Brexit isn’t a sexy story – but it’s so crucial to all our futures

World of Politics with Harry McGee

A rule of thumb of politics is that the most important issues often tend to be the ones that are just too hard to explain without bring people beyond distraction.  Climate change is a classic example; everybody understands how important it is and the changes that will be required. But once you commit pen to paper to try and explain all that your audience is reduced to a handful of tofu-eating bearded people, relatively speaking.

The EU is another. There’s a committee in Leinster House that spends its time scrutinising EU legislation. God love them; that’s the equivalent of being told by a teacher you will be writing out 500 lines of “I must behave in class” every single day for the rest of my life.

I have had the great displeasure of having to cover referendums on EU treaties including Nice and Lisbon. And despite all the millions of words and arguments and debates and campaigns, when people voted on the first Lisbon Treaty they voted on hunch and gut instinct.

Without any solid evidence, there was a suspicion of too much sovereignty being conceded to Europe and there were also fears (false as it turned out) that their kids would get conscripted into a European Army.

The second kind of story that is hard to sell initially starts off as something that commands everybody’s attention. But the problem is it becomes so drawn-out and so bogged down in dispute, impasse that people’s interest in it begins to wane.

The Tribunals of Inquiry were a good example of this. When the revelations of planning bribes, and of Charlie Haughey’s personal finances, came into the public domain they were sensational.

The first few years of both Tribunals were compelling. Who could forget James Gogarty’s evidence or the stunning disclosure that Ben Dunne had given Haughey more than one million pounds?

But then the Tribunals ground on for years and years until there came a time when people half forgot the point of them, fully forgot most of the detail, and they just became tedious. At the end the extravagant cost of the Tribunals became almost as much a controversy as the topics.

Sure, there were brief moments of renewed interest – when Bertie Ahern’s finances were disclosed for example. By the time their voluminous reports were issued, the subject matter was no longer a matter of “grave and urgent public importance”, that was for sure.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.