In yesterday's Sunday Business Post Pat Leahy blames Pat Rabbitte for steering himself into a pickle last week for being unclear about post-election intentions. In doing so "he has allowed another week to pass in which the opposition has been too busy talking about political process to concentrate on the issues voters actually care about". Leahy then goes on to rehash and analyse the process elements of the story for the entire article. In his penultimate sentence he mentioned that Rabbitte really wanted to talk about childcare, "which voters care about - but ended up talking about electoral strategy, which they don’t". Labour had just announced the first of its five "commitments for change" which was precisely about childcare.
Leahy is engaging in what philosophers would call a "performative contradiction", which occurs when there is a discrepancy between act and content, between performance and proposition. The truth about Leahy's claim that politicians should deal with the issues voters care about is belied by his own performance in contributing to the coverage of the process issue and almost entirely ignoring an important issue of policy. In Saturday's Irish Times Noel Whelan Whelan observed:
The 2007 election is still some months away but already there are signs that the issues are not going to get a look in. This week has set a bad precedent for how this election is going to be covered. Much of the space which should be given to a pre-election debate about the issues, has instead been filled with coverage about post-election scenarios for government formation.
He adds that the "most significant thing which Rabbitte had to say last week wasn't about government formation but about pre-school education", and, to his credit, the rest of the article is a searching analysis of Labour's proposal. Whelan doesn't ignore the political context of such a policy but that article would be a far better guide to an undecided voter than almost anything else that has appeared recently.
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