O’Conall Street

It’s Irish News article day again. See below this month’s piece. 

I was in Venice last week a made a little bit of history. Weber Shandwick became the first Public Relations agency from the North of Ireland to win a SABRE, the European Public Relations Award. We were also the only Irish winners on the night. Anyway, back to the city with no cars, where life and art intermingle and where every street has a story to tell.

There is an amazing painting in the Doge’s Palace, San Marco, depicting the battle of Lepanto - an epic encounter between the Christian and Ottoman (Turkish) forces and an important milestone of that period in history. On the day the Christians won out and by the time Andrea Vincentino came to depict the battle from the Venetian perspective he was very careful not to create a scene which was demeaning to the Turks. Instead this great master of the sixteenth century painted two brave fleets in man to man combat. The Venetians were a trading people and there was business to be done. They may have defeated the Turks at sea but did not want to humiliate them in the Piazza di San Marco when they came to engage in commerce. Being magnanimous in victory and defeat was one of the great strengths of the Venetian republic.

What’s this got to do with communications? Well there is a minister in our Executive who could take a lesson or two from the Venetians. As our kids get ready for the summer, education in Northern Ireland is in crisis and many are arguing that crisis has been fuelled by how the minister has chosen to communicate or not communicate her plans for the future of selection.

Caitriona Ruane made a fundamental mistake of communications ten days ago when, out of the blue, she published proposals to break the deadlock on the issue without in anyway preparing the ground for what she was about to say. This was not a problem that crept up behind her by surprise, for over a year now the minister has failed to engage in a meaningful debate about her vision for the future and bring with her those on the other side of the argument.

In communications victories are not solutions. The art of good consensus politics is the art of good communications. You identify the key stakeholder groups, analyse and understand who will support you and why and then set about trying to persuade those against you of the benefits of your argument. You also keep as much of your communications as possible in private. Public debate too early is certain to result in failure. At the end of the day the media want a story, not necessarily a solution. Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting you can bring all the people with you all the time but on an issue as important and central to life as this one the minister should have been aiming to bring the majority of parents at least as well as a majority in the assembly with her.

The reality has been that over the past year her inability to engage and communicate effectively with the many stakeholders in this debate has resulted in common ground being lost. Angela Smyth, the New Labour direst rule minister, had got all the key stakeholder groups and the point where they agreed on a series of broad principles. That there would be some form of selection at 14, that there were demographic realities which everyone needed to accept and that the identities, particularly, religious the ethos of schools would be protected in the future. From what I understand this consensus remained in broad terms following the St Andrews negotiations in the preparation for government committee at the Assembly.

In simple communications terms the obvious thing for the new minister to have done would be to widen this consensus across the broad population thus copper fastening it, enabling her to tackle the difficult issues of detail from a position of strength. Instead she appeared to go to ground for twelve months.

As it is we are not just at a cross roads but in the middle of a stand off. It will be difficult for her to negotiate her way out of this one but negotiate she must and in negotiations, all things being equal, it is generally the party that can invoke popular support that carries the day. If I were the minister I would be thinking about how I can make my opponents feel like they came up with the solution for when the battle comes to be recorded all sides need to be able to walk away with their heads held high.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 8:18 am and is filed under Business, Current Affairs, Politics, Public Affairs, Public Relations, The Media, Weber Shandwick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.