Cowen is back! (Really?) – Smyth on the Sundays

BRIAN COWEN is back, the Sundays say.

How do you measure something like that? Oh, we just need to depend on the barometer of all things true in Ireland:  the political columnists and opinion writers in our quality newspapers. Right so, it must be true then.

And so it began this weekend, from the people who celebrated every excess of the boom years and other great scams of our time, we now have: ‘Cowen – The Sequel.. He’s back, bigger, with make up… and he’s angry!!!’

Sarah McInerney and Stephen O’Brien kicked off with an article titled Cowen’s Christmas List in The Sunday Times.

According to their vox-pop of unnamed but “senior” Fianna Fáil TDs, some are both ‘shocked and delighted’ that the bullying of interviewers so renowned of Cowen’s media performances has returned.

McInerney and O’Brien reported that Cowen “gave a series of media interviews that were reminiscent of his bullish performances during the 2007 general election campaign”. Then we had the quote from a “middle-ranking” member. (How do media scribes measure this in Fianna Fáil? Do they have some secret code? Could it be that Fianna Fáil is in fact a secret military organisation?)

Anyway, the “middle-ranking member" claimed:

They’re saying the old Brian Cowen is back. We don’t know where he’s been for the last two years but he’s back now.

It fell to Justine McCarthy to bring a small glimmer of reality in her article titled Biffoesque blustering counts more than shame or integrity.

Miriam O'Callaghan

McCarthy focuses on Cowen’s performance in the Miriam O’Callaghan RTÉ Primetime interview. And, yes, there is a lot of hand-waving and gesturing. By the way, we don’t have a bail-out deal that dilutes our sovereignty – apparently we have an “arrangement”.

And Brian is wearing a lot of make-up. Not sure why.

O’Callaghan is good in the pointed questions she asked; Cowen’s answers were pure bluff.

He is not responsible for anything and uses the ‘global economic downturn argument’ as the reason for “the situation we’re in”.

And so, in the Sunday Independent there are four pages with the strapline Brian Cowen talks a good fight.

The articles run from Eamon Delaney’s analysis of the latest Green Party dithering to Jody Corcoran talking about Cowen having his ‘Mojo back’. Maybe Cowen has been watching those Cheryl Cole L’Oreal ads.

It falls to John Drennan to write Taoiseach still a dead leader talking. Drennan writes of Cowen:

Looking all too like some embattled dictator, trapped in a bunker, calling on imaginary legions to rescue his broken state.

The Tribune also focuses on the Cowen Second Coming. Just when it was all over, Biffo came back was the headline to Shane Coleman’s article: “Somehow, inexplicably, it was Brian Cowen’s week.”

In The Sunday Business Post, Pat Leahy wrote that Cowen “staged a rally last week with combative performances in the Dáil and in the media” but at least countered it with:

But it’s gone past fightin’ talk now, and anyway this rally will probably fade.

The fact that so many journalists and the editors who direct them decided, pack-like, to report this way is a bad reflection on what goes as news.

Brian Cowen has been rude, bullying and disingenuous in media interviews for many years, decades even. To report it this week as news is a sham, and part of, I humbly think, an attempt by the news media to talk up Cowen and Fianna Fáil so the media horse race coverage of the next election will have more drama.

There was nothing new to see in the Government this week.

The car is still crashed and the wreckage has not been cleared away.

The economy is still in crisis and nobody in government has a strategy to get us out of here.

Once again we heard the ‘doing our best’, ‘not our fault’, ‘international global downturn’ nonsense, except that this week it was repackaged as a ‘fight back’.

This is not news and as opinion it must have been a slow week for this to be the focus of Sunday papers.