‘Dev’s county’ tag now gone

THERE seemed to be something missing at the count on Saturday last. No great buzz about the place during the day and the place seemed subdued. All’s changed, changed utterly. Things have definitely changed for Fianna Fáil. The soldiers of the rearguard were fighting rearguard action. Even still, the Sunday Business Post refers to us this week as Dev’s county. If anything good comes out of the Fianna Fáil debacle, it might be the end of that.
Where were they coming from, or more importantly where have they been for the past 15 years? Here is a party who see it as their right to govern but they set out, maybe not to lose an election but definitely not to win. If people woke up last Friday morning to find that everything had changed and they wanted to vote Fianna Fáil back into office – they couldn’t. There were not enough candidates. RTÉ did a special programme on the lack of female candidates because there were only 83. Why did they not do a programme on the lack of Fianna Fáil candidates, as there were only 75.
The great new leader did reasonably well in the televised debates but, of course, he conveniently forgot that he was not coming from a position of Opposition but that he himself had actually sat at the Cabinet table for the past 14 years. At least he can claim to have more experience that the leaders of the other two main parties. Maybe it was his experience of the parliamentary party that led him to appoint non-TDs to his ‘front bench’. Here was the man who gave us the HSE, mountains of informative reports and the smoking ban. Don’t forget the minimum prices order, which was another nail in the coffin of many small rural pubs and groceries. He also served as minister for foreign affairs but still he could nearly insult an important trading partner with a ridiculous attempt to do a comedy act imitation of a Chinese accent.
Locally, the party needs a radical overhaul. No more dictation from Dublin. If it is this great national movement then move yourselves and don’t wait to be told what to do. Scrap every cumann in the county and form an entirely new active set of cumainn based on a minimum number of electors each. A cumann based around where there was a polling station 80 years ago and where there might be 50 votes is a joke and just gives a few old timers outings to conventions and ard fheiseanna. That is not the way forward. The grandson of a former Clare TD once said that the PDs needed to be radical or redundant. It might not be bad advice for the Soldiers of the Destiny.
They could do worse than go back and read an interview that Tony Killeen gave to Gerry McInerney of this paper at the last election. Mr Killeen said he believed there was a market in Clare for a new candidate, that if party planners were wise they would look to five years time and put new candidates in place. “Clearly, there is a vote in Clare for a completely new candidate,” he said. Prophetic words indeed. That had been obvious. This is now the fifth election in the past 30 years when a new candidate was elected a first time TD. It makes you wonder what Fianna Fáil does with the famous tallies if they could not see that.
The Labour party learned and they heeded Mr Killeen’s advice. Michael McNamara continued on from Timmy Dooley, James Breen, Tony Killeen and Síle de Valera. The only difference was that he did not head the poll like they did. He might have were it not for a possible reaction to the Labour national campaign. I think they started with their gale but worked hard at taking the wind out of the sails. Frankfurt’s way or Labour’s way was frightening, as was the slogan of Gilmore for taoiseach. We have just come out of years of ‘the cult of the leader’. We had Charlie, followed by Bertie and then Brian Cowen. The country had enough of that kind of stuff but the Labour strategists did not seem to realise that until it was too late. The exit polls showed that people were looking at policies and the ministerial line-up, not at the picture on the poster.
I believe that if Labour had gone ahead with an old reliable typical party candidate then they would have garnered 3,000 or 4,000 votes and that James Breen would be back in the Dáil, Instead, they fielded a young, articulate, well educated and presentable candidate who clicked with the people. He was what Clare people have looked for in every election since the ’80s. It is now up to the party to keep him there.
It was very difficult to gauge the mood in the Fine Gael camp on Saturday. Certainly the open hostility between the different internal factions, so obvious at the last local election count, was missing. Or maybe it was just being hidden. The first count of 25,000, a rise of approximately 25% since 2007, was extraordinary and worthy of congratulations. This is a doubling of the vote in under 30 years.
There was a major attempt to shift the vote among the candidates towards the end of the campaign. It succeeded. It was said that this was in an attempt to win three seats. I do not believe that. That amount of votes simply would not elect three candidates. There was a certain amount of tension before the election about the number of candidates and their geographic location. They stuck with their original plan but, and I stress this is solely a personal opinion, maybe they saw from their internal polls that while they were getting their big vote, it was very unevenly spread. I think the big switch was undertaken to level out the figures and not show up any flaws in the candidate strategy.
Whatever about the Gilmore Gale or a Biffo Bounce, there was definitely a Kenny Kick. He was ridiculed by sections of the media and not so long ago had to survive a leadership challenge but Enda Kenny has proven himself cool, politically shrewd and capable of putting together and managing a team to run the country. In his time in charge, he has dragged Fine Gael from the brink of oblivion to the largest party in the country. We can only hope and pray that he can do the same for this country of ours.
Both Labour and Fine Gael should bear in mind that some of the votes they received were of the protest variety- anybody but Fianna Fáil. Voters like that are fickle and nobody knows that better than TDs. People who switch to you for hope and improvement are seriously likely to switch somewhere else just as fast.
Finally, to those traditional Fianna Fáil supporters who were afraid that their hands might fall off after the way they voted on Friday, check them, they are still there and the fingers still work.