When you went out to cast your anti-government vote last week, you probably thought you were mad as hell. You were mad about negative equity, pensions levies and income cuts. You were mad because the government, like a badly trained puppy, keeps lurching into your budget, eating some benefit - and even when it is forced to give it back (think Christmas bonus) it has chewed some good out of it by the time you retrieve the soggy remainder.
At least that's what you thought. In fact you were labouring under a misapprehension. You didn't vote for Fine Gael, Labour and independents or spoil your vote because of bad stuff the government has done. You did it because Fianna Fail and the Green party failed to communicate with you.
This "failure to communicate" is the new cabinet mantra. Our leaders have done no wrong. It's just that their press releases weren't sufficiently punchy. They didn't get the message out. That's the only problem.
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This explanation for an electoral drubbing might have some credibility if it were articulated by someone like the tanaiste - great voice, pity about the content - but it doesn't wash when it comes from someone like Mary Hanafin, the social welfare minister, who communicates with the clarity of a scalpel. Neither does it sit well with Noel Dempsey, the transport minister.
I was on a television programme in which Dempsey offered up the "failure to communicate" excuse with a straight face. The Meathman may have faults, but his communication is between good and excellent. Unlike most politicians, he even knows when to shut up; witness the recent Questions and Answers when Michael O'Brien, a survivor of child abuse, let loose from the audience.
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When demonstrably good communicators berate themselves and their party for failure to communicate, it inevitably leads to speculation as to where this new explanation of electoral disaster might be coming from.
First of all, it's a corporate reality of some provenance. One of the first things the top guy in Enron did, as the flames began to rise around his silk socks, was to state that this was a communications problem and yell for his PR people to line up in front of him, smartish. This view is based on the assumption that everything the communicator has done is right and that any dissent on the part of the audience is due to "failure to get the message out". But what is the information the government wants us to apprehend and which we've missed? That Ireland is but part of a global meltdown? Got that. That we're a small, open economy and when America gets a cold we get flu? Got that too. That the banking problems were not invented here but started with the collapse of Lehman Brothers? Most people hadn't missed that.
The government's PR people could put all those messages up on lamp-posts around the country left vacant after the election and it wouldn't change a thing. They could do television advertising to send out the other messages. Like the one saying: "There are no quick fixes." Or the one to the effect that if we all pull together, we'll be grand. Or the one about Brian Cowen seeing green shoots.
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Were those messages to hit people from morning until night, it would not solve the government's problem. Neither would members of the public begin to spend the money they have. They're hanging onto it because they fear that the finance minister Brian Lenihan, in promising to take 4 billion out of the economy in December's budget, is going to give their assets another good chewing.
The political scientists Michael Cobb and James Kuklinski point out that voters "assign relatively more weight and importance to events that have negative, as opposed to positive, implications for them or those dear to them. When making decisions, they place more emphasis on avoiding potential losses than on obtaining potential gains. Impressions formed on the basis of negative information, moreover, tend to be more lasting and more resistant to change." Applied to post-election Ireland, what that means is that talking up the green shoots or trying to get the electorate into a fair-minded appreciation of the problems of other nations is a waste of time. When we've reached the point where we're afraid to put the Laser card in the cash machine, we'd rather throw the Galway tent at Fianna Fail and long-life lightbulbs at the Greens than work on our fair-mindedness.
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That's not to say that the government couldn't - or shouldn't - improve its communication. It could and should, particularly since it has more access to mass media than any other political party. Key improvements could be achieved within weeks, at no cost to either the taxpayer or to the Fianna Fail party.
The first improvement Cowen and his cabinet need to make is to stop blaming the media, as ministers were doing all over the weekend. Blaming the media is like wobbling a sore tooth with your tongue: deeply satisfactory and utterly unproductive.
The media has its own sore-tongue idiocy, chanting the refrain that if both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are attacking the messengers then they must be doing something right. Not necessarily. Criticism from opposing sides does not establish fairness on the part of a media outlet. It may indicate only that the outlet is even-handed in its unfairness. But trying to convert newspapers or TV programmes convinced of their own rectitude is an endeavour so certain to disappoint that it should be avoided.
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The second improvement Fianna Fail needs to do is make Cowen understand that the Dail is televised. He doesn't seem to get this and when he becomes shirty with the opposition says things like: "Well, you may believe that, but I don't," which does not impress viewers. The taoiseach also complicates matters by constantly focusing on process and policy. He often sounds as if he hasn't met a living, breathing human being in years.
Apart from Cowen, party members need to accept blame, even if they don't believe they deserve it. Just as every good relationship requires one partner to take the blame, even when they're innocent, good politics sometimes means taking the blame when you don't deserve it. Upping the volume and clarity of unacceptable communication, on the other hand, is not the way to go.