Famous name is no guarantee of unchallenged success

Date Published: 30-Mar-2011

How can you lose faith in a prime minister whose name is Socrates? A classical Greek Athenian philosopher who is credited as one of the founders of westerm philosophy, his namesake is now no longer considered worthy ofsorting out the economic problems of Iberian’s poor relations.

Of course when you preface Socrates with Jose – to give the outgoing Portuguese PM his full name – it loses a little bit of its lustre. It’s like being called Johnny Pele. But surely if the surname doesn’t inspire some form of confidence, we’re all bunched?

Sending Socrates to the European Union should have guaranteed the Portuguese the sort of bail-out that two men named Brian could never hope to achieve – instead he never made it out of the blocks.

Maybe they confused him with the other Socrates, the Brazilian captain of the eighties who is now remembered for three things – smoking forty fags a day, studying to be a doctor and leading one of the most talented sides his country has ever produced to precisely nothing.

The one fact that is constantly misquoted about this Socrates – he was actually called Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira but can you imagine the cost of putting that on the back of your young fella’s jersey – is that he played for UCD while studying medicine in Dublin.

And indeed Dr Socrates is a name that would fill you

with some confidence as you awaited his deliberations on your test results – although if he was smoking it might suggest that you wouldn’t be skipping out the front door with a clean bill of health.

Name association can be a wonderful thing, its mere mention according the name’s owner a status that his or her own ability would never entitle them to.

I was one part owner of a greyhound that – admittedly after a fair amount of drink – we decided to call Charlie Bird. Now this wasn’t insulting to RTE’s intrepid adventurer; he owned an equal share of the same dog.

We’d bought him at a Media Ball in Dublin, without ever laying eyes on him. More importantly, he agreed to be bought without laying eyes on us.

But we called him Charlie Bird for one reason only – the name recognition. We had a notion that our Charlie was even faster than the real thing, as quick chasing a mechanical hare as the reporter was at hunting down politicians on the Dail plinth.

And then there would be the advertising campaigns when he won a decent race: “Charlie Bird swears by Pedigree Chum”; “Charlie Bird gets his coat washed at Suds Emporium” – that sort of thing.

People would back him because they recognised his name, other dogs would fear him because of his constant yapping in the kennels. We couldn’t lose – and if we needed the extra fillip of publicity, we could parade Charlie the dog with Charlie the newshound for a publicity photograph.

So it should have been with Jose Socrates, particularly if he played down the first name. RTE’s website had a headline last week which said – in relation to his austerity proposals – simply ‘Socrates warns of rejection consequences’. How that didn’t make the natives sit up and take notice, we will never know.

And some names have more impact than others – Enda Kenny, for example, threatening to burn the banks doesn’t have half the effect it would if someone in the higher echelons of Sinn Fein issued a warning….particularly if they signed it ‘P O’Neill’ at the end of the statement.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.