'I could not fail to disagree with you less!" is an example. Or how about: "Brexit means Brexit and we're going to make a Titanic success of it!" Just two utterings of abject gibberish of the sort that earned UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson the most recent Foot In Mouth Lifetime Achievement Award, as presented by the Plain English Campaign.
ed by Chrissie Maher, the PEC has campaigned for 40 years against nonsense jargon by individuals and organisations in power; be they politicians, council officials, the electricity board or banking personnel.
The PEC promotes what it calls "plain-speaking democracy" in an era in which it believes political and corporate language has become ever more evasive, obtuse and vague in its communication. Too often, deliberately so.
The PEC believes that failure by publicly responsible people in power to communicate plainly, disempowers ordinary citizens and therefore results in a failure of public service by the perpetrator.
Spin, or the deliberate distortion of information, is something we are well familiar with in Irish politics. With the rise of jargon-infested US tech businesses here, social media and the growing reliance of our politicians on quack spin doctors, we Irish are saturated in official gobbledegook.
Margaret E Ward is the principal of the corporate communications firm Clear Ink and a recent member of the RTE board. "American consultancy speak has crept in everywhere. Everything is about 'driving and delivering solutions'. We are all 'triangulating' from meetings and talking about 'collateral damage'. Much of it means nothing.
"The team leaders use this sort of jargon because they think it sounds knowledgeable and then the team members copy to be more like them. Now it's crept into Irish politics and policy speak and Government reports. Vague jargon helps absolutely no one," says Ward.
Our outgoing Fine Gael-led Government was especially spintastic. The missives and statements it produced took official speak to brave new worlds.
First with the infrastructure of communications. During its term of office, FG attempted to rein in State press offices to bring them under the control of its own advisers.
The party leadership's attempt to set up the infamous Strategic Communications Unit (nicknamed Scud) in order to help to centralise departmental messages by channelling them through the Department of the Taoiseach, was a manoeuvre that some straitened European regimes of the 1930s would have approved of. Even Fianna Fáil described the SCU as being set up "to thwart the role of the independent media" and to deploy the resources of state "to promote the Fine Gael-led Government".
The outgoing FG regime also rowed back on Freedom of Information (FOI) applications, a vital means through which journalists have long been able to delve into centralised officialdom to help make Government accountable.
There was a blander obfuscation in day-to-day missives. Through the last two years, I have regularly had to contact the Department of Housing to ask it to explain plainly to me the latest monthly homeless figures it had issued. These had been split into different categories and, for some reason, no longer included (anywhere) a total tally of homeless individuals, despite being headed so. So you had to add them up for yourself.
We saw spin applied to the real content of these lists, as local authorities were pressurised to 'recategorise' real people in order to reduce the overall numbers of 'homeless'. In 'word war three', regular terms and expressions were tortured beyond recognition.
Finally, there was the rotten old elusive, obtuse and vague language of the sort that the PEC rails against in the UK. Our housing policy tomes are wholly built on these cracked bricks. For example: there's a scourge of 'solutions' (I wish to God someone would solve the solutions problem!). Because the only thing a 'solution' isn't, is a problem. It could in fact be absolutely anything else. Have you ever looked up a company online to find out exactly what it is that company does? Only to discover that they're in the business of driving 'solutions'?
So too are those who have been working on our last Government's housing policies. "New housing solutions" have been widely provided (policy bulletins said with regularity). To the punter, this might imply "lots of homes built".
In reality, for social housing, it meant "everything but lots of new homes built". When you looked deeper, "new housing solutions" covered everything from doing up an existing unoccupied council flat to renting an existing home, to putting in another council tenant, to connecting some electricity.
And in an inordinate number of cases, "new housing solutions" were achieved simply by handing over some money in the form of a HAP. Very few new social houses were actually built during the term.
But the most grievously vague of all has been the term 'affordable', which Fine Gael has sprinkled like manure through Government housing documentation and policy. As we all know, a five-bed luxury penthouse is quite 'affordable' to a billionaire, but not to anyone else. Because 'affordable' means nothing in particular, they built a policy on it. Rebuilding Ireland is full of it. And no one can ever prove you didn't deliver on a vagary like 'affordable'.
Perhaps we found something out with the redevelopment of O'Devaney Gardens, a vast social housing scheme in Dublin originally owned by the tax payer and the citizens of Ireland. When it recently emerged shiny new, a decade after its socially housed residents were vacated and it had been partially privatised, Dublin City Council made the mistake of quantifying the term 'affordable' as €420,000 for a three-bed apartment there. There was uproar. But unlike Government policy, DCC made the mistake of getting specific about 'affordable'.
Twice prior to the Fine Gael Government ending last week, I submitted an official press question to the Department of Housing. Both times, I asked them what exactly they meant by 'affordable', the term upon which much of their housing policy is built. Could they put a monetary interpretation to this? Affordable? How much is that? Can you even give me a band? From €150,000 to €200,000? I asked twice by email. No answer both times.
Because they don't know either. There is no answer. That's why it's there.
Then there's their Trumpian stonewall: just deny. "More than 10,000 people homeless and more ordinary people can't afford to buy. That's a failure isn't it?" Answer: "Not true. We're doing a great job. See the solutions, the affordable, blah blah, solutions etc."
Even the title of the four-year policy: Rebuilding Ireland, would suggest it had something to do with construction or building? But the real track record, which is sometimes difficult to follow due to obfuscation, suggests that very little social-house building has gone on at all since RI was launched in 2016. Plenty of big private build-to-let blocks and shared accommodation though.
Rebuilding Ireland was hailed as a €6 billion plan to increase the supply of new homes to 25,000 per annum by 2020 (now) and to deliver an additional 50,000 social housing units in the period to 2021 (six months' time); and to meet the housing needs of an additional 87,000 households.
The new Government has already started by promising 50,000 new social houses. But are these the same 50,000 homes promised four years ago? Or do we get 100,000 all in?
Or are they starting already... with yet another great big steaming pile of Titanic blah?
