Kathy Sheridan: Terence Flanagan could have turned ‘brain-freeze’ into a bonus

Never mind the politics, hear the sniggers. There were plenty of them. But for anyone with a grain of humanity, the sound of a mind-blank occurring live on air is horrifying. For anyone with even minimal experience of a live interview, Terence Flanagan’s “brain-freeze” – the stumbles, the sighs, the unfinished sentences – must have triggered a few murmurs of “there but for the grace of God”.

Let's be clear. In no way is this comparable to a father of the bride speech, where your audience's love redoubles on sight of your trembling hands and staring eyes. It isn't even a Michael Bay moment when all the Transformers director was required to do was puff some bendy television technology in a practised Ted-talk way. Instead, he quailed and ran off the stage, yelping "I'm sorry, I'm sorry". Bay had nothing to lose but his reputation for cool.

I recall walking beside a big beast cabinet minister down an RTÉ corridor towards a live television grilling, which for even the cockiest performer can feel like a trudge to the gallows. "It's all right for you, you can say what you like," he rasped as we reached the studio entrance, offering up his sweaty, blotchy face for a serious dab of the make-up woman's powder puff. "I could wreck everything in a sentence." He could. Politicians know that three-quarters of the audience is willing them to fail. Spectacularly.

The abyss between public political discourse and what we know as everyday conversation is profound.

Comfort blanket

The everyday is a realm where we are robed in the comfort blanket of mutual understanding; a willingness to understand as we would like to be understood. Not so in politics, where every word, every imagined smirk, every blurted comment, runs the gauntlet of misinterpretation and "lunatic literal-mindedness", as Canadian academic-turned-politician Michael Ignatieff has described it.

Any sympathy for politicians, of course, must be leavened by what we know of their egotism and potentially disastrous arrogance. But where is the gain for the citizen if the net result is a chamber of back-minders, terrified of veering off message or a particular arrangement of words?

The surprise is that brain freezes like Flanagan’s are not more common.

On air, the journey from information overload and dry throat to full-on fight- or-flight mode can be mercilessly swift. Hormones are priming the body for violent physical action. The sufferer will experience accelerated breathing and heart rate, along with tunnel vision of a kind not conducive to questions about complex taxation policy. Live broadcasts are preferred for a reason. They always carry a frisson. Still, a complete mind-blank is rare.

Yet only a few weeks ago, Natalie Bennett, leader of the British Greens, had a similar meltdown on the day of their campaign launch. Like Flanagan, she had already done a series of interviews that day before her meltdown. The question was about tax breaks for buy-to-let landlords. For three minutes and 40 seconds, she fell into an excruciating silence, interspersed with coughing and stammering. Worse, she said she had a "bad cold" – which as someone suggested, is the equivalent of offering your neck to a predator when he's moving in for the kill.

A skilled communicator might have winged it, turned the question around, asked why the interviewer seemed unable to think beyond the standard way of doing things. But Bennett was elected leader for her (highly successful) organisational skills as opposed to her communication artistry. She has no talent for the slick soundbite. Listening to her requires effort.

Brain fade

In the febrile election atmosphere, her “mental brain fade”, as she described it, was a top news item across the media for the next 24 hours. Crucially, however, she insisted on jumping back into the fray that same day and called it for what it was. “I had a bad interview on housing this morning . . . I didn’t do a good job at representing our policies. That happens, I’m human. One can have a mental brain fade on these things.”

The 600,000-700,000 people tuning in for the Late Late Show on Friday were aware that Lucinda Creighton and Eddie Hobbs would be on. They also knew that since Flanagan's mind-blank was by then the talk of the country, it was bound to be one of the first questions. Some of us assumed that the man himself might grab the opportunity to make a comeback. Wouldn't that be the sensible thing to do?

As a 40-year-old, two-term Fine Gael TD, who lost the whip for opposing the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, he is no ingénu. Yet, he is unknown nationally, and it would have been a chance to put a face to the mishap. There might even have been a sympathy vote in it for him since few can resist a redemption story. As a bonus, Ryan Tubridy might have softened his approach to the segment, since no decent human likes to see a man being even lightly pummelled when he's down. Above all, Flanagan could have used his personal calamity to give an honest account of a life caught between the everyday shield of human understanding and that tricky realm of public political discourse. It is no small matter.

Whether the media remains the fourth pillar of democracy is up for discussion but only a few would say it is unimportant. In view of Lucinda’s opinion of it, expressed over the weekend – she used terms such as “absolute lack of any objectivity” and “huge groupthink” – that discussion is probably as urgent as any in Renua’s manifesto.