Strange things can happen in elections

I despair for the future of Fianna Fáil in Clare if the thinking of the leadership of the party in this county on the Presidential election is anything to go by.

According to a report in last week’s Champion, a majority of Fianna Fáil councillors in Clare want to put an internal candidate forward to contest the election.
In that, they are at odds with their leader Micheál Martin and also, it would appear, with Clare Fianna Fáil TD Timmy Dooley. Deputy Dooley was a member of a party sub-committee which recommended to the parliamentary party that they should not contest the election. There were six members, including Deputy Dooley, on the sub-committee. The only one of them in favour of contesting the election was Eamon Ó Cuív, who wanted to be the candidate himself.
But it is a very serious matter for Fianna Fáil in Clare that so many leaders of the party are so much out of touch with reality that they want to contest the Presidential election.
The reality is that Fianna Fáil have not the remotest chance of winning any election within the forseeable future. Even if Brian Crowley were the candidate, the best hope they had was that he might come in third place. Any other Fianna Fáil candidate could quite likely end up at the bottom of the poll.
Such a result coming so soon after last February’s terrible general election result might very well sound the final death knell for the party.
Fianna Fáil owes the banks some €2.4million in debts. The cost of a Presidential election would be in the region of €700,000. Even if by some miracle a Fianna Fáil candidate won the election, it would hardly be worth that amount of money merely to put one of their own into the Park. But adding that huge sum to an already huge debt in a campaign doomed to failure would be the height of stupidity. And that, apparently, was what a majority of Fianna Fáil councillors in Clare wanted to do.
So much for their judgement. Forgive me for thinking that county councillors who are in touch with a lot of people of all shades of opinion during the course of their working days, would have a fair idea of what’s going on in the real world. But the majority of Fianna Fail councillors in Clare must have been so traumatised and disorientated by the general election results that they still do not know whether they are coming or going. We know that Fianna Fail is in a bad way now but those lads want to give the party the final kiss of death.
Who needs Fine Gael, Labour or Sinn Féin when we have Fianna Fáil people themselves wanting to do to the party what Opposition politicians have been trying for generations to do?
The fact of the matter is that no candidate standing on a Fianna Fáil platform has the slightest chance of winning the election. I don’t know how many times I need to say that in order to convince the majority of Fianna Fáil councillors in Clare about the facts of life. I thought that everybody knew that. 
I am now wondering what the result might be if a reporter carried out a similar survey among Fianna Fáil councillors in other counties. Do the majority of Fianna Fáil councillors in Limerick, say, or Galway, Tipperary, Cork or Dublin feel the same way? But there are so few Fianna Fáil councillors left in places like Limerick or Dublin that it is irrelevant how they feel.
However, if there is a majority of Fianna Fáil councillors in counties where it matters in favour of putting a Fianna Fáil candidate forward for this election, then I despair for Fianna Fáil all over the State.
They have no hope of ever improving their situation, not to mention ever again getting back into power. The situation for Fianna Fáil is dire and there is no future for the party until the majority of Fianna Fáil councillors get a dose of reality. They might then have some hope of rebuilding the party.
I don’t know whether their heads are buried in the sand or are up there in the clouds, but they do need to show their faces and listen to what people are saying about the party. It is not enough to lie back and expect that Fine Gael and Labour are going to lose support as they take the tough decisions needed to grapple with the economic mess they have inherrited.
People are not going to automatically turn to Fianna Fáil, the party they are blaming for landing the country into this mess. They will especially not turn to Fianna Fáil if a majority of Fianna Fáil councillors continue to live in cloud cuckoo land.
I read during the week that former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern had come out in support of the Fine Gael candidate Gay Mitchell. What is he at? The most cunning and most devious of them all has had it in for Mitchell for a long time. Is this his way of finally getting his own back on his fellow Dubliner as he did to Albert Reynolds when Reynolds wanted to be President in 1997?
But then another former Fianna Fáil Minister David Andrews has endorsed the candidacy of Michael D Higgins. Does that snooker him too?
The reality is that a Fianna Fáil endorsement of any candidate is not going to help that candidate. It may in fact do the opposite.
Strange things have happened during previous presidential election campaigns. Brian Crowley might now have some chance of election were he to change his mind at this stage and stand as a truly Independent candidate on an anti-Fianna Fáil platform. He has his reasons to be anti-Fianna Fáil, or at least anti-Fianna Fáil leadership.
But I doubt it. He will still have the whiff of Fianna Fáil sulphur off him.