Poor Denis has been let down... by alter ego’s loose lips

THERE’S a wonderfully funny scene in Woody Allen’s film Bananas where his character, Fielding Mellish, who has accidentally ended up as the president of a tin-pot republic, is on trial for treason.

In the process of conducting his own defence, he puts himself in the witness box and cross-examines himself, haranguing himself from the body of the court – ‘I would not joke with this court if I were you, Mr Mellish!’ – and then racing back to the box to answer his own questions.

And as his own interrogation of himself becomes more intense, he stammers and sweats and pleads to be believed. ‘I swear to God...’ he wails and then, racing back down and assuming his lawyerly pose again, he scoffs: ‘Aha – you swear to God and yet you have no compunction about teaching evolution!’

Listening to Communications Minister Denis Naughten explain the difference between his ‘personal’ and his ‘ministerial’ incarnations last week, I was strongly reminded of Fielding Mellish. It turns out Minister Naughten the politician and Minister Naughten the private individual might not always know what the other is thinking. They mightn’t even always agree in their views. In keeping with the popular Irish habit of side-stepping issues, Denis Naughten basically told the Dáil last week that his right hand does not necessarily know what his left hand is doing.

So when he was passing sensitive information on to a paid lobbyist for INM, information which ended up in the paws of Denis O’Brien, Minister Fielding Naughten was simply expressing a personal opinion about what Minister Denis Mellish might perhaps be thinking.

He wasn’t telling the lobbyist, Eoghan Ó Neachtain, what the Minister was thinking; he was simply telling him what he was thinking the Minister might be thinking. Not that he’d know for sure, obviously, unless he’d put himself in the witness box and cross-examined himself.

And even then, Denis the Private Citizen would have had his work cut out trying to winkle information out of Denis the Minister. Because Denis the Minister, as we know from his stern pronouncements, is a closed book when it comes to his ruminations. Ministerial secrets and opinions are fiercely guarded by Denis the Minister; he won’t even share them with Dáil Éireann, let alone trust them with his loose-tongued alter ego Denis the Private Citizen.

He keeps his cards close to his chest, does Denis the Minister. After all, lots of people were speculating about his thinking on the issue in question – INM’s proposed takeover of Celtic Media, which would have significantly strengthened Denis O’Brien’s control of the Irish media landscape – at the time. And he wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone.

Lots of interested parties wanted to know if he would refer the bid to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, but he was silent. Far from being a foregone conclusion, as Fine Gael is now trying to spin it, opinion was divided about his plans. Some informed sources believed he’d give the proposal the nod without a referral to the BAI; some even suggested it was already a done deal.

As for Denis the Minister, though, wild horses couldn’t have dragged a hint of a whisper of a suggestion of a clue out of him. Indeed, when he was questioned in Dáil Éireann about his attitude to the proposed takeover, Denis the Minister pompously informed the people of Ireland, via their elected representatives, that ‘I have not made my views clear, and I am not going to’. But it turns out that, more than a month beforehand, Denis the Private Citizen had made his views very clear indeed. In a conversation weeks earlier with INM’s man, he’d said that the rumoured referral was highly likely. And, by sheer coincidence, that’s exactly what happened.

This was valuable and sensitive commercial information, emanating from a Government department, which was being withheld from the general public at the time, but ended up going straight to Denis O’Brien. Since Fine Gaelled governments are notoriously strict on This Sort of Thing, Denis the Minister must be absolutely furious with Denis the Private Citizen for being such a blabbermouth. Loose talk, he should remind him, costs lives, careers and millions of euro in tribunal fees.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, Bananas the movie was set in a corrupt South American banana republic where the rule of law counted for zero and a bumbling nobody could end up as a leading politician just by being in the right place at the right time.

And perhaps in Woody Allen’s wildest comic imaginings, the citizens of a banana republic might just believe in a government minister capable of holding two distinct views of a sensitive issue at the same time: one of them his personal attitude, the other his political opinion. They might even believe the minister’s private persona forgot to discuss it with his political persona, before shooting off his mouth about it to an interested third party.

But, much as we hate to break this to Minister Fielding Mellish, we’re not buying it here.