned, straight to camera piece against a background of Legion of Mary blue; Nora Bennis (National Party) railed against "the killing of preborn children" and John Burns (Natural Law Party) spoke of cutting crime by 5 per cent through "transcendental meditation and yogic flying". His brown suit and the fact that he didn't do the gig in the lotus position rather weakened his message.
And that was that. I have not yet seen Sinn Fein's, Democratic Left's, the Progressive Democrats' or the Green Party's official propaganda. But the dominant images of the week have been negative: and cheaply melodramatic. That is not to say that, like regular commercial advertising, they won't have been effective. But, with their scaremongering and reinforcing of simple stereotypes, the State's two bigger parties have shown their true colours. For voters keen to heal the black and white divisions in Irish society, the prospects are grey indeed.
THERE'S nothing new in this, of course. Monday night's tributes to Noel Browne (RTE 1 & TnaG) reminded us that social and economic divisions in Irish society have always had powerful buttresses. RTE rescreened an interview Browne gave, on his 70th birthday in 1985, to Pat Cox. In it, the former Minister for Health spoke about "the colonisation of social thinking" by the Catholic church. Today's social and political thinking - just look at the party political broadcasts - is being colonised by global capitalism.
There are, in fairness, fewer victims under the new colonisers. Browne recounted how his mother and brother were buried in paupers' graves. He spoke of poverty and the TB he contracted five times. When he was appointed a minister, about 4,000 people a year were dying in this State of tuberculosis. "It was, primarily, a poor person's disease," he said, fuelled by "overcrowding, malnutrition and joblessness". Does heroin addiction not have a similar ring today?
On the matter of the Mother and Child Scheme, Browne said that the medical establishment and the Catholic hierarchy moved to defeat him. He could, he believed, have "bought off the doctors" but the hierarchy of the time had just too much clout. Mind you, Browne, like the rest of them, was aware of the value of political propaganda almost half a century ago. He used journalists Frank Gallagher and Aodh de Blacam "to mobilise public opinion".
The profile which emerged from this interview was of a man who, with his education paid for by strangers, never forgot or forgave the awfulness of poverty. His descriptions of various sanitoria and county homes (one in Co Longford "had an open sewer") evoked an era when the poor were so downtrodden that they remained passive. "God's will" was the generally accepted reason for all sorts of social injustice. Today, it is the absolute need to feed the demands of the Tiger.
TnaG's tribute was also a rescreening. Sean O Tuairisg's profile was of the same vintage as the Cox interview but it has dated more profoundly. "Things are bad now in Ireland and good in the Soviet Union," said Browne. Well, that's changed, but Browne was right in asserting that, in essence, the Republic has always been "a one party state too. You can have any policy you like," he said, "so long as it's conservative."
He spoke about how, he believed, "the power of the church had to be broken" and about "education being the way forward" and about the fact that "old British ways were carried on by the ruling Irish after independence". Ironically, though the first and second of these have largely come to pass, much of the institutionalised inequality which Browne despised, remains, not only in place, but as a vote catcher for our major political parties.
AWAY from politics, QED reopened the case, literally, of the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick. Inside was the skeleton of the most grotesquely deformed human being imaginable. Back in 1980, when the film of the same name with John Hurt in the title role (now narrating this documentary) opened in New York, it was generally accepted that neurofibromatosis (NF) was the cause of Merrick's condition.
Predictably, the film was seen by the American National NF Foundation as a heaven sent fundraiser. But, it chilled NF sufferers and their families as they waited in dread that they might turn into elephant people. However, it seems now that Merrick probably suffered from the much rarer Proteus Syndrome, which ensured that his deformity would grow monstrously worse as he aged.
Early photographs of Merrick, taken by his medical mentor, the surgeon Frederick Treves, showed a body and a face so horrifically malformed, that they were among the most shocking images on TV this year. And yet Merrick, by all accounts, was a sensitive and warm person, who constructed finely detailed models of notable buildings and, like the Irish Labour party, loved the countryside.
Structured as a quest, this documentary, aware that it could easily be misconstrued as a freak show in the name of medical science, was equally sensitive. Science was at its core - the search for clues and DNA - but it had a very human dimension too. Relatives of Merrick and a present day sufferer from Proteus Syndrome, Sue Fildes, spoke about the disease and about the myth of the Elephant Man. Though it was about science, it said much about our notions of aesthetics and human beauty and about the way images can manipulate our responses. As with propaganda, the truth lay buried.
FINALLY, amid all the propaganda designed to win the 166 Dail seats, one seat on the Late Late Show has generated almost as much controversy. The winner of the antique show's antique restoration competition, Siubhan Maloney, has been accused of not doing the work herself. Well, who knows? But, more comically, the row has generated a spinoff spat on the radio between Gay Byrne and Pat Kenny.
Mind you, down the years, people have dragged in dirty bits of wood and metal to the Late Late competition and returned a few months later with showroom pieces of furniture, suggesting that some of this DIY restoration has been of resurrection proportions. Perhaps this latest controversy will kill off the antiques item. But, then again, remembering that the "Lambo" Ryan fictions on Gay Byrne's radio show did Lambo's Montrose career no harm, maybe the Late Late will become RTE's answer to The Antiques Roadshow.