Last night with Mary Lou v the Two Lads

 I note – without surprise – that The Irish Times today is telling its readers that  last night’s leaders’ debate didn’t change the ‘focus’ or ‘sway the momentum’ towards Micheál Martin, Mary Lou McDonald or Simon Harris. No change, says the newspaper of record.

Funny they should say that (although predictable). I watched the entire thing (yes, very much past my bed-time) and what I saw were two men in greyish suits struggling to contain a brightly-clad woman between them – and failing.

It’s like on the hustings: you can tell when some politicians are on edge, smiling at constituents through gritted teeth, and some other politicians know how to be in the moment, talking and listening, hand-shaking and hugging, looking as though this was their natural element.

Overall impressions matter. Yes of course we should pay attention to what is said, but in such debates, the overall impression is crucial.

Simon Harris did the reverse of what we used to do when we went to confession as children: tell the wee sins and then at the end toss in the big ones and hope the priest doesn’t faint. Simon started – well actually, he was started by Miriam O’Callaghan  – and acknowledged he’d made a bags of things down in Cork with Charlotte. As a test of his sincerity in confessing his sin, he said he was really  pleased to have established contact with Charlotte, he was really really grateful that he got to have the phone-call with her, that he really really had learnt a lot from the occasion.

Do you remember Brian Friel’s great play ‘Philadelphia Here I Come’? In it, two actors play one character: Actor 1 is the public Gar, who is generally civil and obedient and polite; Actor 2 is the private Gar, who leaps about and shouts   and yells in the faces of authority and phoniness. 

I found myself wondering: what’s Simon really really really wanting to say about Charlotte in Cork: Might it be ‘What sort of fucking moron allowed the cameras to pick up our exchange? They’re paid to help me avoid such grating exchanges, including this one which has shredded my nerves and sent my heart thudding like a trip-hammer. Of course I didn’t want to talk to her in the shopping centre, of course it was Garden of Gethsemane stuff, having to talk to her on the phone and grovel, grovel, grovel until my knees were near wore out. I have only three things to say about the whole matter: fuck cameras, fuck microphones, and fuck my stupid staff who didn’t steer me away from Charlotte the human hand-grenade.

Simon’s problem on TV last night was not that he didn’t grovel again – of course he did – nor that he didn’t have loads of statistics inside his large head – he did. The problem was, they came gushing out of him at warp speed, like a man relieving his pent-up bladder into a rural hedge. So many numbers, all delivered at such pace,I found myself giving up on even trying to follow the line of what he was saying.what he was talking about.

Micheál Martin, on the other hand, resembled a fairly powerful car that keeps shuddering into life, then stops, followed by more sssssshudders and another racing episode.  He wasn’t quite the unhappy figure that Harris presented, but he didn’t look like a man who was doing a happy dance in the limelight. More like a man with toothache who hasn’t been sleeping well for the last three weeks.

Mary Lou McDonald chose to amble. Ask her a question and she thinks for a few seconds,then in unhurried fashion presents her forceful answer. This is often couched in terms of people she has met, something someone said to her  – in short, her answers had a conversational tone which really came as a relief after the shuddering, 1,000 mph men flanking her.

So once more I don’t agree with The Irish Times and their judgement.  It’s true nothing shattering happened, but the overall impression was without doubt an unflappable woman running rings round a couple of very tense men.

I suspect many others came to the same conclusion.  We’ll find out on Friday and over the weekend.