POLITICIANS are no strangers to publicity stunts. Neither are the news media, for it is we who make it all happen: no publicity, no stunts. An example of the genre was to be observed yesterday in the GPO in, as the cliche has it, Dublin's O'Connell Street.
We had been invited to observe the Minister for Social Welfare meeting mothers collecting their Child Benefit at the GPO to mark the £26 million overall or, to put it another way, £2 a child a month increase in the payment.
To bring this important event to the nation the resources of the media - journalists, printers trucks, sawmills, paper mills, ink manufacturers and all the rest of it - were to be mobilised.
On the way to the GPO, the portents were not good. That other great stunt, the millennium clock, had disappeared from view yet again beneath the green, opaque waters of the Liffey, to the satisfaction of those cynics who visit O'Connell Bridge for the sole purpose of not seeing it.
Inside the GPO, the Minister's people looked around anxiously. There was a shortage of women who looked as though they were collecting Child Benefit.
One woman pushing a buggy was smilingly approached but she left in a hurry. An ideological debate broke out in the forlorn media group present. Should we round up mothers and children to get the whole thing over with or would this be an unjustifiable interference with objective reality?
The debate was meandering along in a desultory fashion - it never really got to the raging stage - when Mr De Rossa materialised (he was not seen coming through a door) in front of a counter. He immediately began to chat up a mother and child who were roped in for photographs along with two others quickly corralled by his helpers.
The Irish Times interviewed two of the mothers. One was a northsider, Ms Carmen Stegarscu, from Romania, who lives with her Romanian husband and 19-month-old son, Adrian, in Marino. A mechanical designer by profession, she finds Irish people very friendly and hopes to get a job when Adrian is older.
The other was Ms Valerie Foley, who was accompanied by her husband Michael and 11-month-old son James. Ms Foley, who lives in Naas, has the complexion of a Hawaiian princess, speaks with what sounds like a cheerful English accent and responded to attempts to establish her origin by declaring she was from Kerry.
Asked why she came from Naas to collect her Child Benefit, she revealed she doesn't. She had just popped into the GPO to buy a stamp when she found herself caught up in someone else's photo-opportunity.
We left a smiling Minister behind us and returned to the newsroom to mobilise the resources of the media to bring this important event to you, the reader.