The Taoiseach has been a king of colour - this grabbed journalists as firmly as his electorate, says Anne Marie Hourihane
THERE WAS an interesting moment on Prime Timelast Thursday. Mark Little was introducing what turned out to be one of the less predictable panel discussions of the week, on corruption in Irish politics. In his introduction, delivered to camera, Little replayed the events surrounding Bertie Ahern's resignation and concluded "Things certainly move fast in this business."
Around the country, viewers tried to work out exactly which business Mark meant: was it politics or show? But then we gave up, because really the lines between the two have been blurred for quite a while.
Last week, Bertie's supporters were bitter about the media, and its part in their hero's downfall. There were a lot of "I hope you're happy now" complaints. "Hounded by the media" was another frequently heard phrase. And for this Fine Gael is certainly to blame.
It is neither strange nor surprising that political journalists should have spent the last couple of years pursuing the Taoiseach with outlandish questions about money in suitcases and the advisability of paying tax. But it is rather peculiar that, while the media was doing that, Fine Gael was at home washing its collective hair.
Despite what my esteemed colleague Harry McGee wrote on Saturday about Fine Gael and its tactics over the tribunals, it is really hard for the ordinary person to remember that Fine Gael put the brakes on during the 2007 election. I mean, how can we tell when Fine Gael puts the brakes on? Does the man walking in front of them with the red flag sit down on the road? The thing is, since Fine Gael did put the brakes on they've never really found first gear again. And so the media became the opposition.
Ahern supporters always made out that journalists hated Bertie - but in fact we adored him. We're talking about your ordinary journalist here, not the journalists who supported Bertie and who presumed they knew his mind. And we're leaving aside the journalistic profession's overweening love for a powerful man, which makes groupies of us all. No, it was simply because Bertie was guaranteed colour for a journalist.
In the first place, he was so available that he made the doorstep news briefing (in which people with microphones rush at you in an unplanned melee) a staple of national political life. He seemed to prefer this method - whereby he spoke directly to the public - to answering pesky questions in the Dáil, where, let's face it, he never really shone. Bertie's love affair was not with the Dáil, it was with the public through the media. No wonder his backbenchers began to feel a little lonely.
Second, Bertie brought soap opera to politics: his pretty and unassuming daughters with their weddings and their bestsellers and their twins. His devotion to Manchester United. His girlfriend(s).
For journalists, it doesn't get much better than this. Add to this his considerable charm, his fondness for holy days of obligation and his compulsion to shake every hand offered to him and you have the media dream.
Most politicians are as boring as hell. Bertie was never boring. He often looked like he was enjoying himself.
Bertie has never had hobbies: politics was where he had his fun.
On Ash Wednesday this year, Bertie was photographed with the stain of half a volcano on his forehead, at the launch of a commemorative stamp to mark the 50th anniversary of the Munich air crash, in which some of Manchester United's Busby Babes perished. Hardened PR experts like Max Clifford would have to take hallucinogenic drugs for a year before they could come up with something that the press would find so delicious.
And so it came to pass that the media followed the thread of the story - or part of the story - as it unravelled from the tribunals. For those of us who don't receive Fine Gael press releases, there seemed to be nothing coming from that party but a screaming silence.
No wonder the media began to think that it was the Opposition, when the Opposition was closeted in purdah, watching the events unfold through an intricately carved screen that kept it safe from the outside world.
Or maybe Fine Gael is like those poor Japanese soldiers who ran for their lives during the second World War and hid in the jungle for 40 years. Meanwhile, modern life developed across the globe. When the soldiers finally emerged they had to be told that the war had been over for decades. They had spent all those years in hiding and in fear - for nothing.
It usually comes as a great shock to people involved in politics or show business - and, like Mark Little, I am including journalists in show business, where we probably belong - that large sections of the general public don't care much for their obsessions. (Girl in supermarket last Wednesday, when told of Bertie's resignation: "Sure, they're all the same.")
It may well be that one of the creeping legacies of the Ahern years is that the media and Fianna Fáil are in the same game - entertainment. And Fine Gael are the ones who now have to come up with a good story.