When you ask children about the danger that lurks outside their home, they know immediately what you’re talking about: those lions, tigers and dinosaurs hiding around every corner, waiting for the chance to sink their oversize teeth into you.

We wise adults smile to ourselves at the notion of our pleasant suburb being populated with big cats and prehistoric monsters. Isn’t it sweet, we think, a toddler’s perception of risk? Behind the smile is the belief that we, as adults, are much better than children at calibrating risk.

We’re not. We may not check underneath the car in the morning lest a big cat is sleeping underneath, but when we’re on a plane thundering down the runway towards take-off, many of us perceive ourselves to be at the immediate risk of disaster and death. In fact, we have just survived much greater danger on the drive to the airport, and when we arrive at our destination the other end, the car journey is statistically more risky than was our flight. But, as our toes curl and we check the nearest exits on the plane, the facts surrender to the emotional conviction of personal danger.

We always rate close and personal risk higher than the distant and general. Which is why smokers happily ignore printed warnings that cigarettes cause cancer and heart disease whereas users of Super Glue do not ignore the warnings on the blister pack in which the adhesive comes. They register the warning because the threat is personal and up close: use this stuff the wrong way and your fingers will bond together.

The threat is not to the general populace at some vague point in the unimaginable future. The danger threatens you, personally, right now.

Failure to understand this thought process lies behind the cervical cancer catastrophe. The health minister certainly knew, and other members of the cabinet may also have known, that more deaths can be prevented by investing in anti-smoking campaigns than in the cervical cancer vaccine. They are also rightly concerned about the other lethal cancers that affect the population.

But the politicians failed to grasp the close and personal threat felt by women in the postponement of the vaccine, viewed as a preventative measure against the disease.

The narrative goes like this. Without a vaccine, a couple of hundred women every year will develop cervical cancer, and more than 80 of them will die. So to withhold the vaccine is to condemn almost 100 women a year to death. The feeling among the public is that instead of saving lives, we’re paying our taxes to store electronic voting machines and buy posh cars for ministers.

Government backbenchers, caught in the crossfire, were grievously hampered by a lack of understanding. Some of them were overheard to say that 12-year-olds should not be having sex anyway. Others suggested that the screening programme was more important than the vaccine because it identified the women most at risk from developing cervical cancer.

This is not about 12-year-olds having sex. It’s about establishing a point at which the eradication of cervical cancer begins. The Department of Health decided it should be when a girl reaches the age of 12. It could have chosen 13, 14 or 15. It chose 12.

Administering the vaccine to whatever age group was chosen would prevent cervical cancer in that band, no matter how much sex they had in their twenties or thirties. That, in turn, would mean a drop in sickness and mortality. Perhaps not as pronounced a drop as that which followed the introduction of a polio vaccine, but a significant reduction nonetheless, with a consequent reduction in demands on the health service.

Some backbenchers believed that screening would identify women at particular risk, and then they could get the vaccine. Not so. Pap smears identify pre-cancerous cells in the cervix. In other words, they establish that a woman is on her way to cervical cancer unless carefully and frequently monitored and, if necessary, treated.

The vaccine has no function at that point. In fact, it is to prevent that point being reached that Ireland had planned to inoculate all of its young women before they become sexually active.

Failure to understand the media slant on the cervical cancer threat put the cabinet in the wrong position. Failure to understand the issue put the backbenchers in an even worse position. The fact that the announcement of the plans for the vaccine occurred in August, when the depth of the economic decline was well-established, was a gratuitous complication. What doesn’t exist isn’t missed. What isn’t announced doesn’t become an expectation. Once it had been announced, a withdrawal became an insult to the body politic, despite the fact that, as government TDs bitterly pointed out, nobody had ever expressed an interest in this vaccine up to now.

If the cabinet and backbenchers had problems, the taoiseach was in the worst position of all. Brian Cowen is reputed to be a clever man who comprehends complex issues quickly. Therefore we can assume that he grasped the wider implications of the decision to postpone the vaccine. That did not serve him well last week in the Dail.

It didn’t serve him well because of his incapacity to think quickly under pressure and to muster evidence in a way that persuades listeners.

At leaders’ questions, hostile inquiries invariably jolt him into snarling reactions which make him look defensive, aggressive and truculent. He doesn’t seem to have Bertie Ahern’s ability to listen to the question while going through the source material handed to him by the civil service, to select the data which will persuade the voter (as opposed to simply squelching the TD across the floor of the House), and deliver it with calm authority.

Instead, he attacks. He attacked Enda Kenny for misrepresenting the situation, but didn’t show where the misrepresentation lay. He left the emotional narrative intact.

It was the wrong issue at the wrong time handled in the wrong way. Like the medical card debacle, it left a huge dent in Fianna Fail’s reputation for understanding precisely how the people of Ireland feel on an issue at any given time.

The government won the vote. It didn’t win over the people.

terry.prone@sunday-times.ie

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