It was the epicentre of our Celtic Tiger excess. Each year, like a scene from Apocalypse Now, a swarm of helicopters would arrive, the limos would line up and the sound of champagne corks would pop like a twenty-one gun salute to our greed.
But seeing the rogues gallery, including the likes of Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy, return to the Galway Races this week has rightly left a sour taste in many people’s mouth.
I was as guilty as the rest of them. Yes, while the Celtic Tiger roared I was to be found in Galway wining and dining with the best of them. But I was probably considered a nobody, because it used to be a case of if you didn’t have a helicopter you just weren’t at the races. And then reality struck. The cruel winds of recession not only ravaged our country but also gave us the cold slap of reality across our faces that we needed. The endless champagne, helicopters and horse races had to stop.
But while some of us have moved on, Bertie and Charlie were still to be seen swanning around amid the Champagne tents and the caviar, while the rest of the country still struggles to get back on its feet.
They both were not only the architects of our economic boom but also of our disastrous fall from grace. So even though they are now private citizens and can do as they please, different rules of decorum apply for the former head of state and finance minister.
There are loads of horse races around the country, but the reason people swagger around Galway this time of year is to be seen. Of course, people used to say great deals were done as the powerful and the mighty converged on this orgy of excess, but to be honest this is simply a myth. The only thing to emerge for most after the excess of champagne, lobster and caviar would have been a hangover.
So as the country deals with its hangover of recession, Bertie should be keeping his head down.
However, further salt was rubbed in our wounds when news that Bertie bags €40,000 for, as the Irish Independent put it, “tips on Celtic Tiger ‘success’” made the front pages. It is beside the point that for such speaking engagements the figure he gets, just like Tony Blair, is actually double that. While Bertie has every right to earn a living, he should not in the current climate be flaunting it.
While the Americans embrace failure and are eager to learn from it, in Irish culture it is still considered taboo. Bertie achieved great things while Taoiseach, the most outstanding being peace in Northern Ireland, and despite what people currently think the blame for the collapse of the economy rests on many shoulders, not alone his. But at present he is seen as a pariah.
Today in Ireland people in the public eye almost need to be seen to be going around in sackcloths and ashes. It has gone from one extreme to another and this is no bad thing.
But with a deal on Ireland’s bailout repayments easing our burden this week, the signs that we are thankfully seeing light at the end of the tunnel are growing.
It is time for the country to rise up, but maybe not to the crazy old days of the Galway Races.
As the Queen arrives in Ireland maybe she can teach Obama some media management lessons after the US government flapped and floundered desperately trying to control the storm surrounding Osama bin Laden, writes Paul Allen
It was a right royal cock up. As news of the demise of Osama bin Laden flooded onto TV screens, newspapers and magazines, what should have been a coup was quickly turning into a PR disaster.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Royal Family was basking in the glory of a flawless, perfectly executed public relations operation as the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton ran as smoothly as Pippa Middleton’s now famous derriere.
The two events obvious differ greatly in terms of their geo-political importance, yet both are classic examples of how and how not to orchestrate a targeted public relations campaign.
When President Barack Obama calmly swaggered up to the microphone to tell the American public something it had waited over a decade to hear it should have been a case of game, set and match.
However, his advisors seemingly were oblivious to the basic rule of PR, which states that if an unfolding story in the era of 24-hour news is not managed smoothly along the proper guide wires and directed in a strategic way it will quickly spin out of control.
The two words fundamental to crisis management are command and control. You must remain in charge of how an unfolding story is managed and, above all, deal with the facts by sticking to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
However, as the story progressed the Whitehouse was being accused of burying itself under a volcano of badly thought-out lies. Indeed, large parts of President Barack Obama’s Sunday night address and the subsequent briefing by his counter-terrorism coordinator John Brennan hours after the raid were subsequently retracted.
The White House photograph of the President and his top advisors supposedly watching real-time footage of the Navy Seal’s operation turned out to be somewhat phoney. A spokesperson admitted the real-time video link had stopped working before the Seals had entered the compound in Abbottabad.
Even more unforgiveable was when the public were told Osama bin Laden was armed and used his wife as a human shield. It quickly transpired that these ‘facts’ were nonsense.
Next we were told of a fierce 40-munite gunfight as the navy seals stormed the “luxury villa”. It was then revealed only one of those killed in the raid actually had a gun. Osama’s luxury villa originally said to be worth a million dollars was soon downgraded to a large but sparse compound, valued by local property experts at a quarter of the Whitehouse’s original estimate.
But it was the dilly-dallying over the photographs of Obama’s bullet riddled face that proved the most embarrassing. The case of ‘will they won’t they’ was allowed to drag on for days until the Whitehouse finally decided against releasing the gruesome snaps.
Indeed, Obama’s team seems not only to have had problems providing convincing documentation surrounding Bin Laden’s departure but also the President’s own arrival. The unnecessary drama surrounding the President’s birth cert proved long before the current fiasco that Obama could do with some royal lessons when it comes to media management.
While Buckingham Palace managed its affairs with a typical stiff upper lip, there was also a very down-to-earth, more human touch to the proceedings. William and Kate were always going to do things a little differently, but the lessons learnt from the events surrounding Lady Diana’s death were well learnt.
There were clever set pieces, such as the driving of Prince Charles’s eco-powered Aston Martin, festooned with ribbons and a JU5T WED registration, down the Mall. But even when the unexpected photos of a scantily clad Pippa Middleton hit the headlines, the Palace refused to get itself in a flap. It held its head high and went about business as usual. The Royals seemed always in control, were never caught off guard and directed the event superbly.
Cleverly, in a period of tough economic times, the extravagance of the wedding was balanced by Kate’s £49.99 high street going-away outfit to show the couple is still very much in-touch with reality.
While the US government suffered from too many cooks trying to orchestrate an out-of-tune symphony surrounding Osama’s demise, the Royals cleverly minimised leaks and kept the media happy by ensuring plenty of access to the couple on the big day. This was with the understanding that after the event they would be left in peace. It was controlled, it was smooth, it was sleek and, above all, it was successful.
On the other hand, Obama’s PR strategy seemed to change more often than the President changed his socks. Whether the raid was planed three years ago or three weeks ago, the seeming lack of planning from a post-event media management perspective was shocking. The catastrophe suffered from too much information and too little fact.
When controlling the coverage of a major event or crisis with the slow strategic release of information, the media will always try to fill the vacuum with speculation or even down right lies. The problem with Obama’s advisors is that this time they seemed intent on doing the media’s job for them.