Now Ye're Talking - to a Political Correspondent

Hi everyone! Thanks to those of you who have posted questions so far - I'm just back in the office after being in Limerick for the seven-way debate last night. Suffice it to say: I'm voting for Claire Byrne.

So, let's get to it...

Agent Smith wrote: »

Which political party comes across as the most professional in their setup?

To be fair the 'big four' (Fine Gael, Labour, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin) are all quite professional in their dealings, but to be honest this is a natural by-product of the amount of money they have, which is again a by-product of the state funding they get because of the number of TDs they get elected.

There's only a couple of observations I'd have about this, in the two-and-a-bit years that I've been in this job: firstly, Fine Gael hasn't had cause to hold many events because when it's in government the events tend to take on a 'State' angle and are run by the various government departments rather than the party itself. That said, when it's running its annual Ard Fheis the events are very professionally run and always go very smoothly. (Labour's conferences run equally well but it seems to me that Labour holds more 'standalone' events for various party policies or documents that aren't directly linked to government.)

The other observation is that Sinn Féin has come on quite a bit in this regard in the last couple of years and are now, in terms of dealing with the media, on a par with the other larger parties as regards the facilities they offer at party events, and the degree to which they're prepared to take calls and questions after hours. Even little things like providing a stand for the various TV and radio stations to sit their microphones into make a big difference - up to a few months ago, if Micheal Martin was speaking to the media, FF would provide a mic stand which then gives any little interview a sense of gravitas as we're all then stood a few yards away. With SF there were no mic stands, so we'd hold microphones up to the mouths of Gerry Adams/Mary Lou McDonald and it would end up feeling a little more claustrophobic. SF on their own initiative are dealing with little things like this now.

Polo_Mint wrote: »

Should Heckling in the Dail be stamped out and which politician stands out to be the worst for heckling?

As a citizen I'd say absolutely, heckling should be stamped out - and certainly as a radio reporter covering Dáil events it gets pretty tiresome trying to find a good clip that isn't then ruined by a verbal brawl breaking out towards the end.

The only point I'd make is that it's virtually impossible to really stamp it out - bear in mind that when people are heckling in the chamber their microphones aren't turned on, and their roaring is only heard simply because of how loud it is. Ironically enough the only way you might be able to stamp it out is to leave every mic turned on, all the time, and then shame people into realising how disruptive their comments can be.

That said, the speaking time in the Dáil is so closely regulated that sometimes a well-placed heckle might be the only chance that a TD has to raise a legitimate concern during proceedings, so we'd need to tread carefully about any sort of measure that stops elected TDs from being able to make comments in a house of parliament.

I can't think of any obvious standout offender but the worst would generally be the elder members of Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil who tend to descend into the odd tribal heckle when it comes to any discussion about the records of either party.

5rtytry56 wrote: »

Does any political group, party try to avoid political correspondents like you?

In all honesty, no - but it's worth bearing in mind that the opposition parties realistically need the media to get their message across, so they are always going to make themselves more available. Generally speaking Labour are also very keen and amenable - especially since Joan Burton took over, she's been available to the media almost on a daily basis, which is fairly rare for the leader of a government party these days. Fine Gael are less accessible in relative terms to the other parties, but Enda Kenny generally speaks to the media once or twice a week - less than other past taoisigh, from what I'm told, but far more than some of his counterparts in Europe.

Kerrydude1981 wrote: »

Who is the toughest politician to interview?

How do you see the Kerry constituency going in this election?

The toughest are the party leaders, but all for different reasons - Enda Kenny simply because although he's available more regularly than other prime ministers, it's in a fairly controlled environment where he'll only have time for a few questions, one from each reporter. This means you have to think a little bit about what's the most worthwhile question to ask and you generally don't have the chance for a follow-up or to put something under a little more scrutiny.

Joan Burton is frustrating simply because she's prone to tangents. If you ask her what colour the sky is, she might start by saying how important it is to recognise all the various colours it might be from time to time, and while it's blue now it might not always be blue, and bear in mind that when it's not blue it's because there might be clouds which are full of condensation, and that condensation is compromised of water that has come from all manner of different households and businesses into our natural estuaries, and that it's important to make sure that the water that gets pumped into those rivers and lakes is clear and that's why we need Irish Water and so in answer to your question the sky is blue but of course my favourite colour is red, ahahaha.

Gerry Adams and Micheal Martin have a similar propensity to declare a question 'answered' when it would be more correct to say it's been 'addressed'. Adams is by far more prevalent at this - if you ask him what colour the sky is, he might say it's more relevant to comment on how much rain is fallen, and then you ask again about the sky he'll say he's answered the question. Martin is a lesser offender at this but more recently when it's come to coalition questions he's adopted the same tack.

As for Kerry... it's a very tough call. It's such a vast county and has no history of people transferring geographically from one end of the county to the other. Take a random example like Louth: if FG ran a candidate in Dundalk and another in Drogheda, you could reasonably trust one candidate to transfer their surplus/preferences to the other. Kerry has no history of doing that and it remains to be seen how 'local' people will vote. In my mind, Michael Healy-Rae (Ind) and Jimmy Deenihan (FG) are the only truly safe seats; the big question is whether the Healy-Rae gene pool splitting in two might eat up more of the traditional FF vote that John Brassil might have hoped for.

Dave! wrote: »

Any advice for aspiring journalists/political correspondents?

Any reflections on the direction that the news industry is going, the changes taking place in the industry? What will news look like in 5-10 years' time?

To be honest it seems foolhardy to try and offer an analysis of what news will look like in 5-10 years' time because nobody could possibly have predicted, 5 or 10 years ago, what the news world would look like in 2016. That said, I would safely imagine that one or more of Ireland's daily broadsheets will have gone the way of the Independent in ten years.

As regards advice... my own path was a bit random but if someone wanted t get into politics/current affairs reporting, a good start is simply to watch a lot of Dail/Seanad/council proceedings. In fact, a very good idea would be to get into the habit of going along to meetings of your local city/county council, if you can at all, and just sit in the public gallery studying how things work. A lot of this game is simply understanding the procedures and therefore knowing when to expect newsworthy exchanges/events to happen. I remember doing some trial shifts at a previous job and some colleagues would leave the Dáil stream running all day just in case it yielded some news. That's not a bad idea, but it's a far better idea to become familiar with the general scheduling and timetable of Dáil events so that you can spend that time more wisely.

One other idea would be to get to grips with the written answers that are tacked onto the end of every day's Dáil transcript - they can often be a treasure trove of interesting stuff that can yield a good story that you can sell to a newspaper and get yourself going. This is one example!

dulpit wrote: »

Hey Gavan.

1. How different is it being a correspondent for a radio station versus working for a newspaper/online paper?
2. Why do interviewers not push politicians more on answering the question asked, rather than allowing them waffle on and on?
3. Have you been tempted or have you called politicians on their obvious bulls**t?
4. Is it difficult to keep your own political leanings out of your reportage?
5. Based on the polls and your experience/soundings, do you reckon the next Dáil will collapse in a few months, or will it go a couple of years?
6. FF + FG = match made in heaven or not a chance in hell?

I'm aware that my answers are probably longer than anyone wants to read, so I'll try to rush through these...

* The biggest difference is that when you're working in the written word, you have more scope to do 'background' stories or analysis pieces. When you're working towards an hourly news bulletin, which only has space for perhaps 5 or 6 stories each hour, you generally have to be filing the sort of story that could potentially be on page one of a newspaper.

* I think every interviewer has different reasons for doing so - my gut assumption would be that if you pursue them, you might end up betraying your own anger and veering away from an interview into a straightforward row, which is not your job. There might also be a (naive?) belief that if you wait long enough, you'll get your answer anyway - or, if you give a politician enough rope, they'll say something stupid that you can latch onto afterward.

* I wouldn't use those words, but I have done in the past - where I've interrupted someone giving answers to say that their stance now completely contradicts something they've said in the past. Generally speaking the politician will have an excuse prepared - they'll either brazen it out, or offer some sort of explanation about circumstances changing or something.

* It's tricky sometimes - it's an especially prescient concern when you're in broadcasting and are more heavily regulated, with more obligation to be totally impartial. Naturally every reporter will have sympathies or leanings in a certain way but I try to approach every reporting job with the mindset of, 'I am a punter and don't know how I will vote. I hope that attending this event will help me make this decision,' and that pulls me through it. (As a general rule, I always approach jobs with the mindset of 'Citizen first, journalist second'. It's a useful rule of thumb.)

* It depends who's in power! Right now my leaning is that FG will be a minority government with FF offering what's called 'confidence and supply', where they agree to support the government (or abstain) in motions of confidence and on budgetary matters (i.e. money 'supply'). How long that lasts, though, I'm not sure. Both sides might be perfectly happy to keep that arrangement going until after the Budget simply so that they can rest and gather the resources they need for another election in early November.

* FG and FF is a match made in hell only for the more tribal members of either party who appear to think there is a difference between them. From the outside it's always seemed to me that they agree on 90-95% of major matters and that the only thing keeping them apart is how many bodies would turn in their metaphorical graves at the idea of coalition!

Buona Fortuna wrote: »

I think it was Michael Ring

Sure - but he could have said that from the getgo instead of going round the houses and he could then have explained how they intend growing it ...

The answer would have been clear and everyone would know what they stand for. Instead we got several minutes of waffle - leaving people like me thinking - He's hiding the answer or doesn't know.

To be honest, this is the classic example of the answer I gave Skrynesaver - clearly the presenter in this case decided it would be more diplomatic to hand Ringer a shovel and dig a hole for himself, rather than to push him into it. Again, it's a really nifty rule: if they're talking at length, they either know loads about the subject or almost nothing...

5rtytry56 wrote: »

Has been in politics made anybody a better person than when you first knew about them?

A great question, and one that unfortunately I'm not around long enough to answer because I haven't seen enough people come in and out of the halls of Leinster House and how it's changed them. Generally speaking, being in there tends to make people more mature - but that could easily be because they're simply getting older while they're there, or they might get married or have kids or whatever. It's a tiring gig though, so you can't be a total jack-the-lad in the way you might potentially have been as a councillor.

barry181091 wrote: »

This is so silly but I have always wanted to know; Are politicians from different partiess (Specifically TD's.) friends behind it all? Like the leaders debate last night, I could all imagine them joking after it. In a sort of, "Good match!" kind of way.

I get the feeling that a lot of the promises new far-left parties are offering may sound possible *technically* but are not possible in reality. I feel the experience of actually being in power/politics for so long is that you know how the whole system ACTUALLY works and what is ACTUALLY realistically possible. My question is this; Should the experience that the bigger parties have add to their ability to run the country?

Behind the partisan lines, they're almost all perfectly cordial and sound to each other. I've heard Stephen Donnelly (now of the Social Democrats, but an independent at the time) tell a story of how he was due out in RTE one night to do a radio debate against someone from Fine Gael - the two of them went for dinner first, one gave the other a lift to RTE, they went inside and tore strips off each other on air, and then happily shared the car back to the city centre where their hotels were. And that's perfectly routine! Even the party leaders are totally cordial to each other when they're 'off duty'.

You'd often find that TDs from the same/neighbouring constituencies, from rival parties, will work together on certain projects (getting a new school built, for example) and become quite friendly though doing so.

I might add as well - because it seems like a good point to do it - that the huge, huge majority of people in Leinster House get into politics for the right reasons. A few are made crooked by the trappings of power and the relative luxury of it all but fundamentally, being a TD is a full-time, all-consuming and seriously tiring job, and nobody would volunteer themselves for it (even though it's very handsomely paid) unless their deepest motivation was for a sense of civic duty and public service.

As regards whether larger parties should be more pragmatic - it's definitely a valid point. Certainly there are constitutional rules and EU factors that would make some idealistic promises utterly unenforceable - like, for example, a promise to scrap upward-only rent reviews (unconstitutional) or to introduce another special VAT rate for particular industries (against the EU VAT directive).

Ultimately though that's really a question that every voter should consider themselves - is 'having experience in power' something they value, or is it a byword for 'why didn't they implement that idea last time?'...

Kerrydude1981 wrote: »

Weirdest experience you have had as Political Correspondent?

Not so much 'weird' as 'surreal' - I was in Washington last March to cover Enda's tour of the United States around St Patrick's Day, and I thought we were lining up for a quick soundbite and photo-op when in fact we were lining up to get into the Oval Office for a joint press-conference-of-sorts. It was a tightly packed queue and I was four or five people from the front so when the queue moved forward I thought it was because Enda and Obama had materialised before us. But suddenly the queue moved forward another step, and another... and suddenly you find yourself in a room where all you can see is a curved ceiling and you realise there's no corners and holycrapitstheOvalOfficeandIhopeIvealreadystartedmyrecorder...

So, no, sadly the answer is not 'a 7-way'...

panda100 wrote: »

I thought you cut your journalistic teeth on the UCD Forum of Boards.ie

Really interesting insight into the world of a political journalist so far.

In all honesty, it was actually taking minutes of meetings when I was secretary of UCD Students' Union! Though my exploits over on 470 didn't hurt... :cool:

blue5000 wrote: »

Thanks Gav for coming on here.

How many seats do you reckon Labour will have after this election?

It's always dangerous to make a prediction this far out but I reckon Labour is currently set to revert back to its usual 'home' of 10% of the vote, and around 10% of the seats in the Dáil.

It won't be the national bloodbath many of the scale many are expecting - I'd suggest 12-15 seats.

Mrs Shrek wrote: »

Would or could you ever be tempted to throw your hat at politics yourself?

There are days where I'd say I'm tempted and other days where I'm not at all. The way the Irish system is set up, it's virtually impossible to make an electoral breakthrough without having slaved your way through the funeral circuit for a few years beforehand and any interest I'd have in the policy side of things would be totally removed by having to do a parochial slog first. The alternative to this is to go for the Seanad which, as it stands, is far less powerful and a difficult place to do anything seriously meaningful.

Another part of me has the same level of fascination as spin-doctoring as someone else asked. Much as I'd be piqued by doing it for a while, could I feasibly go back to journalism after it? Probably not.

This might sound lofty but in my own way I'd like to think I'm contributing in some way. There are many vital cogs in a democracy and a decent media is one of them - what's the point of democracy if nobody pays attention to what your leaders do between elections? The last bit is my job and right now it's one I'm perfectly happy to stick with!