The most-remembered quotation from the 1976 movie Network is, "I'm mad as hell and not going to take it any more." There's a more prophetic offering in the same Paddy Chayefsky script:
"We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies. We live in a collage of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business."
Chayevsky spotted that politics and politicians in the developed world were losing their hold on the public mind.
The mutually opposed beliefs which were once to (literally) die for were sidling closer to each other. Without the emotional differentiation and personal validation the old stances offered, people were less interested in politics.
In Ireland, currently, every political party claims to be for the marginalised, dedicated to the environment, supportive of good public services, four-square behind tax reform. (Within the apparent diversity about abortion, there's consensus in the middle, like the long section of a Christmas cracker, with two smaller bits at each end, either of which, pulled, creates a big bang and a shower of debris.)
For the general public, this all adds up to a porridgy consensus so boring that a cry of "Get the bastards out!" can attract national attention, albeit only for a day or two. People see the political process as having little impact on their daily lives.
The big issues of previous generations seem largely dealt with, and nobody has faith in any party to really fix problems, like gridlock, which rattle our fillings right now. Even if you are motivated to vote for Party A, you know damn well their policies are going to be watered down when they go into inevitable coalition with Party B or Party C, so there doesn't seem much point in stirring your stumps to vote for them.
This lack of interest in the political process gives rise to a learned helplessness, a sense of uncertainty, and a lot of impotent tut-tutting - "So many gave so much in order that we might have the right to vote, aren't we rotten ungrateful all the same, to throw it back in their dead faces by not bothering?"
One way to change this would be to make voting a statutory duty of citizenship, so just as you can't legally drive a car, watch a television or get married without taking out a license, you couldn't benefit from the fruits of democracy without making the small, once-every-four-to-five-years effort to cast your vote.
Making the franchise an enforceable duty would also radically change both the demographics and interest level of the voting population.
Traditionally, the older you are, the more likely you are to vote. If everyone over 18 must vote, the shape of the practicing electorate inevitably changes, as does the involvement of the new voters in the wider political process. Behaviour changes attitudes. If you must vote, you're more likely to pay attention to what you're going to vote for.
Nothing else is likely to have quite the effect of statutory obligation. It's unrealistic to believe that politicians could, Pied Piper-fashion, entrance the voters of the 21st century by becoming more charismatic, quotable, sexy or impelling.
There's too much competition. Politics was riveting when there was little alternative. Those old black-and-white photographs showing thousands of guys in flat caps rapt by a politician making a speech were taken at a time when the guys did not have 50 TV stations to go home to, or a computer with Internet access, or a mobile phone with text messages popping up on a little screen. Or a copy of Hello! magazine, filled with celebs showing off their mansions and babies.
Which is not to say that politicians shouldn't seek to be more interesting and impelling. Of course they should, if only for self-preservation.
There can be no doubt, for example, that the massive, comprehensive, interlinked, long-term programmes and strategies all governments get hooked on constitute a major turn-off for the rest of us. You don't hear that many people exchanging gossip about the National Development Plan or a recent EU Directive on the top deck of the bus.
The bigger and less accessible these strategies and plans become, the more voters turn to single-issue candidates (who talk emotive sense about concerns of local significance); to the courts (who, at least until just before Christmas, seemed a good bet for kicking public administration into satisfying action); or to the media ("I'll tell Pat Kenny on you.")
The one party which has learned the requisite lesson from the present political uncertainty and recent erosion of bigger parties is Sinn FΘin, which concentrates on creating a presence at local level, as advocates and ombudsmen tuned into the changing realities of everyday life, and on creating allegiances one person at a time.
Sinn FΘin has no problem finding party workers or volunteers to knock on doors or lick envelopes because they've copped on to twin eternal verities of politics, articulated by Tip O'Neill:
1. People like to be asked.
2. People like to be thanked.
Because Sinn FΘin refuses to accept political apathy as a given, it is better at removing it than parties which, because they've been around longer, tend to be somewhat disempowered by the "good old days" they believe are now gone forever.
Many of the factors causing political disaffection are common throughout the developed world. Unique in its extra contribution in this State is the tribunal of inquiry.
Tribunals have exacerbated disengagement between public and politics, not by revealing corruption, (corruption may be second only to power as an aphrodisiac and attraction), but by giving a mysterious perpetuity to a particular period, putting us in a timewarp, endless action replays of the past displacing the present.
How many phrases from recent political speeches can be recalled by as many people as know, off by heart, the exchange that goes "Will we get a receipt?" "Will we f***?" Oddly, the tribunals don't make today's politicians look more honourable by comparison with the past, but just less colourful.
Mass media is the final, and possibly most powerful, element in the mix of factors generating political apathy. As long as most people met politics and politicians only in print, the relationship was one of distance, content and rhetoric.
Television changed all that. Television put each politician in our sitting room, in big close-ups showing their every pore, their every drop of interrogation-induced sweat.
Politicians, once they learned to dress for the studio and encapsulate concepts in examples, stories or illustrations, believed they had the TV thing sorted. They didn't realise the TV thing was changing all other media. It shortened the international attention span.
Soundbites in news bulletins went, within a decade, from an average of 45 seconds to an average of 12 seconds. During the same period, the length of features in publications such as Time and Newsweek reduced by a fifth and, in Britain, coverage of parliamentary debates in the broadsheet papers halved.
TV tilted the axis of public understanding toward personalities rather than issues. Pictures became more important, even when they contributed nothing to public understanding and were self-evidently only of entertainment value.
Witness the pictorial coverage given, last year, to Liam Lawlor's departure from Mountjoy, and, more recently, to his duty free shopping on the way to New York.
Media people uniformly blame politicians for the fall-off in political interest on the part of the general public, but media could - and should - help to reverse that process.
They won't stop making fun of politics and politicians, relentlessly exemplified by the extra space given to colour writers and satirical snippets on radio. The laughs are too easy.
They could, however, question some practices driven by what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu dubbed "the anxiety to be amusing at all costs".
The truism that "talking heads are bad", for example, is overdue its P45. It has led to shorter, frantically hurried interviews peppered with interruption. The notable exception is The Last Word on Today FM, where in-depth exploration of ideas is constant and popular.
On TV, the no-talking-heads rule led to the decoration of political programmes with anything and everything to divert and distract: phone-ins from viewers, telephone polls, e-mails read out on the air. Not to mention over-population: these days, Prime Time often has so many panellists lined up against a minister that the minister has an easy ride while the presenter is half-killed trying to ensure every panelist gets their 15 seconds of airtime and that there's some logical thread to the argumentation.
Better differentiation between the political parties, more vivid, accessible, passionate communication by politicians, more thoughtful and in-depth media coverage, and the productive conclusion of the tribunals could all help slow down the erosion of collective interest in serious issues.
However, only vigorously enforced legislation making it obligatory to vote is likely to reverse that erosion and predispose the rising generation to intellectual and actual involvement in politics.
Terry Prone works for Carr Communications in Dublin
More tomorrow