By midnight on the night of the election count, it was clear that Fianna Fail would need to court the support of others if it wanted to get back into Government.
The party had done astoundingly well but even with its impressive haul of 78 seats was tantalisingly close but not quite there. To put it in a mountaineering vein, Everest is 8,850 metres high but the last few hundred metres is the hardest.
It was hardly a unique position for Fianna Fáil to find itself in. They were a couple short five years ago. But then the PDs had eight TDs and that was never going to be a problem. And they also found themselves coming up short in 1997. And it’s those events of ten years ago that makes the courting of the Greens so remarkable.
Bertie Ahern’s first election as leader of Fianna Fail saw the party win 77 seats. The PDs hit a bit of a trough that time, returning only four. The combined strength of both parties was 81. The situation facing Fianna Fail a decade later is uncannily similar. Granted, together they have one less at 80. But now, as then, there are enough independents there to allow them forge a deal.
So why have they worked so hard to put together what amounts to the State’s first Fianna Fail-led Rainbow rather than relying only on the traditional props of the PDs and ‘like-minded independents’?
On the face of it, it’s hard to fathom. On the Sunday morning following the election, Bertie Ahern spoke of the PDs and the Independents being his first preference and the Greens being his clear second preference.
And that seemed to make sense. If you rewind to 1997, the consensus was that FF and the PDs could do it with only two gene pool deputies. In the event, they secured the support of four non-aligned TDs (but all with hues of Fianna Fail, from light to deep). Then, many people predicted the government would last a year. But it lasted five, without any real bother.
So why change such a winning arrangement? The PDs needed to be in Government in order to survive. And FF would just need to secure the services of only three independents (though only one with a provenance in the party).
For the Greens, last week’s marathon talks with Fianna Fail was their political coming of age. Forty hours of tough negotiations were grinding – and you could see the tiredness etched all over John Gormley and Dan Boyle’s face on Friday evening.
When they broke down after six days, a whole host of theories (benign, conspiracy and Machiavellian) started doing the rounds. One was that FF were only stringing the Greens along to make sure the independents didn’t demand too much in their separate negotiations? The other prime theory it was all designed to muddy the waters and allow FF to enter negotiations with its real target, the Labour Party. Pat Rabbitte committed his party to support Enda Kenny until the vote for Taoiseach on Thursday – after that all votes would be off.
But anyone who watched the body language of both parties on Friday evening knew there was something else afoot. At their press conference Greens looked exhausted, disappointed – as if the race had been run. But within half an hour, one of the FF negotiators Seamus Brennan was on RTE’s Six-One News. He was remarkably upbeat and positive and grabbed every available second to praise Trevor Sargent and the Greens. In the background, the Fianna Fail negotiators were sanguine and relaxed. It wasn’t all over. The Greens no longer had the deadline of the special meeting on Sunday looming over them. If they took a bit of time to reflect on it over the weekend, both sides could return for a second bite.
And that’s how it happened. Informal contacts continued over the weekend. And in a remarkable article in a Sunday newspaper, Bertie Ahern used language you would never imagine him using in his political career.
"I belive that an environmentally sustainable economy is the only way forward for Ireland and the planet."
Bertie Ahern? It could have been taken straight out of a Sargent speech. That was very significant. And there was more. FF were genuinely open to new ideas. In the problem areas like climate change, transport, health and education, – where all the “insurmountable” obstacles were– Fianna Fail believed that the Green Party’s policies were “not incompatible” with our own. John Gormley gave a clear signal on RTE Radio’s This Week programme that the Greens were willing to talk. Within minutes FF had contacted him. The game was back on.
The speed at which things resumed was as breath-taking as last week. Within hours the Greens had produced a paper on the areas where there were differences. By noon yesterday, Fianna Fail had responded. All afternoon, negotiators from both parties shuffled between their headquarters and the Dail to take part in a series of bilaterals and informal talks.
The parties began drafting a programme for government based on agreed areas. The ‘bit ticket’ areas where there was still contention were parked. And from early afternoon, it was clear that those issues would be thrashed out by two men, Bertie Ahern and Trevor Sargent.
Ahern arrived into Government buildings in late afternoon, departed for a short while and then returned. Shortly before 7pm, Sargent left his party headquarters to make the short ten minute walk to Leinster House. He was accompanied by general secretary Dónall Geoghegan. John Gormley cycled home to change his shirt. The third negotiator, Dan Boyle, in Leinster House. Gormley and Boyle said that there were still gaps, that it wasn’t a done deal.
“Close but no cigar,” said Boyle, summing up the delicate balance between success and failure.
But why did FF go to such efforts to woo the Greens if they didn’t really need them? It was nothing to do with filibustering. It was partly the security of numbers, certainly. But there was also a sense that 15 years of FF and the PD would make it into a tired unelectable government – that the Greens would give renewal and reinvigoration, make the government as a whole more attractive to the next generation.
And that's why later on this morning the Greens will walk out of Government Buildings with a deal.
A version of this appeared in this morning's Irish Examiner
Showing posts with label General Election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label General Election. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Saturday, June 09, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - BREAKDOWN OF NEGOTIATIONS
On Politics
Harry McGee
It is decreed by nature that school examinations and talks on coalition government can only take place when the sun is splitting the rocks and there’s not a cloud in the sky.
This week must have felt like doing the Leaving Certificate again for the Fianna Fail and Green Party negotiators, cooped up indoors in an intense, tortuously long and energy-sapping experience, trawling through the minutiae derived from dense texts.
And as the exhausted Green party negotiators emerged into the June sunshine yesterday evening, they had the look of students who got a little tripped up by a trick question on the honours paper.
In a week that wavered between hope and despondency for both parties, it looked for a couple of hours early yesterday afternoon that a deal might be possible.
Both sides had compromised on a lot of issues during these marathon talks that ultimately lasted over six days. But the Fianna Fail negotiators thought yesterday afternoon that enough had been offered, that there was more than a sliver of hope that a deal could be forged. But as the afternoon wore on, it became clear that it was all slipping away. The three-person negotiating team for the Green Party went back to the wider reference group (comprised of 12 key members including the six TDs and Dan Boyle). And it was clear that it wasn’t going to happen.
It was always going to be difficult. The gulfs between policy and outlook were of Grand Canyon proportions. The biggest were identified early and were never bridged, were never close to being bridged.
strangely, we look at the potentially explosive mix of the Greens and the PDs and think of blockage. But that was never the issue. Indeed, last night the PDs confirmed that Mary Harney had signed up to a Bertie Ahern-led government on Thursday morning and Brian Cowen said as much yesterday as he entered the talks. And while the Greens say that this did not form any part of the negotiations, it’s clear that there was an – let’s phrase it delicately – an unspoken understanding that the PDs would be part of the mix.
The talks, instead, foundered on ideological gaps on a range of policy areas. Trevor Sargent spelt out some of them at the press conference yesterday.
The Greens, being the Greens, wanted more urgent action on climate change. Nothing would have outranked that from their perspective. This, after all, is what the party is about. Sure it is more savvy politically than in the past but there were core principles like this one that were never going to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency.
There were no specifics. But it’s as clear as a pikestaff that they argued for carbon taxes and a 3% annual reduction in carbon emissions. It’s likely that it also argued for congestion charges and – of course, another Green pillar – prioritising public transport over road-building.
There were other areas of disagreement. None were specified by either side last night but health, education, planning and local government just proved to be massive stumbling blocks.
What was intriguing was that the talks had no concluded in bitterness or recrimination. They had taken place in a cordial fashion and the Greens had learned a lot during the process. But it was over. There was not enough give from either side.
The Greens could not sell what was on offer to its membership.
And while both sides said yesterday that their doors remained open, it is unlikely that they will revive the process. The gulf is still too wide. Time is against them. It’s almost certain now that Bertie Ahern will pursue the narrower option with the PDs and independents.
Fianna Fail had a massive advantage going into the negotiations. Its 78 seats meant that it didn’t ultimately need the greens, and so winning its support would be mainly a ‘belts and braces’ operation.
Its seriousness was clear - that was immediately evident from the composition of its vastly experienced team of Cowen, Dempsey and Brennan.
From its perspective, the Greens displayed a little naivety at times during negotiations. Cowen and Dempsey put a lot of emphasis on the financial costs of some of the Greens proposals. It was felt that their lack of experience in government gave them a certain lack of appreciation of the money aspects of what they proposed.
Stranger coalitions have been formed since 1948 but those governments have been forged on the anvil of necessity. Here there was none. Ultimately FF could take it or leave it as an optional multiple choice. But in the end, like the A students they are, they decided to stick to what they knew best. Enter Mary Harney, Jackie Healy Rae and Beverly Flynn.
Harry McGee
It is decreed by nature that school examinations and talks on coalition government can only take place when the sun is splitting the rocks and there’s not a cloud in the sky.
This week must have felt like doing the Leaving Certificate again for the Fianna Fail and Green Party negotiators, cooped up indoors in an intense, tortuously long and energy-sapping experience, trawling through the minutiae derived from dense texts.
And as the exhausted Green party negotiators emerged into the June sunshine yesterday evening, they had the look of students who got a little tripped up by a trick question on the honours paper.
In a week that wavered between hope and despondency for both parties, it looked for a couple of hours early yesterday afternoon that a deal might be possible.
Both sides had compromised on a lot of issues during these marathon talks that ultimately lasted over six days. But the Fianna Fail negotiators thought yesterday afternoon that enough had been offered, that there was more than a sliver of hope that a deal could be forged. But as the afternoon wore on, it became clear that it was all slipping away. The three-person negotiating team for the Green Party went back to the wider reference group (comprised of 12 key members including the six TDs and Dan Boyle). And it was clear that it wasn’t going to happen.
It was always going to be difficult. The gulfs between policy and outlook were of Grand Canyon proportions. The biggest were identified early and were never bridged, were never close to being bridged.
strangely, we look at the potentially explosive mix of the Greens and the PDs and think of blockage. But that was never the issue. Indeed, last night the PDs confirmed that Mary Harney had signed up to a Bertie Ahern-led government on Thursday morning and Brian Cowen said as much yesterday as he entered the talks. And while the Greens say that this did not form any part of the negotiations, it’s clear that there was an – let’s phrase it delicately – an unspoken understanding that the PDs would be part of the mix.
The talks, instead, foundered on ideological gaps on a range of policy areas. Trevor Sargent spelt out some of them at the press conference yesterday.
The Greens, being the Greens, wanted more urgent action on climate change. Nothing would have outranked that from their perspective. This, after all, is what the party is about. Sure it is more savvy politically than in the past but there were core principles like this one that were never going to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency.
There were no specifics. But it’s as clear as a pikestaff that they argued for carbon taxes and a 3% annual reduction in carbon emissions. It’s likely that it also argued for congestion charges and – of course, another Green pillar – prioritising public transport over road-building.
There were other areas of disagreement. None were specified by either side last night but health, education, planning and local government just proved to be massive stumbling blocks.
"In each of these areas substantial blockages still remain. Because of this, the party does not believe it could enter government and stand over the policy proposals."
What was intriguing was that the talks had no concluded in bitterness or recrimination. They had taken place in a cordial fashion and the Greens had learned a lot during the process. But it was over. There was not enough give from either side.
The Greens could not sell what was on offer to its membership.
And while both sides said yesterday that their doors remained open, it is unlikely that they will revive the process. The gulf is still too wide. Time is against them. It’s almost certain now that Bertie Ahern will pursue the narrower option with the PDs and independents.
Fianna Fail had a massive advantage going into the negotiations. Its 78 seats meant that it didn’t ultimately need the greens, and so winning its support would be mainly a ‘belts and braces’ operation.
Its seriousness was clear - that was immediately evident from the composition of its vastly experienced team of Cowen, Dempsey and Brennan.
From its perspective, the Greens displayed a little naivety at times during negotiations. Cowen and Dempsey put a lot of emphasis on the financial costs of some of the Greens proposals. It was felt that their lack of experience in government gave them a certain lack of appreciation of the money aspects of what they proposed.
Stranger coalitions have been formed since 1948 but those governments have been forged on the anvil of necessity. Here there was none. Ultimately FF could take it or leave it as an optional multiple choice. But in the end, like the A students they are, they decided to stick to what they knew best. Enter Mary Harney, Jackie Healy Rae and Beverly Flynn.
Monday, June 04, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - NEGOTIATONS
Charlie McCreevy once said that he knew Bertie Ahern better than most and, at that, he knew him only 20%.
Fianna Fail took most people by surprise whey they held their first formal discussions with the Greens yesterday, moving much more quickly than was anticipated to expand their options on forming government.
But anyone who thinks the serious nature of the talks with the Greens – and the seriousness is particularly evident from the smaller party – signifies that this is now the option the FF is pursuing is mistaken.
At the same time, Fianna Fail is doing its business on all fronts. Dealings are continuing with the rump of the PDs and also with the independents – significantly Michael Lowry issued his first statement yesterday confirming that he too had been contacted by the Government.
He said: "I accepted an invitation from Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to negotiate on the terms of my involvement in a cross-party alliance to provide a stable government."
The latest overture by Fianna Fail to Lowry brings to twelve the number of TDs it might include in government.
Sources in Fianna Fail have spoken about forming its own kind of rainbow, with the PDs, the Greens and independents.
The downside of that arrangement is that Fianna Fail would have sacrifice more cabinet positions than what its own TDs consider necessary – at least two senior ministries (one each to the PDs and, at the very minimum, to the Greens) and at least two so-called ‘super junior’ ministries.
The other is that the Greens are to some FF rural TDs what reds were to McCarthyite Americans in the 1950s. They look at the Greens’ stances on corporate donations, on roads, on carbon taxes, on once-off housing and they see meddlers. However, of all the parties, FF backbenchers know their place and if a deal is struck with the deals, they will go along with it obediently while grumbling privately.
There’s a couple of problems for the Greens too, that are not all that easy to get over. For one, Trevor Sargent will have to step down as leader if they do a deal with Fianna Fail or else he will be accused of blatant inconsistency.
Secondly, the party is going to have a tough job convincing its members – and its potential supporters in future elections – that it is doing right by the country by going into government while at the same time ceding some of its core principles including a ban on corporate donations; carbon taxes, and transport policies.
The party really wants to go into government. But a sardonic political veteran observed yesterday. “If the Green Party is prepared to compromise on core principles so that it can wallow in high office, they will get hammered.”
From the moment that a third-term was confirmed, Mr Ahern has continued to speak about a Government of stability and longevity. In other words, what he wants is one that lasts for five years, come hell, high water, or further damaging Tribunal allegations.
Part of that equation is numbers. If he has four or five TDs above the magic 83 mark, it will allow the Government some breathing space, and make the government of the country over the next five years less of a hairy roller-coaster ride, where the government will always be vulnerable to a defection or an illness that gives the opposition a chance to defeat the government in the chamber.
However, the corporate memory within Fianna Fail still has bitter memories of the manner in which the most secure majority of all time – that with the Labour Party in 1992 – fell asunder amid mutual recrimination just two years later.
We tend to attribute a Machiavellian slant to everything Ahern says, and McCreevy's 20% assessment gives credence to this. But maybe he's been right all along and his preferred solution is the PDs and independents and he’s sounding out the Greens just to see if it’s a feasible option.
In another sense, he may be playing them all off one against the other to maximise FF’s negotiating position and minimise what the smaller parties might demand in relation to ministries and policy concessions.
And there are some who say that all of this talking is a prelude to FF approaching Labour with an unbeatable offer in the run-up to June 14th, knowing that it has at least one or two other deals in the bag.
The only thing that’s certain is that Fianna Fail has all the chips on its side of the table and is in a powerful position.
But trouble may be coming down the tracks in the shape of the Quarryvale module and the fresh questions facing Mr Ahern.
There’s an element of ‘don’t mention the war’ about this issue. It’s quite possible that a deal can be negotiated with ‘moral high ground’ parties. Of course, the $64,000 question is the $45,000 question, if you get the drift. Will that be conveniently long-fingered for future consideration.
Expect a long week of horse-trading ahead.
Fianna Fail took most people by surprise whey they held their first formal discussions with the Greens yesterday, moving much more quickly than was anticipated to expand their options on forming government.
But anyone who thinks the serious nature of the talks with the Greens – and the seriousness is particularly evident from the smaller party – signifies that this is now the option the FF is pursuing is mistaken.
At the same time, Fianna Fail is doing its business on all fronts. Dealings are continuing with the rump of the PDs and also with the independents – significantly Michael Lowry issued his first statement yesterday confirming that he too had been contacted by the Government.
He said: "I accepted an invitation from Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to negotiate on the terms of my involvement in a cross-party alliance to provide a stable government."
The latest overture by Fianna Fail to Lowry brings to twelve the number of TDs it might include in government.
Sources in Fianna Fail have spoken about forming its own kind of rainbow, with the PDs, the Greens and independents.
The downside of that arrangement is that Fianna Fail would have sacrifice more cabinet positions than what its own TDs consider necessary – at least two senior ministries (one each to the PDs and, at the very minimum, to the Greens) and at least two so-called ‘super junior’ ministries.
The other is that the Greens are to some FF rural TDs what reds were to McCarthyite Americans in the 1950s. They look at the Greens’ stances on corporate donations, on roads, on carbon taxes, on once-off housing and they see meddlers. However, of all the parties, FF backbenchers know their place and if a deal is struck with the deals, they will go along with it obediently while grumbling privately.
There’s a couple of problems for the Greens too, that are not all that easy to get over. For one, Trevor Sargent will have to step down as leader if they do a deal with Fianna Fail or else he will be accused of blatant inconsistency.
Secondly, the party is going to have a tough job convincing its members – and its potential supporters in future elections – that it is doing right by the country by going into government while at the same time ceding some of its core principles including a ban on corporate donations; carbon taxes, and transport policies.
The party really wants to go into government. But a sardonic political veteran observed yesterday. “If the Green Party is prepared to compromise on core principles so that it can wallow in high office, they will get hammered.”
From the moment that a third-term was confirmed, Mr Ahern has continued to speak about a Government of stability and longevity. In other words, what he wants is one that lasts for five years, come hell, high water, or further damaging Tribunal allegations.
Part of that equation is numbers. If he has four or five TDs above the magic 83 mark, it will allow the Government some breathing space, and make the government of the country over the next five years less of a hairy roller-coaster ride, where the government will always be vulnerable to a defection or an illness that gives the opposition a chance to defeat the government in the chamber.
However, the corporate memory within Fianna Fail still has bitter memories of the manner in which the most secure majority of all time – that with the Labour Party in 1992 – fell asunder amid mutual recrimination just two years later.
We tend to attribute a Machiavellian slant to everything Ahern says, and McCreevy's 20% assessment gives credence to this. But maybe he's been right all along and his preferred solution is the PDs and independents and he’s sounding out the Greens just to see if it’s a feasible option.
In another sense, he may be playing them all off one against the other to maximise FF’s negotiating position and minimise what the smaller parties might demand in relation to ministries and policy concessions.
And there are some who say that all of this talking is a prelude to FF approaching Labour with an unbeatable offer in the run-up to June 14th, knowing that it has at least one or two other deals in the bag.
The only thing that’s certain is that Fianna Fail has all the chips on its side of the table and is in a powerful position.
But trouble may be coming down the tracks in the shape of the Quarryvale module and the fresh questions facing Mr Ahern.
There’s an element of ‘don’t mention the war’ about this issue. It’s quite possible that a deal can be negotiated with ‘moral high ground’ parties. Of course, the $64,000 question is the $45,000 question, if you get the drift. Will that be conveniently long-fingered for future consideration.
Expect a long week of horse-trading ahead.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - THE SOUND OF SILENCE
The Dáil returns on June 14. We will have a Government then, one that you can confidently say will be Fianna Fail led, will also be Bertie Ahern led.
Right now, we are stuck in the political version of a holding pattern over Heathrow Airport. There is some movement but it is circular. The Labour Party parliamentary party is meeting today. The residue of a party once known as the PDs is meeting also.
Fine Gael have been busily selling the line that the FF win wasn't really that much of a FF win and that FG were the real winners, so much so that they might surprise us all and form the next government. To that end, Enda Kenny has met with just about ever entity that isn't FF or SF.
Even if he were to pull it off, and cobble together a government more complicated than the 1948 arrangement, it would be so precarious, so inherently unstable that it would hardly last a year. I think the current FG leadership is playing a longer game. On the one hand it's posturing a little, anticipating any leadership challenge, ensuring that Enda's leadership is a continuity one. The message: he's ready to step into the breech now and at any time as Taoiseach. Secondly, they are planting the notion in people's minds that if a FF-led coalition collapses, then it might not be necessary to go to the country.
Having said that, FF have the chips stacked on their side of the table. For once, I don't think we have to take a Machiavellian reading of Bertie Ahern's intentions. He wants the PDs and the independents first, and then the greens. The problem with the first constellation is question marks over Beverly Flynn €1.5 million debt to RTE. The majority will be wafer-thin - and it would be difficult for the government to last the course. I think the upper echelons of the FF leadership are not too gone on the Greens either - and it goes beyond its concerns about so-called flakey policies to the attacks that the Greens have made on FF's relationship with developers.
If there were an agreement with the Greens it might be more stable.
But looking at the numbers, you suspect that what FF might try for is a wider coalition involving FF, the two PDS, the six Greens, and one or two sympathetic independents.
FF and Labour? I just don't see it. Let's be real about this. Pat Rabbitte ruled it out. If there was wiggle room in what he has said in the past six months, its so infinitesimally small as to be negligent.
Fintan O'Toole's column in the Irish Times yesterday made a cogent argument for this set-up, saying it would guarantee both ten years of Government, could see the successors of Pearse and Connolly ruling the country at the time of the 100th anniversary of 1916. It makes sense for a Brian Cowen led FF. The problem with the thesis is that it's not a Brian Cowen led FF and won't be for at least another two and a half years.
And the Tribunals. It will cause Ahern trouble. Not now. None of his opponents have any appetite to take FF on for a third time over BertieGate. Ahern has already scored two emphatic victories over this. But the patterns in politics often mirror closely the patterns in sport - and yes, sport always provides a vivid dayglo metaphor for the human condition!. In championship fare, you often see teams demolish its opposition for three or four games in a row and then be set up as untouchable or as raging hot favourites. For all that, sometimes in the game that you least expect it, they put in an insipid performance and exit tamely. This might happen here. After the heroic seeing off of his detractors, the Taoiseach might be felled in the end by something small and seemingly insignificant - the piece of straw that will have broken the camel's back .
Right now, we are stuck in the political version of a holding pattern over Heathrow Airport. There is some movement but it is circular. The Labour Party parliamentary party is meeting today. The residue of a party once known as the PDs is meeting also.
Fine Gael have been busily selling the line that the FF win wasn't really that much of a FF win and that FG were the real winners, so much so that they might surprise us all and form the next government. To that end, Enda Kenny has met with just about ever entity that isn't FF or SF.
Even if he were to pull it off, and cobble together a government more complicated than the 1948 arrangement, it would be so precarious, so inherently unstable that it would hardly last a year. I think the current FG leadership is playing a longer game. On the one hand it's posturing a little, anticipating any leadership challenge, ensuring that Enda's leadership is a continuity one. The message: he's ready to step into the breech now and at any time as Taoiseach. Secondly, they are planting the notion in people's minds that if a FF-led coalition collapses, then it might not be necessary to go to the country.
Having said that, FF have the chips stacked on their side of the table. For once, I don't think we have to take a Machiavellian reading of Bertie Ahern's intentions. He wants the PDs and the independents first, and then the greens. The problem with the first constellation is question marks over Beverly Flynn €1.5 million debt to RTE. The majority will be wafer-thin - and it would be difficult for the government to last the course. I think the upper echelons of the FF leadership are not too gone on the Greens either - and it goes beyond its concerns about so-called flakey policies to the attacks that the Greens have made on FF's relationship with developers.
If there were an agreement with the Greens it might be more stable.
But looking at the numbers, you suspect that what FF might try for is a wider coalition involving FF, the two PDS, the six Greens, and one or two sympathetic independents.
FF and Labour? I just don't see it. Let's be real about this. Pat Rabbitte ruled it out. If there was wiggle room in what he has said in the past six months, its so infinitesimally small as to be negligent.
Fintan O'Toole's column in the Irish Times yesterday made a cogent argument for this set-up, saying it would guarantee both ten years of Government, could see the successors of Pearse and Connolly ruling the country at the time of the 100th anniversary of 1916. It makes sense for a Brian Cowen led FF. The problem with the thesis is that it's not a Brian Cowen led FF and won't be for at least another two and a half years.
And the Tribunals. It will cause Ahern trouble. Not now. None of his opponents have any appetite to take FF on for a third time over BertieGate. Ahern has already scored two emphatic victories over this. But the patterns in politics often mirror closely the patterns in sport - and yes, sport always provides a vivid dayglo metaphor for the human condition!. In championship fare, you often see teams demolish its opposition for three or four games in a row and then be set up as untouchable or as raging hot favourites. For all that, sometimes in the game that you least expect it, they put in an insipid performance and exit tamely. This might happen here. After the heroic seeing off of his detractors, the Taoiseach might be felled in the end by something small and seemingly insignificant - the piece of straw that will have broken the camel's back .
Monday, May 28, 2007
INSIDE POLTICS - ELECTION, THE OVERVIEW
By the times the polling stations closed at 10.20 last Thursday night, Bertie Ahern was exhausted. This had been his toughest campaign as Fianna Fail leader, physically and psychologically. The first one in 1997 had been hard but he was a younger man and also the challenger. The second in 2002 was hard too but his government was so strong, the opposition so divided that the outcome was predetermined weeks, maybe months beforehand.
This one was different. He always knew he would be going into this one as top weight, handicapped by two terms of office, economic uncertainty, and all the brouhaha surrounding his personal finances and his house.
Election campaigns are always intense but this one was bruising, nasty, divisive and personal – for the first two weeks, the questions surrounding his house were unrelenting and pitiless.
Ahern and those closest to him knew that they turned it, that the critical last ten days of the election campaign had belonged to them. But the effort to pull that off had taken his toll.
Sometime after the last vote was cast Ahern went to bed and fell into a deep sleep. He slept through the RTE exit poll at 7.00 the following morning. He slept through the tallies from the 43 constituencies. He slept through the first counts early in the afternoon, all of which told the same story.
And when he finally woke, sometime after 4pm on Friday afternoon, it was to a radically changed country. The first call he got was from his daughter, Cecilia, at around 5pm. She told him: it’s ok, everything is going well. For him, it must have been a transforming moment.
It’s a fair question to ask: what has radically changed or what has been usurped if everything remains the same, if the status quo is as it was.
But the drama of this election wasn’t that Fianna Fail held on, but the dramatic and emphatic nature of the party’s victory. They defied everything. The odds. The trust of the media punditry, which called it as going right to the wire. The expectations (over-cooked as it turned out) of all the other parties. This was a bigger victory than 1997. It was also a much bigger victory than 2002.
Sure, the numbers didn’t stack up as high this time. Fianna Fail came back with 78 seats rather than 80 but its percentage of support was actually higher. And now, not only was it facing a real alternative in the shape of the Fine Gael and Labour alliance, it also had to face down Sinn Fein – most of its gains in the marginal constituencies of Dublin and Donegal would be made at the expense of FF.
There was a mood out there all right, but it wasn’t – as the opposition parties believed – a mood for change. People were worried. About house prices. About health services. About transport. About public services. About quality of life. About the economic uncertainty that lies ahead. But the mood when it translated into votes plumped for trusting the incumbents more than the pretenders – or as Pat Rabbitte put it, a refusal to switch horse in mid-stream.
This was a fascinating election and one that will take many months to analyse. There were many factors that fed into the victory, some complementary, some harder to explain.
There has been a lot of talk this weekend about the air war and the ground war. The air war was the national campaign fought on the airwaves and in the media – the one in which Bertie Ahern took an awful lot of flak in the first fortnight; the one also that was turned around in the last ten days.
But Fianna Fail won the ground war, and won it hands-down. The party always seems to be ahead of the posse in terms of tactics and strategy. In the late 1990s it began maximising its chances of getting a seat bounce by ruthlessly minimising its number of candidates. This time round, it picked young, hard-working, presentable candidates, paying particular attention to the commuter-belt constituencies that satellite Dublin.
These were the constituencies where FF had taken massive hits in the local elections and in the Kildare North and Meath by-elections in 2005. The problems of these new suburban towns were manifold – marathon commuting times, no school facilities, no public transport, hassle getting childcare; class sizes, no real sense of community. The list went on. During the campaign, we heard of a family holding a birthday party for a child at 6.30am.
And how did these new communities vote? Overwhelmingly for Fianna Fail.
They picked up two in the three-seaters of Meath East (thwarting the high-profile Labour candidate Dominic Hannigan); Kildare South; Meath West; two in Kildare North, Longford Westmeath, and Wicklow; and three out of five in Carlow-Kilkenny.
And they held Dublin. Save for North Central (which was down a seat anyway) and North East.
But the ground war meant more than just candidate-selection. It was the incessant nature of the campaigning – two years of slog and constant canvassing. In the last couple of days of the campaign, Fianna Fail succeeded in dropping close to 1 million leaflets through letterboxes. That was awesome.
The air war had to be won too and it was in the last ten days of the campaign, FF managed to turn it around in its direction. Once Ahern issued his statement that Sunday, Fianna Fail finally managed to put BertieGate behind it. From there on in, it made sure it would not emerge again.
Brian Cowen (who was the real star of the show for FF) came out with an inveterate attack on Enda Kenny’s ‘contract’ the next day. Ahern was in Westminster the following day. By the time Ahern lined up against Kenny for the TV debate, the wind had changed. But as a senior FF strategist said yesterday, the debate became the ‘tipping point’, the moment in which it all swung back towards FF.
Kenny didn’t do badly in the debate and for many, the fact that he survived relatively unscathed was enough. But what Ahern succeeded in was raising real doubts about the alternative’s policies and figures. In a series of claims during the debate, he queried the costing of hospital beds, claimed the FG tax would favour the rich, said that a FG promise of 2,000 extra cops was only 1,000 extra cops. Kenny never departed from his script, was never prepared to go cross country to take Ahern on. And it cost him – because he left those allegations unanswered.
The FF big guns lined up on Friday and Saturday and pounded away with the same rhetorical artillery all weekend. This was an exercise in consolidating the advantage (privately, FF were furious that the media had not called Ahern a more clear-cut winner).
By the time FG (which has far fewer political heavyweights on its front benches than FF and Labour) got its act together – and it required considerable assistance from Pat Rabbitte – it was all over. FF had a lousy last Tuesday of the campaign – but by that stage it was too late.
Another feature that is staggering about this election is that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael do not seem to take each other on directly. Their seats are almost mutually exclusive. In 2002, when Fine Gael almost disappeared, they lost only five of their seats to FF. This time, they displaced Fianna Fail in Cork South Central and Cork South West, Dublin North East and in Roscommon/South Leitrim. The strange thing is FG gained more from Labour (and benefited hugely from its transfers) than FF. And it almost single-handedly wiped out PDs – taking all of its six losses.
Likewise, the real success of Fianna Fail this time round was in staving off the threat posed by Sinn Fein. If SF had succeeded in grabbing seats off FF in Donegal and in the three constituencies north of the Liffey, it might have been down to 74 or 75 seats and the whole dynamic of the election would be changed. And to be sure, while FG recorded a gain in Dublin South West, it was also a victory for FF which maintained its two by targeting the potential support of SF’s Sean Crowe (a strategy employed by Joan Burton with Joe Higgins in Dublin West).
For good measure, it also stole a couple of seats from independents, notably in Cavan-Monaghan, in Kildare North and in Tipperary South.
This became an election that was resolved by almost primal voter considerations. The environment didn’t really feature. Quality of life didn’t really feature. Nor did childcare. And was it a referendum on health? It became a contest of what Michael D Higgins describes as ‘managerialism’.
To me it seems people asked themselves the simple question about who should govern and gave surprisingly cautious, innately conservative answers to those questons. Better the divvil you know. Or the ‘cold feet syndrome’, to employ the words used by another potential David McWilliamesque corny phrase-maker.
Who should govern? When you are a smaller party you are not really in a position to provide an answer to that question.
A very senior FFer told me yesterday that this time round, voters voted for the politics of possibility rather than the politics of protest.
And distilled down, possibility could really express itself in only two configurations. Voters in 2007 asked the same essential question that voters have asked themselves since 1927 – Fianna Fail or Fine Gael?
And the answer to that question emerged in the hours of Bertie Ahern’s deep sleep. He woke to find a changed country, to find that he, the man in the anorak, would lead Fianna Fail into government for a third term.
He didn’t win an overall majority. But psychologically, it was a landslide.
A version of this appeared in this morning's Irish Examiner
This one was different. He always knew he would be going into this one as top weight, handicapped by two terms of office, economic uncertainty, and all the brouhaha surrounding his personal finances and his house.
Election campaigns are always intense but this one was bruising, nasty, divisive and personal – for the first two weeks, the questions surrounding his house were unrelenting and pitiless.
Ahern and those closest to him knew that they turned it, that the critical last ten days of the election campaign had belonged to them. But the effort to pull that off had taken his toll.
Sometime after the last vote was cast Ahern went to bed and fell into a deep sleep. He slept through the RTE exit poll at 7.00 the following morning. He slept through the tallies from the 43 constituencies. He slept through the first counts early in the afternoon, all of which told the same story.
And when he finally woke, sometime after 4pm on Friday afternoon, it was to a radically changed country. The first call he got was from his daughter, Cecilia, at around 5pm. She told him: it’s ok, everything is going well. For him, it must have been a transforming moment.
It’s a fair question to ask: what has radically changed or what has been usurped if everything remains the same, if the status quo is as it was.
But the drama of this election wasn’t that Fianna Fail held on, but the dramatic and emphatic nature of the party’s victory. They defied everything. The odds. The trust of the media punditry, which called it as going right to the wire. The expectations (over-cooked as it turned out) of all the other parties. This was a bigger victory than 1997. It was also a much bigger victory than 2002.
Sure, the numbers didn’t stack up as high this time. Fianna Fail came back with 78 seats rather than 80 but its percentage of support was actually higher. And now, not only was it facing a real alternative in the shape of the Fine Gael and Labour alliance, it also had to face down Sinn Fein – most of its gains in the marginal constituencies of Dublin and Donegal would be made at the expense of FF.
There was a mood out there all right, but it wasn’t – as the opposition parties believed – a mood for change. People were worried. About house prices. About health services. About transport. About public services. About quality of life. About the economic uncertainty that lies ahead. But the mood when it translated into votes plumped for trusting the incumbents more than the pretenders – or as Pat Rabbitte put it, a refusal to switch horse in mid-stream.
This was a fascinating election and one that will take many months to analyse. There were many factors that fed into the victory, some complementary, some harder to explain.
There has been a lot of talk this weekend about the air war and the ground war. The air war was the national campaign fought on the airwaves and in the media – the one in which Bertie Ahern took an awful lot of flak in the first fortnight; the one also that was turned around in the last ten days.
But Fianna Fail won the ground war, and won it hands-down. The party always seems to be ahead of the posse in terms of tactics and strategy. In the late 1990s it began maximising its chances of getting a seat bounce by ruthlessly minimising its number of candidates. This time round, it picked young, hard-working, presentable candidates, paying particular attention to the commuter-belt constituencies that satellite Dublin.
These were the constituencies where FF had taken massive hits in the local elections and in the Kildare North and Meath by-elections in 2005. The problems of these new suburban towns were manifold – marathon commuting times, no school facilities, no public transport, hassle getting childcare; class sizes, no real sense of community. The list went on. During the campaign, we heard of a family holding a birthday party for a child at 6.30am.
And how did these new communities vote? Overwhelmingly for Fianna Fail.
They picked up two in the three-seaters of Meath East (thwarting the high-profile Labour candidate Dominic Hannigan); Kildare South; Meath West; two in Kildare North, Longford Westmeath, and Wicklow; and three out of five in Carlow-Kilkenny.
And they held Dublin. Save for North Central (which was down a seat anyway) and North East.
But the ground war meant more than just candidate-selection. It was the incessant nature of the campaigning – two years of slog and constant canvassing. In the last couple of days of the campaign, Fianna Fail succeeded in dropping close to 1 million leaflets through letterboxes. That was awesome.
The air war had to be won too and it was in the last ten days of the campaign, FF managed to turn it around in its direction. Once Ahern issued his statement that Sunday, Fianna Fail finally managed to put BertieGate behind it. From there on in, it made sure it would not emerge again.
Brian Cowen (who was the real star of the show for FF) came out with an inveterate attack on Enda Kenny’s ‘contract’ the next day. Ahern was in Westminster the following day. By the time Ahern lined up against Kenny for the TV debate, the wind had changed. But as a senior FF strategist said yesterday, the debate became the ‘tipping point’, the moment in which it all swung back towards FF.
Kenny didn’t do badly in the debate and for many, the fact that he survived relatively unscathed was enough. But what Ahern succeeded in was raising real doubts about the alternative’s policies and figures. In a series of claims during the debate, he queried the costing of hospital beds, claimed the FG tax would favour the rich, said that a FG promise of 2,000 extra cops was only 1,000 extra cops. Kenny never departed from his script, was never prepared to go cross country to take Ahern on. And it cost him – because he left those allegations unanswered.
The FF big guns lined up on Friday and Saturday and pounded away with the same rhetorical artillery all weekend. This was an exercise in consolidating the advantage (privately, FF were furious that the media had not called Ahern a more clear-cut winner).
By the time FG (which has far fewer political heavyweights on its front benches than FF and Labour) got its act together – and it required considerable assistance from Pat Rabbitte – it was all over. FF had a lousy last Tuesday of the campaign – but by that stage it was too late.
Another feature that is staggering about this election is that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael do not seem to take each other on directly. Their seats are almost mutually exclusive. In 2002, when Fine Gael almost disappeared, they lost only five of their seats to FF. This time, they displaced Fianna Fail in Cork South Central and Cork South West, Dublin North East and in Roscommon/South Leitrim. The strange thing is FG gained more from Labour (and benefited hugely from its transfers) than FF. And it almost single-handedly wiped out PDs – taking all of its six losses.
Likewise, the real success of Fianna Fail this time round was in staving off the threat posed by Sinn Fein. If SF had succeeded in grabbing seats off FF in Donegal and in the three constituencies north of the Liffey, it might have been down to 74 or 75 seats and the whole dynamic of the election would be changed. And to be sure, while FG recorded a gain in Dublin South West, it was also a victory for FF which maintained its two by targeting the potential support of SF’s Sean Crowe (a strategy employed by Joan Burton with Joe Higgins in Dublin West).
For good measure, it also stole a couple of seats from independents, notably in Cavan-Monaghan, in Kildare North and in Tipperary South.
This became an election that was resolved by almost primal voter considerations. The environment didn’t really feature. Quality of life didn’t really feature. Nor did childcare. And was it a referendum on health? It became a contest of what Michael D Higgins describes as ‘managerialism’.
To me it seems people asked themselves the simple question about who should govern and gave surprisingly cautious, innately conservative answers to those questons. Better the divvil you know. Or the ‘cold feet syndrome’, to employ the words used by another potential David McWilliamesque corny phrase-maker.
Who should govern? When you are a smaller party you are not really in a position to provide an answer to that question.
A very senior FFer told me yesterday that this time round, voters voted for the politics of possibility rather than the politics of protest.
And distilled down, possibility could really express itself in only two configurations. Voters in 2007 asked the same essential question that voters have asked themselves since 1927 – Fianna Fail or Fine Gael?
And the answer to that question emerged in the hours of Bertie Ahern’s deep sleep. He woke to find a changed country, to find that he, the man in the anorak, would lead Fianna Fail into government for a third term.
He didn’t win an overall majority. But psychologically, it was a landslide.
A version of this appeared in this morning's Irish Examiner
Saturday, May 26, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - WHERE AND WHEN ELECTION WAS WON
About five six or days into the election campaign, when things looked bad for Fianna Fail and very very bad for Bertie Ahern, I bumped into Brian Cowen after one of his party’s morning briefing.
Things aren’t look good, was my blatantly obvious observation to him.
Cowen immediately responded by evoking the 1994 All Ireland. For people from his home county, it will go down in history as the ‘four minute final’. Offaly were trailing Limerick by five points with only four minutes remaining. In a late blitz, they scored two goals and four points to pull off one of the most memorable – almost unbelievable - reverses of all time.
And this was its political equivalent. The first two weeks of the campaign were a disaster for Ahern and FF, as they struggled – and failed- to put the BertieGate mess behind them. On that Monday, Cowen himself came out fighting with an imperious performance, a bravura demoltion job on Enda Kenny’s contract.
It proved to be the springboard for his party’s last gambit – a two-pronged attack that traded on Ahern’s statesmanship on the one hand and a no-holds-barred attack on what they identified as Fine Gael’s weak point – Enda Kenny’s American-style ‘Contract for a New Ireland’.
That three-day period that began with Ahern’s Westminster speech and culminated in the TV debate on Thursday night between him and Kenny proved to be pivotal.
In the wake of the debate, the media said that Ahern had shaded the debate (though, in defence of the Irish Examiner, we said that Ahern was the conclusive winner). But it wasn’t until the Irish Times opinion poll was published the following Monday that the disconnect between the media and the public became evident. The public had declared Ahern an emphatic winner. It wasn’t just FF sophistry. Joe Public out there agreed that he had dismantled Kenny’s ‘Contract’.
That wasn’t the only disconnect between the media and the public. It seemed that many people out there just didn’t share the media’s preoccupation (a justified one, nonetheless) with his finances. If he had strayed offside, it is clear they were ready to forgive him. The people have spoken – to employ the electoral cliché – and have spoken in a language that is foreign to that of the media.
But did a late blitz really turn around – in the space of two days - a possible FF loss into the party’s most emphatic election since 1977? Whatever, FF clearly consolidated its position after the Ahern victory, and never looked back. While the media was taken aback by the Times poll on Monday, it is clear its own private polls were telling it the party was close to an overall majority. On Vincent Browne’s programme on polling night, pollster Sean Donnelly, who conducts private polls for FF, predicted 76 seats for the party. Donnelly doesn’t exaggerate. FF knew it was going to have a good election.
David Davin Power’s great quotation of an African proverb is the summation of this election: “When elephants fight, the grass gets grampled.”
Everything converged back to the two civil war parties. All the smaller parties have got squeezed, suffered reverses – and in the case of the PDs – are facing extinction in the face. The concentration to the civil war configuration was staggering. Labour made no gains and lost one or two. The Greens were expected to make three gains but instead found four of its six TDs fighting for survival. Sinn Fein bellyflopped – gained zero and lost one seat, that of Sean Crowe in Tallaght. Only three or four independents will return. There will be no Joe Higgins. And as for the PDs, they have been salamandered – with only two TDs likely to return to the 30th Dail.
At the time of writing FF look good for 79 or 80 seats. In the cockpits of Dublin and Cork , it has retained comfortably – only in Bertie Ahern’s Dublin Central (where the vote management was lousy) is it in danger of losing.
It has also been a good election for FG but only in relative terms. It will ensure that Enda Kenny should be given the nod to continue leadership. For Pat Rabbitte and Trevor Sargent, there is much more uncertainty.
For Bertie Ahern, there is no such uncertainty. He has made history, a three-term Taoiseach with the prospect of serving for 15 years – an unprecedented feat for a leader in an age of political obsolescence.
Things aren’t look good, was my blatantly obvious observation to him.
Cowen immediately responded by evoking the 1994 All Ireland. For people from his home county, it will go down in history as the ‘four minute final’. Offaly were trailing Limerick by five points with only four minutes remaining. In a late blitz, they scored two goals and four points to pull off one of the most memorable – almost unbelievable - reverses of all time.
And this was its political equivalent. The first two weeks of the campaign were a disaster for Ahern and FF, as they struggled – and failed- to put the BertieGate mess behind them. On that Monday, Cowen himself came out fighting with an imperious performance, a bravura demoltion job on Enda Kenny’s contract.
It proved to be the springboard for his party’s last gambit – a two-pronged attack that traded on Ahern’s statesmanship on the one hand and a no-holds-barred attack on what they identified as Fine Gael’s weak point – Enda Kenny’s American-style ‘Contract for a New Ireland’.
That three-day period that began with Ahern’s Westminster speech and culminated in the TV debate on Thursday night between him and Kenny proved to be pivotal.
In the wake of the debate, the media said that Ahern had shaded the debate (though, in defence of the Irish Examiner, we said that Ahern was the conclusive winner). But it wasn’t until the Irish Times opinion poll was published the following Monday that the disconnect between the media and the public became evident. The public had declared Ahern an emphatic winner. It wasn’t just FF sophistry. Joe Public out there agreed that he had dismantled Kenny’s ‘Contract’.
That wasn’t the only disconnect between the media and the public. It seemed that many people out there just didn’t share the media’s preoccupation (a justified one, nonetheless) with his finances. If he had strayed offside, it is clear they were ready to forgive him. The people have spoken – to employ the electoral cliché – and have spoken in a language that is foreign to that of the media.
But did a late blitz really turn around – in the space of two days - a possible FF loss into the party’s most emphatic election since 1977? Whatever, FF clearly consolidated its position after the Ahern victory, and never looked back. While the media was taken aback by the Times poll on Monday, it is clear its own private polls were telling it the party was close to an overall majority. On Vincent Browne’s programme on polling night, pollster Sean Donnelly, who conducts private polls for FF, predicted 76 seats for the party. Donnelly doesn’t exaggerate. FF knew it was going to have a good election.
David Davin Power’s great quotation of an African proverb is the summation of this election: “When elephants fight, the grass gets grampled.”
Everything converged back to the two civil war parties. All the smaller parties have got squeezed, suffered reverses – and in the case of the PDs – are facing extinction in the face. The concentration to the civil war configuration was staggering. Labour made no gains and lost one or two. The Greens were expected to make three gains but instead found four of its six TDs fighting for survival. Sinn Fein bellyflopped – gained zero and lost one seat, that of Sean Crowe in Tallaght. Only three or four independents will return. There will be no Joe Higgins. And as for the PDs, they have been salamandered – with only two TDs likely to return to the 30th Dail.
At the time of writing FF look good for 79 or 80 seats. In the cockpits of Dublin and Cork , it has retained comfortably – only in Bertie Ahern’s Dublin Central (where the vote management was lousy) is it in danger of losing.
It has also been a good election for FG but only in relative terms. It will ensure that Enda Kenny should be given the nod to continue leadership. For Pat Rabbitte and Trevor Sargent, there is much more uncertainty.
For Bertie Ahern, there is no such uncertainty. He has made history, a three-term Taoiseach with the prospect of serving for 15 years – an unprecedented feat for a leader in an age of political obsolescence.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - FF's JIM O'KEEFFE MOMENT
Well, Fianna Fail had their Jim O'Keeffe moment today.
The week before last O'Keeffe conceded at a Fine Gael conference that crime figures had not doubled between 1995, as claimed by his party, but had stayed the same. He then tried to distinguish between low-level headline crimes like bicycle theft and serious crimes like rape, murder and serious assualt, which he said had increased.
But the damage was done. And it was compounded when in the course of the TV debate Enda Kenny said O'Keeffe - his party's justice spokesman - had not been in possession of the correct statistics. It was a bad moment.
Since then, the FF big swatters have swung into action, especially Mr Brawny from Offaly. They've slid in hard on the 2,000 extra cops claim, the 2,300 beds and the allegation that FG and Labour's tax proposals would benefit the top 3% of earners.
No matter if the claims are true or not. The name of the game is to get them out there, to sow seeds of doubts about the ability and competence of Enda, his party and its partner. Did Enda ride all those tackles as well as he could? It seems the public didn't think so. And FG and Labour took too long to counter-attack and do it with the ferocity of the FF push against them since last Thursday.
It was only in the wake of yesterday's poll that they came out fighting. Rabbitte and Richard Bruton called the FF 3% tax claim a blatant lie. But was it all a little too late.
And then just as Fianna Fail was getting into a hubris frame of mind and patting itself in the back for punching holes in opposition policies, it went one step too far and punched a massive hole in one of its own policies.
The three Fianna Fail ministers at the top table today - Dermot Ahern, Mary Hanafin, and Seamus Brennan - opened their mouths just long enough to take one foot out and put the other foot in.
The context was this. Last night on Question and Answers Brian Cowen had finally come up with a figure, telling how much co-location would cost the taxpayer. €70 million per year over seven years was his response.
Then this morning, Brennan and Hanafin said it would cost €40 million between now and 2011. When asked to clarify this, total confusion reigned. Seamus started to talk about it being difficult to pin down the cost on tax breaks. When pressed further, a note was passed up from the sides.
And finally, Colin Hunt, the FF economic guru, had to step in from the wings to explain it all. Not everybody in the press corps were sure who he was. But he explained that the project would cost E47 million per year but the net cost would be E40 million. He also said that Cowen had referred last night to E40 million being the net cost.
There were a couple of snide remarks from journalists asking if Mr Cowen had had the right statistics to hand last night.
And predictably FG and Labour quickly went to town on it, with the usual barrage of verbal heavy artillery.
We're less than 48 hours away now. Tomorrow is a broadcast moratorium day. Embarrassing as it was for the Government, did it come a little bit too late.
The week before last O'Keeffe conceded at a Fine Gael conference that crime figures had not doubled between 1995, as claimed by his party, but had stayed the same. He then tried to distinguish between low-level headline crimes like bicycle theft and serious crimes like rape, murder and serious assualt, which he said had increased.
But the damage was done. And it was compounded when in the course of the TV debate Enda Kenny said O'Keeffe - his party's justice spokesman - had not been in possession of the correct statistics. It was a bad moment.
Since then, the FF big swatters have swung into action, especially Mr Brawny from Offaly. They've slid in hard on the 2,000 extra cops claim, the 2,300 beds and the allegation that FG and Labour's tax proposals would benefit the top 3% of earners.
No matter if the claims are true or not. The name of the game is to get them out there, to sow seeds of doubts about the ability and competence of Enda, his party and its partner. Did Enda ride all those tackles as well as he could? It seems the public didn't think so. And FG and Labour took too long to counter-attack and do it with the ferocity of the FF push against them since last Thursday.
It was only in the wake of yesterday's poll that they came out fighting. Rabbitte and Richard Bruton called the FF 3% tax claim a blatant lie. But was it all a little too late.
And then just as Fianna Fail was getting into a hubris frame of mind and patting itself in the back for punching holes in opposition policies, it went one step too far and punched a massive hole in one of its own policies.
The three Fianna Fail ministers at the top table today - Dermot Ahern, Mary Hanafin, and Seamus Brennan - opened their mouths just long enough to take one foot out and put the other foot in.
The context was this. Last night on Question and Answers Brian Cowen had finally come up with a figure, telling how much co-location would cost the taxpayer. €70 million per year over seven years was his response.
Then this morning, Brennan and Hanafin said it would cost €40 million between now and 2011. When asked to clarify this, total confusion reigned. Seamus started to talk about it being difficult to pin down the cost on tax breaks. When pressed further, a note was passed up from the sides.
And finally, Colin Hunt, the FF economic guru, had to step in from the wings to explain it all. Not everybody in the press corps were sure who he was. But he explained that the project would cost E47 million per year but the net cost would be E40 million. He also said that Cowen had referred last night to E40 million being the net cost.
There were a couple of snide remarks from journalists asking if Mr Cowen had had the right statistics to hand last night.
And predictably FG and Labour quickly went to town on it, with the usual barrage of verbal heavy artillery.
We're less than 48 hours away now. Tomorrow is a broadcast moratorium day. Embarrassing as it was for the Government, did it come a little bit too late.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - THE ANORAK OR GORETEX
Modern politics is like high street garments. They are designed for obsolescence. Like a Kate Moss cutaway dress or a practical blue Anorak, you’ll get a couple of good years out of them if your are lucky and then they are chucked.
But ten years? Or fifteen years? That’s an eternity.
The evidence is self-evident. In Europe over the past few years, we have seen a rake of two-term and three-term leaders getting the flick from the electorate or their colleagues.
José María Aznar retired after nine years in Spain. Silvio Berlusconi got the guts of a decade in Italy before getting the heave-ho. Gerhard Schroeder had eight years in Germany before . The messianic Jacques Chirac got the heave-ho (even though he managed to last 12). And even Bertie Ahern’s closest foreign ally, Tony Blair – the man whose career has mirrored his own in lots of ways – was given no more than a decade before he got the order of the boot.
A year or more ago, when Ahern began to creep into the record books for running second only to de Valera in terms of longevity, there was an assumption that, like Mr Tony, he would get his third term and his shot at 15 years. Like Mr Tony, election number three wasn’t going to come as easily as election number two but he was still going to limp home. It was a very neat assumption and had a nice symmetry to it. Problem was that it was wrong.
I went out earlier this week to see the various parties canvass. And what struck me was that it was like 2002 all over again except that all the hype and goodwill was now following Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte and not Ahern. We all know that Kenny can shake more hands in an instant than a packed church offering the sign of peace. But the reaction to Rabbitte was more interesting. He is diffident and a bit wooden on the stump with none of the ‘howya horse’ gregariousness of Kenny. But people were actually seeking him out, shaking his hand, wanting to talk to him. And during the course of the day, I heard a phrase that will fall on Fianna Fail ears like poison:
“Maybe it’s time for a change”.
And that’s what may fell this Government in the end. Not the health services. Not BertieGate. Not the record on crime. Or eduation. Or health. Or decentralisation. Or e-voting. But for a far more visceral reasons - because they have been there too long and there’s a need for change.
The Anorak has been there for a long time and has given some service. But it’s beginning to let in the rain. And would it be much better to plump for brightly-coloured Mr Goretex - newer, more modern, and much more lightweight.
With the exception of Richard Bruton and one or two others, the Fine Gael front bench isn’t exactly rippling with top talent. Its promises, for all its hard sell, doesn’t amount to that much. Enda’s contract with the people is just a political promise dressed up in another way. Sure he’ll not seek the office of Taoiseach again if he doesn’t fulfil it. But who’ll be the judge of that? Himself, ultimately. I’m sure there will be many mitigation factors to be found if those 2,300 beds are not built or the 2,000 cops (or is it only 1,000) aren’t pounding the beat. That’s what politicians do. They make promises. They break them. They explain them away by talking about new priorities and review.
I must say that I have huge problems with FG’s policies on crime which are Pavlovian, knee-jerk, cynical, hysterical, scaremongering and populist. (And neither FF, the PDs or Labour do much better sadly). Boot camps. Drunk tanks. Electronic tagging. Tougher remission laws. Sounds real tough. All I can say is thank goodness for our constitution. And thank goodness some of the more lunatic ones will never see the light of day.
Having said that, Fine Gael’s revival has been stunning. From a hair’s breadth away from extinction in 2002, it is now but a hair’s breadth away from government. And their recovery has borrowed heavily from the triangulation techniques perfected by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (where else have they featured this week). So, well have they positioned themselves that the choice offered to the electorate is a simple one between the Bertie Ahern of Fianna Fail and the Bertie Ahern of Fine Gael.
The policy choices, the implementation, won’t change that much despite all the promises. Because many of the difficulties in health, crime, education, infrastructure and all the other things in the mix are long-term, complicated, multi-faceted and subject to drawn-out procedures. But they promise they can do it differently. That’s the rub.
Consider this stale but relevant cliché. Governments lose elections, Oppositions don't win them. The Fianna Fail campaign has been shockingly fragmented, incoherent and all at sea. Last Monday, Brian Cowen came out fighting with a full-frontal attack on the Mullingar Accord’s spending plans. But they couldn’t sustain it, even for 24 hours. It would take a further two days for the party to seize the initiative and that was with the showdown between the two leaders on PrimeTime. Ahern looked tired but for the first time we saw a hunger and desire there after two and half weeks of being on the back foot and being out of sorts.
But victories in TV debates are not decisive and determinate. Fianna Fail and the PDs had already leaked gallons of support to the alternative. On second viewing, my own view that Ahern was the clear winner of the TV debate was reinforced. But by surviving almost unscathed Kenny also won big. He can now say that he wasn’t the corporal who by some outrageous stroke of fortune became a lucky General.
It’s going to be very tight, knife-edge close. The key electorate, the floating voters, are wavering about if 10 years is long enough, or whether there’s another couple of years wear left in the anorak.
But ten years? Or fifteen years? That’s an eternity.
The evidence is self-evident. In Europe over the past few years, we have seen a rake of two-term and three-term leaders getting the flick from the electorate or their colleagues.
José María Aznar retired after nine years in Spain. Silvio Berlusconi got the guts of a decade in Italy before getting the heave-ho. Gerhard Schroeder had eight years in Germany before . The messianic Jacques Chirac got the heave-ho (even though he managed to last 12). And even Bertie Ahern’s closest foreign ally, Tony Blair – the man whose career has mirrored his own in lots of ways – was given no more than a decade before he got the order of the boot.
A year or more ago, when Ahern began to creep into the record books for running second only to de Valera in terms of longevity, there was an assumption that, like Mr Tony, he would get his third term and his shot at 15 years. Like Mr Tony, election number three wasn’t going to come as easily as election number two but he was still going to limp home. It was a very neat assumption and had a nice symmetry to it. Problem was that it was wrong.
I went out earlier this week to see the various parties canvass. And what struck me was that it was like 2002 all over again except that all the hype and goodwill was now following Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte and not Ahern. We all know that Kenny can shake more hands in an instant than a packed church offering the sign of peace. But the reaction to Rabbitte was more interesting. He is diffident and a bit wooden on the stump with none of the ‘howya horse’ gregariousness of Kenny. But people were actually seeking him out, shaking his hand, wanting to talk to him. And during the course of the day, I heard a phrase that will fall on Fianna Fail ears like poison:
“Maybe it’s time for a change”.
And that’s what may fell this Government in the end. Not the health services. Not BertieGate. Not the record on crime. Or eduation. Or health. Or decentralisation. Or e-voting. But for a far more visceral reasons - because they have been there too long and there’s a need for change.
The Anorak has been there for a long time and has given some service. But it’s beginning to let in the rain. And would it be much better to plump for brightly-coloured Mr Goretex - newer, more modern, and much more lightweight.
With the exception of Richard Bruton and one or two others, the Fine Gael front bench isn’t exactly rippling with top talent. Its promises, for all its hard sell, doesn’t amount to that much. Enda’s contract with the people is just a political promise dressed up in another way. Sure he’ll not seek the office of Taoiseach again if he doesn’t fulfil it. But who’ll be the judge of that? Himself, ultimately. I’m sure there will be many mitigation factors to be found if those 2,300 beds are not built or the 2,000 cops (or is it only 1,000) aren’t pounding the beat. That’s what politicians do. They make promises. They break them. They explain them away by talking about new priorities and review.
I must say that I have huge problems with FG’s policies on crime which are Pavlovian, knee-jerk, cynical, hysterical, scaremongering and populist. (And neither FF, the PDs or Labour do much better sadly). Boot camps. Drunk tanks. Electronic tagging. Tougher remission laws. Sounds real tough. All I can say is thank goodness for our constitution. And thank goodness some of the more lunatic ones will never see the light of day.
Having said that, Fine Gael’s revival has been stunning. From a hair’s breadth away from extinction in 2002, it is now but a hair’s breadth away from government. And their recovery has borrowed heavily from the triangulation techniques perfected by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (where else have they featured this week). So, well have they positioned themselves that the choice offered to the electorate is a simple one between the Bertie Ahern of Fianna Fail and the Bertie Ahern of Fine Gael.
The policy choices, the implementation, won’t change that much despite all the promises. Because many of the difficulties in health, crime, education, infrastructure and all the other things in the mix are long-term, complicated, multi-faceted and subject to drawn-out procedures. But they promise they can do it differently. That’s the rub.
Consider this stale but relevant cliché. Governments lose elections, Oppositions don't win them. The Fianna Fail campaign has been shockingly fragmented, incoherent and all at sea. Last Monday, Brian Cowen came out fighting with a full-frontal attack on the Mullingar Accord’s spending plans. But they couldn’t sustain it, even for 24 hours. It would take a further two days for the party to seize the initiative and that was with the showdown between the two leaders on PrimeTime. Ahern looked tired but for the first time we saw a hunger and desire there after two and half weeks of being on the back foot and being out of sorts.
But victories in TV debates are not decisive and determinate. Fianna Fail and the PDs had already leaked gallons of support to the alternative. On second viewing, my own view that Ahern was the clear winner of the TV debate was reinforced. But by surviving almost unscathed Kenny also won big. He can now say that he wasn’t the corporal who by some outrageous stroke of fortune became a lucky General.
It’s going to be very tight, knife-edge close. The key electorate, the floating voters, are wavering about if 10 years is long enough, or whether there’s another couple of years wear left in the anorak.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - Donnybrook at Donnybrook
After the Ranelagh Rumble earlier, we had the donnybrook at Donnybrook last night as the four leaders of the parties that aren’t the big two slugged it out in a high-octane TV debate.
This was the undercard but in many ways it was always likely to be a more exciting and bruising dust-up than tonight’s main attraction – the debate between Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny tonight.
For each of the four leaders, Pat Rabbitte (Labour), Michael McDowell (PD), Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein) and Trevor Sargent (GP)are strong personalities in their own right – and all except Sargent are able debaters.
And in an exchange with personal and nasty moments, it was Rabbitte and McDowell who emerged most strongly – on the the force of their arguments, their ease, and the best lines.
Adams did not lack confidence but lack of mastery on economic issues was exposed a few times – as he was caught waffling. Sargent, not a natural debater, was always going to find it difficult. In the end he held his own without really making a killer point.
But optically, it was terrible for him. The extensive cog notes he had written neatly on the palm of his hands were easily spotted – and will probably dent his marks more than anything he or anybody else said.
The format of the PrimeTime special was simple. Each opened with a statement while bathed in a spotlight. They were then ushered over to a table in turn by presenter Mark Little. The format reminded you of a game show. They even threw in the tense music. The Weakest Link came to mind.
All four were a little nervous and stilted when reading their statement off an autocue.
Michael McDowell immediately continued his row from the afternoon, accusing the Greens of flip-flopping over corporation tax. More scare stuff – the first real row. Sargent sallied back strongly. McDowell had the first good quotable quote: “I’m surrounded by the left (Lab); the hard left (SF); and the left-overs (Greens).
The pattern became obvious early - it was mostly going to be McDowell against the other three.
The second topic was another hot potato one – the Government’s controversial collocation proposal. Here it was McDowell v the rest. Sargent contended it was a “quick fix”. McDowell went in hard.
Second fast quip by Rabbitte, looking more like the Cheshire Cat.
“You are over-energised by that pole you climbed up in Ranelagh,” he quipped.
Little moved it to crime and ASBOS and immigration with McDowell trying to divide the Greens and Labour.
Rabbitte’s second great line: “Michael is like a menopausal Paris Hilton. He is an inveterate attention seeker.”
A few minutes later it started getting personal. When the discussion moved to drugs, he accused Adams of getting E25m from FARC guerrillas in Colombia who are financed by cocaine.
Sargent scored a good point when he said there were only 27 detox beds in the entire State. As did Rabbitte when he said there were more dog wardens than labour inspectors. More insults. Sargent accused McDowell of being hardline and the PDs of being peddlers of despair and deceit. McDowell scored with an argument asking people to imagine what it will be like in three years. Adams returned to a broad republican team.
None let themselves down but Rabbitte pipped it, with McDowell pipping the other two.
from this morning's Irish Examiner
Postscript: Sargent said that he had the notes written down on his palm just in case the autocue went down at the start - in context, it was relatively minor but it would have been better for the notes to have remained hidden from view.
This was the undercard but in many ways it was always likely to be a more exciting and bruising dust-up than tonight’s main attraction – the debate between Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny tonight.
For each of the four leaders, Pat Rabbitte (Labour), Michael McDowell (PD), Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein) and Trevor Sargent (GP)are strong personalities in their own right – and all except Sargent are able debaters.
And in an exchange with personal and nasty moments, it was Rabbitte and McDowell who emerged most strongly – on the the force of their arguments, their ease, and the best lines.
Adams did not lack confidence but lack of mastery on economic issues was exposed a few times – as he was caught waffling. Sargent, not a natural debater, was always going to find it difficult. In the end he held his own without really making a killer point.
But optically, it was terrible for him. The extensive cog notes he had written neatly on the palm of his hands were easily spotted – and will probably dent his marks more than anything he or anybody else said.
The format of the PrimeTime special was simple. Each opened with a statement while bathed in a spotlight. They were then ushered over to a table in turn by presenter Mark Little. The format reminded you of a game show. They even threw in the tense music. The Weakest Link came to mind.
All four were a little nervous and stilted when reading their statement off an autocue.
Michael McDowell immediately continued his row from the afternoon, accusing the Greens of flip-flopping over corporation tax. More scare stuff – the first real row. Sargent sallied back strongly. McDowell had the first good quotable quote: “I’m surrounded by the left (Lab); the hard left (SF); and the left-overs (Greens).
The pattern became obvious early - it was mostly going to be McDowell against the other three.
The second topic was another hot potato one – the Government’s controversial collocation proposal. Here it was McDowell v the rest. Sargent contended it was a “quick fix”. McDowell went in hard.
Second fast quip by Rabbitte, looking more like the Cheshire Cat.
“You are over-energised by that pole you climbed up in Ranelagh,” he quipped.
Little moved it to crime and ASBOS and immigration with McDowell trying to divide the Greens and Labour.
Rabbitte’s second great line: “Michael is like a menopausal Paris Hilton. He is an inveterate attention seeker.”
A few minutes later it started getting personal. When the discussion moved to drugs, he accused Adams of getting E25m from FARC guerrillas in Colombia who are financed by cocaine.
Sargent scored a good point when he said there were only 27 detox beds in the entire State. As did Rabbitte when he said there were more dog wardens than labour inspectors. More insults. Sargent accused McDowell of being hardline and the PDs of being peddlers of despair and deceit. McDowell scored with an argument asking people to imagine what it will be like in three years. Adams returned to a broad republican team.
None let themselves down but Rabbitte pipped it, with McDowell pipping the other two.
from this morning's Irish Examiner
Postscript: Sargent said that he had the notes written down on his palm just in case the autocue went down at the start - in context, it was relatively minor but it would have been better for the notes to have remained hidden from view.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
INSIDE POLTICS - DEBATE PART ONE
My own initial verdict is that Rabbitte (relaxed, almost too Cheshire Cat) pipped it from McDowell (over negative, too prone to personal insults) from Adams (relaxed but woolly on specifics espeically on the economy) and Trevor (made some very good points; defended himself well but the writing on the hands was a disaster).
The last time any of us saw writing on the palm of the hand was on the hands of exam cheats who wrote cog notes on their palms. Trevor should have learned from the first rule of a cogger. Which is not to get caught. If you have something to hide, make sure it's hidden.
Every time he made a gesture we could see it: Giving his own Irish version of, Talk to the hand. It will deflect from what was a performance in which he held his own against three of the smoothest and most efficient debaters in the business.
There were a couple of good lines. When Adams said his bank owned his holiday home in Donegal; McDowell whizzed in with: "What bank? The Northern Bank?".
He then plied it on too thick with his accusation about the FARC drug-money allegedly financing Sinn Fein.
As people who follow politics, we knew that Adams had information gaps when it came to the economy. But he's very self-assured and has a reach with the public.
Rabbitte's best lines were reserved for McDowell. The best of all was:
“Michael is like a menopausal Paris Hilton. He is an inveterate attention seeker.”
Surely one he had prepared earlier.
The last time any of us saw writing on the palm of the hand was on the hands of exam cheats who wrote cog notes on their palms. Trevor should have learned from the first rule of a cogger. Which is not to get caught. If you have something to hide, make sure it's hidden.
Every time he made a gesture we could see it: Giving his own Irish version of, Talk to the hand. It will deflect from what was a performance in which he held his own against three of the smoothest and most efficient debaters in the business.
There were a couple of good lines. When Adams said his bank owned his holiday home in Donegal; McDowell whizzed in with: "What bank? The Northern Bank?".
He then plied it on too thick with his accusation about the FARC drug-money allegedly financing Sinn Fein.
As people who follow politics, we knew that Adams had information gaps when it came to the economy. But he's very self-assured and has a reach with the public.
Rabbitte's best lines were reserved for McDowell. The best of all was:
“Michael is like a menopausal Paris Hilton. He is an inveterate attention seeker.”
Surely one he had prepared earlier.
INSIDE POLITICS - GREEN PARTY POLITICAL BROADCAST
It's probably the best political broadcast of this election campaign so far. It wouldn't be stretching it to say it's the best ever in Irelnad.
I have misgivings about using children and getting them to use scripted lines, as vehicles for grown-up thoughts.
Having said that, they are essential for the clever punch line - by the time they get a vote at the age of 18, it will be too late. Amazingly shot. Simple sentiments. Staggeringly delivered. Food for thought.
Of course, Fianna Fail is also promising a spectacular tonight, haveing sought and obtained the endorsements of both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. That was a huge coup! But I just sense that the feelgood factor from the North, the championing of Bertie Ahern as world statesman, will not be enough to turn the tide for FF.
Monday, May 14, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIEGATE; THE END CREDITS
It was – to borrow somebody else’s phrase – the last sting of a dying wasp.
There was no emotional TV interview. There were no catch in the voice. There were no tears. This wasn’t a politician tugging at the heart strings – this was a Taoiseach tugging impatiently at the exit door to leave BertieGate behind once and for all.
And in the end Bertie Ahern got it over with. The comprehensive statement came in a staggered way – the gist of it in a written response to questions in the Sunday Independent; and the whole shebang in a statement delivered at 2pm yesterday – about the only time in the week where the news cycle takes a siesta and gives way to sport. There are no talk shows and consequently the first real parsing of it was on the Week in Politics, late last night.
There were a couple of strange references in the statement that suggest it had been originally written for Ahern to read out.
“I hope you will bear with me as I give you a detailed account of these matters,” is the syntax of talk and not of prose.
But no matter if the strategy chopped and changed. No matter that it was released on the day the latest opinion poll spelt further bad news for Fianna Fail. “You know us, always going against the wind,” said one of its backroom people.
What mattered for Fianna Fail was two things. That it was comprehensive and complete enough for the PDs. The last thing FF wanted was for Michael McDowell to be so scunnered (a nice Scottish word that means very annoyed or devastated) to bring the edifice down. And it was comprehensive and complete enough to draw a line under it, as far as this election cycle was over.
Sure, they’d get another sting off the wasps – the swarm of journalists that is, not the opposition. For the leaders of the main opposition parties have reacted to questions about BertieGate in the way an elderly nun might react to a flasher. Recoil verging on speechlessness has been the standard response. It’s been a textbook example of standing up for your focus group findings.
And it was, in the end, a comprehensive account of the convoluted dealings surrounding his house near Griffith Avenue. It wasn’t just a lawyer putting words into Bertie Ahern’s mouths – there was a human element to it that explained things in a manner that will go down very well with ordinary people.
“I know that some people will fell that some aspects of my life are unusual. I am sorry if that has caused any confusion or worry in people’s minds All of these issues arose in a period when my family, personal and professional situations were rapidly changing.”
Some cynics will say that he has brought the soap opera that is his personal life and family into it, to again elicit a sympathy vote. But there wasn’t overkill. And he confronted the substantial questions relatively head-on, though “unusual” would only be the beginning of some of the aspects and transactions.
But like all Bertie Ahern’s public utterances, this one had its loose threads and its ambiguities. New questions keep cropping up – when one door closes, another opens.
The one thing that he does nails head is the alleged dollar lodgement. The Tribunal lawyers said that the £28,772.90 that Celia Larkin lodged (this was the £30,000 sterling that he says Michael Wall gave him for renovation and for stamp duty) represented the exact sum he would have received that day if he tendered $45,000.
But in his statement yesterday, he said it actually equated to $44,277.68 at the appropriate AIB rate. Either he’s wrong or the Tribunal is wrong. And if the Tribunal is wrong, it’s a fundamental error, especially as it knew that this allegation would be made public before the hearing began. That one has been knocked on the head.
But there are others that remain hanging. Why was that lodgement a mixture of sterling and punts. And that lodgement went through two accounts before going back into his safe in St Luke’s a month or so later. And then it was converted back into sterling for the purposes of paying back Mr Wall but then that didn’t happen and then may or not have been kept in his safe as sterling.
But the longest loose thread is a new one that he brought up yesterday in the interview. Last October, he was asked in the Dail about his tax liability arising out of the Dublin and Manchester dig-outs in 1993.
“I have been separately advised by two eminent tax advisers that I have no tax liability in respect of the Manchester moneys. The funds were from persons based in the Manchester area who are not based in Ireland and, therefore, the sums were not chargeable to gift tax,” he said.
But yesterday, he revealed that he has – on the foot of subsequent advice – made a provisional payment to cover any liability which could arise.
In his doorstep interview, he gave a few more details. He said the issue had arisen as to whether or not Michael Wall had paid UK tax. On that basis, he made a declaration.
“If I owe at the end it will be very little,” he said.
But that’s not the point. He may be opening himself to the charge of misleading – if inadvertently – the Dáil last October when he gave the impression that no tax liability arose. This may come back to haunt him. He was also Minister for Finance at the time – a person whose propriety in all things is supposed to be beyond question.
Privately, the main opposition parties were expected a full-blooded attack yesterday. In the end, it was a tempered statement. There is some ‘Empire Strikes Back’ sallies. He ridicules the allegations of Tom Gilmartin.
There is also dark talk about “malicious leaks” and the agenda to damage him and FF. He lists off the four leaks – including the alleged claims of a Garda driver that came from Fine Gael MEP. Yesterday he made an opaque comment about secret meetings in hotels in west Galway – almost reminiscent of the Famous Five and mysterious midnight activities at ‘smuggler’s cove’. From all that, it’s as plain as a pikestaff that FF believe there’s a vast conspiracy against them and that it’s FG that is behind it.
This whole episode has left a deep well of bitterness in FF. Everybody has had it in for them. The Mahon Tribunal. The alleged clandestine operations of their political opponents. An aggressive media - Ahern yesterday chafed at what he called its “lurid news headlines and copious details of my private life distorted, misrepresented and sensationalised.”
But, even if all that is true – and even if all the details were leaked with malicious intent – the problem for Ahern is that the dig-outs and the arrangements surrounding his house did raise very grave questions that went to his credibility. And in modern democracies, the credibility, honesty and trustworthiness of our politicians – especially our leaders – are paramount. Resent it as they do, it would have been a dereliction for the media to avoid it.
And Ahern has been lucky. In a bigger less personal country like Britain he may not have found understanding or forgiveness. Lucky though that his dig-out was venial compared to the ‘mortallers’ of Charlie Haughey. Lucky too that the people judged that against his undoubted achievements and said that the latter tipped the scales in his favour.
And by tomorrow, when he makes another historic address in Westminster, my guess is that this controversy will have died down and the election agenda will have finally moved on.
However, the last time we heard about the sting of a dying wasp in Ireland (over gangland crime), it turned out to be a singularly unfortunate phrase. This controversy has not gone away, has merely been postponed until polling day. The poison has gone into the bloodstream but there's a long incubation.
This is my piece from today's Irish Examiner.
There was no emotional TV interview. There were no catch in the voice. There were no tears. This wasn’t a politician tugging at the heart strings – this was a Taoiseach tugging impatiently at the exit door to leave BertieGate behind once and for all.
And in the end Bertie Ahern got it over with. The comprehensive statement came in a staggered way – the gist of it in a written response to questions in the Sunday Independent; and the whole shebang in a statement delivered at 2pm yesterday – about the only time in the week where the news cycle takes a siesta and gives way to sport. There are no talk shows and consequently the first real parsing of it was on the Week in Politics, late last night.
There were a couple of strange references in the statement that suggest it had been originally written for Ahern to read out.
“I hope you will bear with me as I give you a detailed account of these matters,” is the syntax of talk and not of prose.
But no matter if the strategy chopped and changed. No matter that it was released on the day the latest opinion poll spelt further bad news for Fianna Fail. “You know us, always going against the wind,” said one of its backroom people.
What mattered for Fianna Fail was two things. That it was comprehensive and complete enough for the PDs. The last thing FF wanted was for Michael McDowell to be so scunnered (a nice Scottish word that means very annoyed or devastated) to bring the edifice down. And it was comprehensive and complete enough to draw a line under it, as far as this election cycle was over.
Sure, they’d get another sting off the wasps – the swarm of journalists that is, not the opposition. For the leaders of the main opposition parties have reacted to questions about BertieGate in the way an elderly nun might react to a flasher. Recoil verging on speechlessness has been the standard response. It’s been a textbook example of standing up for your focus group findings.
And it was, in the end, a comprehensive account of the convoluted dealings surrounding his house near Griffith Avenue. It wasn’t just a lawyer putting words into Bertie Ahern’s mouths – there was a human element to it that explained things in a manner that will go down very well with ordinary people.
“I know that some people will fell that some aspects of my life are unusual. I am sorry if that has caused any confusion or worry in people’s minds All of these issues arose in a period when my family, personal and professional situations were rapidly changing.”
Some cynics will say that he has brought the soap opera that is his personal life and family into it, to again elicit a sympathy vote. But there wasn’t overkill. And he confronted the substantial questions relatively head-on, though “unusual” would only be the beginning of some of the aspects and transactions.
But like all Bertie Ahern’s public utterances, this one had its loose threads and its ambiguities. New questions keep cropping up – when one door closes, another opens.
The one thing that he does nails head is the alleged dollar lodgement. The Tribunal lawyers said that the £28,772.90 that Celia Larkin lodged (this was the £30,000 sterling that he says Michael Wall gave him for renovation and for stamp duty) represented the exact sum he would have received that day if he tendered $45,000.
But in his statement yesterday, he said it actually equated to $44,277.68 at the appropriate AIB rate. Either he’s wrong or the Tribunal is wrong. And if the Tribunal is wrong, it’s a fundamental error, especially as it knew that this allegation would be made public before the hearing began. That one has been knocked on the head.
But there are others that remain hanging. Why was that lodgement a mixture of sterling and punts. And that lodgement went through two accounts before going back into his safe in St Luke’s a month or so later. And then it was converted back into sterling for the purposes of paying back Mr Wall but then that didn’t happen and then may or not have been kept in his safe as sterling.
But the longest loose thread is a new one that he brought up yesterday in the interview. Last October, he was asked in the Dail about his tax liability arising out of the Dublin and Manchester dig-outs in 1993.
“I have been separately advised by two eminent tax advisers that I have no tax liability in respect of the Manchester moneys. The funds were from persons based in the Manchester area who are not based in Ireland and, therefore, the sums were not chargeable to gift tax,” he said.
But yesterday, he revealed that he has – on the foot of subsequent advice – made a provisional payment to cover any liability which could arise.
In his doorstep interview, he gave a few more details. He said the issue had arisen as to whether or not Michael Wall had paid UK tax. On that basis, he made a declaration.
“If I owe at the end it will be very little,” he said.
But that’s not the point. He may be opening himself to the charge of misleading – if inadvertently – the Dáil last October when he gave the impression that no tax liability arose. This may come back to haunt him. He was also Minister for Finance at the time – a person whose propriety in all things is supposed to be beyond question.
Privately, the main opposition parties were expected a full-blooded attack yesterday. In the end, it was a tempered statement. There is some ‘Empire Strikes Back’ sallies. He ridicules the allegations of Tom Gilmartin.
There is also dark talk about “malicious leaks” and the agenda to damage him and FF. He lists off the four leaks – including the alleged claims of a Garda driver that came from Fine Gael MEP. Yesterday he made an opaque comment about secret meetings in hotels in west Galway – almost reminiscent of the Famous Five and mysterious midnight activities at ‘smuggler’s cove’. From all that, it’s as plain as a pikestaff that FF believe there’s a vast conspiracy against them and that it’s FG that is behind it.
This whole episode has left a deep well of bitterness in FF. Everybody has had it in for them. The Mahon Tribunal. The alleged clandestine operations of their political opponents. An aggressive media - Ahern yesterday chafed at what he called its “lurid news headlines and copious details of my private life distorted, misrepresented and sensationalised.”
But, even if all that is true – and even if all the details were leaked with malicious intent – the problem for Ahern is that the dig-outs and the arrangements surrounding his house did raise very grave questions that went to his credibility. And in modern democracies, the credibility, honesty and trustworthiness of our politicians – especially our leaders – are paramount. Resent it as they do, it would have been a dereliction for the media to avoid it.
And Ahern has been lucky. In a bigger less personal country like Britain he may not have found understanding or forgiveness. Lucky though that his dig-out was venial compared to the ‘mortallers’ of Charlie Haughey. Lucky too that the people judged that against his undoubted achievements and said that the latter tipped the scales in his favour.
And by tomorrow, when he makes another historic address in Westminster, my guess is that this controversy will have died down and the election agenda will have finally moved on.
However, the last time we heard about the sting of a dying wasp in Ireland (over gangland crime), it turned out to be a singularly unfortunate phrase. This controversy has not gone away, has merely been postponed until polling day. The poison has gone into the bloodstream but there's a long incubation.
This is my piece from today's Irish Examiner.
Friday, May 11, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - GREEN PARTY DECLINE?
A noticeable trend in the Irish Times poll this morning was upward shifts and slideage of support for the non Big 2 parties. Labour is on a roll at the moment and has displaced both Sinn Fein and the Greens as the 'coming party'. Its three point jump to 13 is consistent with findings in our own poll and the Sunday Business Post on Sunday. After months of green tide talk, the Greens look like they may be on the ebb. Five per cent suggests a loss of traction to Labour in the key Dublin constituencies. At that level of support, there are no guarantees it can retain all its seat.
And that will make a lot of people who predicted they would win big a little bit silly.
In our own supplement I predicted the following state of the parties:
FF 67; FG 47; Lab 22; GP 11; SF 8; PD 4; Others 7.
Of course, it would be churlish for me to pledge my life on it. These things are merely punt. And when you tot up all the individual constituency predictions done by the media in the run-up to elections, you see how horribly wrong we turn out to be.
In any instance, I will have to revisit my predictions this weekend, and perhaps revise the Greens down, SF up a little, and Labour up a little. But then, I'll probably have to do the same next weekend. Fortunes wax and wane furiously in the heat of battle.
At least I'm in relatively good company. Watch this classic piece of RTE footage from the 1981 election where Vincent Browne (dig the lamb chops!) admits he was completely wrong with his predictions. Follow this link!
And that will make a lot of people who predicted they would win big a little bit silly.
In our own supplement I predicted the following state of the parties:
FF 67; FG 47; Lab 22; GP 11; SF 8; PD 4; Others 7.
Of course, it would be churlish for me to pledge my life on it. These things are merely punt. And when you tot up all the individual constituency predictions done by the media in the run-up to elections, you see how horribly wrong we turn out to be.
In any instance, I will have to revisit my predictions this weekend, and perhaps revise the Greens down, SF up a little, and Labour up a little. But then, I'll probably have to do the same next weekend. Fortunes wax and wane furiously in the heat of battle.
At least I'm in relatively good company. Watch this classic piece of RTE footage from the 1981 election where Vincent Browne (dig the lamb chops!) admits he was completely wrong with his predictions. Follow this link!
INSIDE POLITICS - DAY TWELVE
To Fianna Fail's headquarters near the Grand Canal at 9am this morning. And surprise, surprise. Bertie Ahern made his first appearance at a press briefing. What's more. He took charge of it.
The optics of that are unmistakable. FF now believe they have put BertieGate behind them, feel emboldened enough to allow their leader back to marshall and front their campaign.
The only loose thread of course is Bertie Ahern's statement. FF have been very tight about its timing. The reason for that is obvious. It's Ahern himself who will decide when and how he will make it. I suspect that the party's thinking is going along the following lines: When he makes it, the media will run it with it for at least 24 hours. But the PDs - unless there is another outbreak of spontaneous combustion - will in all likelihood accept it, albeit with a little wrist slapping. The other opposition parties won't touch it because they will be too scared that they'll be swamped by a tsunami of sympathy for the Taoiseach. And the butterflyish media? Will it persist stubbornly to hound him? Or will it move on to other things?
And in that regard, Bertie Ahern is hoping that the first peace dividend of political settlement in the North will be his re-election. Like the North this week, Bertie Ahern's appearance at the Battle of the Boyne site with Ian Paisley will provide powerful imagery and publicity. And it will be more of the same, when he makes the trip to Westminster on Tuesday morning to become the first Taoiseach - and only the 32nd world leader - to address the joint houses of parliament.
There's a tasty piece of irony there. Ahern coat-tailed onto the Blair phenomenon in 1997 when first getting elected. And he may be also able to use the mutual self-congratulation surrounding the Blair departure as a leg-up.
He was on top of his game an decisive this morning. Of course, his party is still struggling - 36% in the polls will put see them slink into the opposition benches for five years. But you get a sense that FF is going to start its big push this weekend - and the empire is just about to strike back.
The optics of that are unmistakable. FF now believe they have put BertieGate behind them, feel emboldened enough to allow their leader back to marshall and front their campaign.
The only loose thread of course is Bertie Ahern's statement. FF have been very tight about its timing. The reason for that is obvious. It's Ahern himself who will decide when and how he will make it. I suspect that the party's thinking is going along the following lines: When he makes it, the media will run it with it for at least 24 hours. But the PDs - unless there is another outbreak of spontaneous combustion - will in all likelihood accept it, albeit with a little wrist slapping. The other opposition parties won't touch it because they will be too scared that they'll be swamped by a tsunami of sympathy for the Taoiseach. And the butterflyish media? Will it persist stubbornly to hound him? Or will it move on to other things?
And in that regard, Bertie Ahern is hoping that the first peace dividend of political settlement in the North will be his re-election. Like the North this week, Bertie Ahern's appearance at the Battle of the Boyne site with Ian Paisley will provide powerful imagery and publicity. And it will be more of the same, when he makes the trip to Westminster on Tuesday morning to become the first Taoiseach - and only the 32nd world leader - to address the joint houses of parliament.
There's a tasty piece of irony there. Ahern coat-tailed onto the Blair phenomenon in 1997 when first getting elected. And he may be also able to use the mutual self-congratulation surrounding the Blair departure as a leg-up.
He was on top of his game an decisive this morning. Of course, his party is still struggling - 36% in the polls will put see them slink into the opposition benches for five years. But you get a sense that FF is going to start its big push this weekend - and the empire is just about to strike back.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - DAY ELEVEN
Bertie Ahern's financial woes have disappeared off the radar screen over the past few days and we have returned to what passes for 'normal' business during an election campaign.
There's a huge element of artifice about what happens. Yesterday, we got a classic example of a phoney war; lots of hot air about an issue (corporation tax) where the policies of all parties (even the supposedly radical SF) are ad idem.
Most days during the campaign, all the parties hold briefings. Meanwhile, the Leader's go on manic whirlwind tours of the country where they do silly things firstly on behalf of upholding democracy and secondly on behalf of attracting the attention of the lenses.
RTE yesterday showed a great piece of archive footage from 1969 featuring Longford-Westmeath TD Gerry L'Estrange addressing a crowd outside Mass (in fact RTE has put a lot of fascinating archive material on its website including FF's embrace of American canvassing techniques in 1977; Pat Kenny explaining the use of computers in 1982; and a Liam Cosgrave address from 1973. You can find them all here.)
Nowadays, there are few speeches. It's all to do with the photo op - the most surreal was Pat Rabbitte and Breda Moynihan-Cronin on top of a jarvey in Killarney, bringing the famous Tom Parlon-Mary Harney donkey and cart photo from 2002 to mind.
The party's choose their own particular schtick each day and then try to anticipate what their rivals are going to say. Sometimes you feel like there's a secret coven where they all secretly agree in advance they are going to spar on an issue. At other times, it's more like throwing all the balls in the air and seeing which ones the media pack will catch and then kick.
Today it was health. Fine Gael insisting that the biggest broken promise of all by this Government was its promise to provide 3,000 extra hospital beds (it's part of the health strategy that runs out in 2011). The Government, particularly health minister Mary Harney countered by claiming that the FG proposal to provide an extra 2,300 beds would be impossible to achieve within five years. FG Deputy leader Richard Bruton insisted it would be, said that that FG would prioritise the first €850 million of the €2.6 billon provided for capital health spending in the NDP.
At least there was some meat in this particular sandwich, if you don't mind the distortion of a political metaphor. There are real differences between the two alternative alliances when it comes to health. And at least when you hear the debate there is a little bit more Gerry L'Estrange about it; a little bit less modern political leaders - there is debate and argument and the welcome (figurative) return of the soapbox.
There's a huge element of artifice about what happens. Yesterday, we got a classic example of a phoney war; lots of hot air about an issue (corporation tax) where the policies of all parties (even the supposedly radical SF) are ad idem.
Most days during the campaign, all the parties hold briefings. Meanwhile, the Leader's go on manic whirlwind tours of the country where they do silly things firstly on behalf of upholding democracy and secondly on behalf of attracting the attention of the lenses.
RTE yesterday showed a great piece of archive footage from 1969 featuring Longford-Westmeath TD Gerry L'Estrange addressing a crowd outside Mass (in fact RTE has put a lot of fascinating archive material on its website including FF's embrace of American canvassing techniques in 1977; Pat Kenny explaining the use of computers in 1982; and a Liam Cosgrave address from 1973. You can find them all here.)
Nowadays, there are few speeches. It's all to do with the photo op - the most surreal was Pat Rabbitte and Breda Moynihan-Cronin on top of a jarvey in Killarney, bringing the famous Tom Parlon-Mary Harney donkey and cart photo from 2002 to mind.
The party's choose their own particular schtick each day and then try to anticipate what their rivals are going to say. Sometimes you feel like there's a secret coven where they all secretly agree in advance they are going to spar on an issue. At other times, it's more like throwing all the balls in the air and seeing which ones the media pack will catch and then kick.
Today it was health. Fine Gael insisting that the biggest broken promise of all by this Government was its promise to provide 3,000 extra hospital beds (it's part of the health strategy that runs out in 2011). The Government, particularly health minister Mary Harney countered by claiming that the FG proposal to provide an extra 2,300 beds would be impossible to achieve within five years. FG Deputy leader Richard Bruton insisted it would be, said that that FG would prioritise the first €850 million of the €2.6 billon provided for capital health spending in the NDP.
At least there was some meat in this particular sandwich, if you don't mind the distortion of a political metaphor. There are real differences between the two alternative alliances when it comes to health. And at least when you hear the debate there is a little bit more Gerry L'Estrange about it; a little bit less modern political leaders - there is debate and argument and the welcome (figurative) return of the soapbox.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - Labour's latest internet video
This is the fourth in a series. This blog also featured the first. They are very sparse, spartan in image but very effective.
The same can't be said for the Labour political broadcast showing tonight on RTE. God, it's depressing. You'd feel like crawling into a hole like hearing all the stories of misery. And then Super Pat arrives into some park to smile beatifically at all those sad groups of downtrodden commuters, young couples, carers etc and suddenly everything is better.
Reminds you of the music video for 'Big Me' by the Foo Fighters. Everything is going wrong and the world is getting you down. But when you pop a minty sweet (I think it was Mentos) everything becomes right again.
INSIDE POLITICS - ENDA KENNY
I was looking at Enda Kenny waltzing around the midlands this evening and I thought to myself - in a fortnight's time this man could be Taoiseach.
One of the party pieces of the great Tyrone novelist, journalist and broadcaster Benedict Kiely was 'The Man from God Knows Where'.
It could have been written for Enda. Or to employ some other cliches that have been hacked around about him - 'the man who rose without trace' or 'the overnight success after almost 30 years'.
Somebody was interviewing him over the last couple of days (so much is happening that you lose track of everything - I think it was Sean O'Rourke) who described the Department of Tourism and Trade during his time as a 'happy' place (see how strong we political hacks are on detail). Ok, I know I'm hanging on a thread here but the gist of the interview was that Enda was a great motivator and that he energised those around him.
I'm sure that's true. He's got a fantastic personal touch. He's friendly, tactile, completely unaffected and very engaging.
A small diversion and then I'll make a point. Like checking out Blogorrah most days, I can't resist posting those satirical parodies like the Simon Cowell one two posts below this one. It's juvenile, cheap and usually very unfair. But it's good clean fun, as the man says. And the point? Well the X Factor satire kind of suits Enda. Because he has that hard-to-describe quality that Bertie has and that Bill Clinton had in spades. The presence of people, the thought of working a room, seems to electrify him.
But - and this is the question - does he have the mettle, the grist, and the granite to become Taoiseach. I remember an interview David Nally of PrimeTime did with him when he contested the leadership with Michael Noonan in 2001. Nally filleted him on the specifics of economic and tax policies.
He has improved over the past couple of years and tends to be very well briefed. But his grasp of detail can still let him down (unlike Bertie who can slew out statistics from morning to night) and he can get caught bang-to-rights when asked tricky supplemental questions.
In the past week, he has kicked to touch on the nurses dispute by saying that an imaginative solution is needed and talking in general terms about benchmarking. Is he in favour of the 10% increase or the reduction of hours to 35 per week? We just don't know.
He also tends to defer to Richard Bruton when the likes of George Lee and Brendan Keenan start asking tough and specific questions. And he has also done a bit of a Pontius Pilate act on the BertieGate saga by, well, not really making a judgement other than the sterile one that the Government is 100% souped.
The reason that Labour and Fine Gael have whistled and looked the other way is that they all got roasted in the polls last autumn. I personally think there was something very strange about the timing of this Quarryvale module, and the Tribunal's insistence on circulating Bertie Ahern's statement on the last Thursday of May (they were very naive if they believed that they wouldn't be leaked).
But once the statements were made public and open to scrutiny (irrespective of the fact they left Ahern playing against a stacked hand) they did raise genuine questions that go to the credibility of the politician who holds the first office. It was inevitable, cut also wholly legitimate, cruel as it is for him
I'm sure that Enda Kenny is well able to deal with all the issues above. But if Ahern's credibility is in question, the big puzzler that has always surrounded Enda Kenny is that of competence - does he have what it takes to become Taoiseach?
I thought of it tonight as I watched him waltzing around a hall in the midlands. I'm sure he has all the qualities (he's been very impressive this year; and he has a formidable presence like Rabbitte riding shotgun for him) but if BertieGate rumbles on for another week, that mettle might not be tested until he drives for the first time into Government Buildings in Merrion Street.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE'S BLUNDERS
Only Day 3 of 25 and already this election is shaping up to be a cliff-hanger.
Five years ago, it was all over even at this stage. One remarkable thing about the commentary from day three on was speculation about how total the FF victory would be. At this stage of this campaign, they stopped talking about FF's win and started doing spec pieces on the margin. A few days later, it became embarrassing, almost painful, to read about Fine Gael's demise.
The start of the campaign has been a disaster for FF.
It's amazing to see that time has almost stood still for the party. There's old hand PJ Mara still elegantly wielding the baton as he conducts the media operation. There's an army of political advisers to Ministers, who have resigned their jobs and are now buzzing around FF's election headquarters. There's an awful lot of them. They include big swatters like Mandy Johnston, Gerry Hickey, Colin Hunt, Ciaran Quinn, Tom Rowley, Gerry Howlin, and Averil Power.
Like five years ago, there's a daily 'grid' of schedules for ministers and the Taoiseach. There's a positive new message every day (today it was pensions). There's the unit whose job it is to rebut all claims made by the oppostion parties. Plus, FF's enormous operation is supplying us in the media with all the images, words, movements, actions and car chases (if you're following Bertie) we desire.
But it's all seems to be falling a bit flat. I'm writing in tomorrow's paper that Fianna Fail's pension announcement today was like its overall campaign - hastily arranged and cobbled together. And the other new factor is that the media isn't the passive and supplicant entity it was five years ago.
The more Seamus Brennan talked about the new SSIA-type incentive the more it sounded like it was concocted on the back of an envelope. Seamus talks about it being in the planning for two and a half years but there was no costings, no indication of how much the Government would pay, and no provision for it in Fianna Fail's economic blueprint for the next five years.
The biggest liability the party has was its biggest asset until 8am on Sunday morning. Something just does't add up about his decision to do his dawn swoop on the Aras just an hour before the President travelled abroad for a week.
When I first heard it on Sunday (I was away) I thought: that's been done for reasons of decorum. But I wasn't aware of the Daily Mail story that revealed that £30,000 st that had been transferred to his ex partner Celia Larkin for refurbishment. The President can't travel abroad without the permission of Government. And Bertie Ahern said yesterday said he originally planned to bring the Dail to an end on Tuesday. So why the indecent haste at the weekend. The not-breaking-with-precedent explanation looks wan when you read of all the outings by FF ministers and the Taoiseach himself over the weekend, bitterly criticising the Tribunal for being in full flow during the election campaign.
Whatever, the effect of the Taoiseach calling the election on Sunday was to stop the Tribunal in its tracks. It meant no opening statement on Monday; no Tom Gilmartin getting into the witness box.
And senior people in FF have told me in recent weeks that they were really worried about the collateral damage that would be inflicted on Bertie and FF, if allegations were aired at Mahon. The last thing the party wanted this May was BertieGate, the Sequel.
Since Sunday FF has been playing catch-up. And Ahern has been very much on the back foot. His tactic of saying nothing yesterday was all very well but it's a tactic he should have employed on Monday rather than giving a confusing explanation then that it was a "stamp duty issue". Once he opened his mouth on Monday, his subsequent 'no comments' and stonewalling looked really bad from an optics perspective. In three days, he has wavered from narky to taciturn to silent. It's clear he of all people wasn't ready for this.
A very bright FF strategist told me a couple of months ago that the party learned in 2002 that when the media claims that the party is in serious trouble, the view is not always shared by Joe Citizen out there.
But that was then. And the goalposts, the pitch, the stadium, and the world have all shifted since then. It's a different game. New rules now apply. Of all people FF, the spinmeisters supreme of modern Irish politics, should know that nothing stands still, that a change of tack is needed.
Five years ago, it was all over even at this stage. One remarkable thing about the commentary from day three on was speculation about how total the FF victory would be. At this stage of this campaign, they stopped talking about FF's win and started doing spec pieces on the margin. A few days later, it became embarrassing, almost painful, to read about Fine Gael's demise.
The start of the campaign has been a disaster for FF.
It's amazing to see that time has almost stood still for the party. There's old hand PJ Mara still elegantly wielding the baton as he conducts the media operation. There's an army of political advisers to Ministers, who have resigned their jobs and are now buzzing around FF's election headquarters. There's an awful lot of them. They include big swatters like Mandy Johnston, Gerry Hickey, Colin Hunt, Ciaran Quinn, Tom Rowley, Gerry Howlin, and Averil Power.
Like five years ago, there's a daily 'grid' of schedules for ministers and the Taoiseach. There's a positive new message every day (today it was pensions). There's the unit whose job it is to rebut all claims made by the oppostion parties. Plus, FF's enormous operation is supplying us in the media with all the images, words, movements, actions and car chases (if you're following Bertie) we desire.
But it's all seems to be falling a bit flat. I'm writing in tomorrow's paper that Fianna Fail's pension announcement today was like its overall campaign - hastily arranged and cobbled together. And the other new factor is that the media isn't the passive and supplicant entity it was five years ago.
The more Seamus Brennan talked about the new SSIA-type incentive the more it sounded like it was concocted on the back of an envelope. Seamus talks about it being in the planning for two and a half years but there was no costings, no indication of how much the Government would pay, and no provision for it in Fianna Fail's economic blueprint for the next five years.
The biggest liability the party has was its biggest asset until 8am on Sunday morning. Something just does't add up about his decision to do his dawn swoop on the Aras just an hour before the President travelled abroad for a week.
When I first heard it on Sunday (I was away) I thought: that's been done for reasons of decorum. But I wasn't aware of the Daily Mail story that revealed that £30,000 st that had been transferred to his ex partner Celia Larkin for refurbishment. The President can't travel abroad without the permission of Government. And Bertie Ahern said yesterday said he originally planned to bring the Dail to an end on Tuesday. So why the indecent haste at the weekend. The not-breaking-with-precedent explanation looks wan when you read of all the outings by FF ministers and the Taoiseach himself over the weekend, bitterly criticising the Tribunal for being in full flow during the election campaign.
Whatever, the effect of the Taoiseach calling the election on Sunday was to stop the Tribunal in its tracks. It meant no opening statement on Monday; no Tom Gilmartin getting into the witness box.
And senior people in FF have told me in recent weeks that they were really worried about the collateral damage that would be inflicted on Bertie and FF, if allegations were aired at Mahon. The last thing the party wanted this May was BertieGate, the Sequel.
Since Sunday FF has been playing catch-up. And Ahern has been very much on the back foot. His tactic of saying nothing yesterday was all very well but it's a tactic he should have employed on Monday rather than giving a confusing explanation then that it was a "stamp duty issue". Once he opened his mouth on Monday, his subsequent 'no comments' and stonewalling looked really bad from an optics perspective. In three days, he has wavered from narky to taciturn to silent. It's clear he of all people wasn't ready for this.
A very bright FF strategist told me a couple of months ago that the party learned in 2002 that when the media claims that the party is in serious trouble, the view is not always shared by Joe Citizen out there.
But that was then. And the goalposts, the pitch, the stadium, and the world have all shifted since then. It's a different game. New rules now apply. Of all people FF, the spinmeisters supreme of modern Irish politics, should know that nothing stands still, that a change of tack is needed.
Monday, April 30, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE'S SUNDAY SWOOP
Like Enda Kenny I was caught on the hop by the pre-dawn swoop by Bertie Ahern yesterday morning. The FG leader was only in Mayo. Unfortunately for me I was in Lisbon without a computer.
You have to play with whatever hand you are dealt. And so I wrote the analysis piece below in a cafe in the Baixa using my mobile phone. It's not exactly a mobile. It's a Nokia 9300 smart phone. It's the size of mobile phones from circa 1999 and opens to reveal a very very small QWERTY keyboard. You can't touch type with it and it's hard going when you have chunky fingers like me... but in an emergency, it's great.
Sorry for being so boring about the technical details but one of the great things about blogger.com is that you can post your scribbling by email. So it;s great when you are in an area with internet connections as zippy as a tranquilised three-toed sloth.
And here's the piece I tapped out on it in great haste (verging on panic) yesterday. Apologies for unspotted typos!
Ireland woke up yesterday morning to discover that the tactics of the pre-dawn police raid had been transferred to the world of Irish politics.
You have to play with whatever hand you are dealt. And so I wrote the analysis piece below in a cafe in the Baixa using my mobile phone. It's not exactly a mobile. It's a Nokia 9300 smart phone. It's the size of mobile phones from circa 1999 and opens to reveal a very very small QWERTY keyboard. You can't touch type with it and it's hard going when you have chunky fingers like me... but in an emergency, it's great.
Sorry for being so boring about the technical details but one of the great things about blogger.com is that you can post your scribbling by email. So it;s great when you are in an area with internet connections as zippy as a tranquilised three-toed sloth.
And here's the piece I tapped out on it in great haste (verging on panic) yesterday. Apologies for unspotted typos!
Ireland woke up yesterday morning to discover that the tactics of the pre-dawn police raid had been transferred to the world of Irish politics.
As the citizens rubbed sleep from their eyes, they opened their curtains to see a changed landscape. Like a fresh fall of snow, almost every lamp-post in the country has now been comandeered and festooned with somebody's beaming portrait.
And talk of a surprise move by Bertie Ahern. Five years ago - without warning - he arrived into an almost empty Dáil chamber late at night during an adjournment debate to dissolve the Dáil.
This time round the chicanery was even more convoluted. For months he has strung people along about the actual date of the election. He was adamant that the election would not be held on a Friday. But besides the Taoiseach dropping a couple of hints about the Dáil returning for at least a week after Easter, there was no real certainty about the date. Most zeroed in on May 24 but with caveats and qualifications. For when Bertie Ahern is playing a tight game he tends to use a stapler to make sure his cards are close to his chest.
The big surprise wasn't May 24 but the dawn raid on Áras an Uachtaráin. In hindsight it makes perfect sense of course. The only piece of legislation that was essential from a credibility perspective was the Criminal Justice Bill, which passed all stages in the Dáil on Tuesday.
From that moment the clock was ticking. The minimum time allowed for a campaign is three weeks. And so when it wasn't called on Thursday, we knew that Thursday May 17th was a goner.
One of the curious anomalies of the Irish electoral system is that strict rules and limits apply to spending during the election campaign. But before it's called, parties can spend any amount, infinite amounts is they have them.
That's why it seems that every billboard and poster site in the country has been given over to those messianic (and photoshopped) images of Bertie for the past month. That's why Fianna Fail favours minimum campaigns to allow it maximise its pre-campaign campaign spending, if you follow my drift.
Most commentators assumed it would be Tuesday or Wednesday of this week when Bertie would go to the country, to allow a bare three weeks. But in the event, there's now 25 days between the opening and closing of the race.
And why it makes sense is that the President was leaving for a trip abroad yesterday. While the Taoiseach could have signalled the dissolution of the Dáil to the Council of State in Mary McAleese's absence, that would have seemed shallow and mean-spirited for such a formal and serious duty.
But then, you would tend to think that Mr Ahern might have almost had a change of heart after seeing the poor showing for his party in the latest opinion poll on Friday. But there's a school of thought (and a persuasive one) within Fianna Fáil that believes that the party needed to go at the earliest possible moment. They argue that in 2007 the name of the game would be about cutting your losses. For them, even May 24 was too late - it should have been May 17or 18.
The notion of a strongly regrouped opposition has been trending since the local and European elections. After a swerve back to the Government last autumn, the momentum has seemed to swing back to the Mullingar Accord parties again.
The latest national poll suggests that Fine Gael is breathing down Fianna Fáil's neck but that scenario - huge FG gains; FF wipeout - isn't really borne out by the Red C constituency opinion polls conducted for Thomas Crosbie Holdings titles.
One opinion poll does not an election make. But the trends - and the unmistakable vibes being transmitted by the growing self-confidence of Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte - all point to one of the great political clichés being flogged to death in the next few weeks ... yes, it's going to be too close to call.
Arguably, since Alan Duke's Tallaght Strategy of 1997, Irish politics has not been characterised by a clash of ideas; rather a clash of personalities, styles and credibility. When you compare economic policies, for example, the parties have all converged into the centre and agree the same fundamental principles (low taxes, both personal and corporate). Sure there are differences (stamp duty, auction politics etc) but they are nuanced - most are so subtle to be indistinguishable.
When it comes to crime, the three mainsstream parties are all slurping out of the same trough, out-toughing each other. The proof of that particular pudding is that both FG and Labour tacitly approved Michael McDowell's hardline criminal justice legislation by abstaining when the vote was called in the Dáil last Tuesday.
It's only in health where there's a bitter row over Mary Harney's plans to build private clinics on public land that we see real gap in terms of thinking and ideology.
Is all that sameness and uniformity healthy for democracy?
The choice that faces the electorate is akin to the choice between two banks or two mobile phone operators. In some of their policy choices, parties have been too influenced by focus groups, running scared of alienating the massive swathe of innately conservative and careful voters who occupy the middle ground. It's for that reason, I'd argue, that Sinn Féin and the Greens are doing so well. Each has an easily identifiable, clearly distinctive, message that brooks no ambiguity.
People forget that for all his undoubted charisma Bertie Ahern achieved only 39% of the vote in 1997. That was exactly the same as Albert Reynolds five years earlier. Why was Reynolds considered a disaster in 1992 and Ahen a triumph in 1997? Improved and ruthless vote management gave the party a huge seat bounce.
Will this be as bad as '92 or as disastrous as 1982 when Charles Haughey almost allowed FG become the largest party in the State for the first time?
It's fascinating to see that in spite of his travails and blunders during BertiGate, Mr Ahern is still his party's greatest asset. Mr Kenny will struggle even now to convince people that he has the mettle for Taoiseach whereas Mr Ahern can just point to his track record. Having said that. the FG leader has travelled a long way.
Of course, there'a a presidential flavour to all parliamentary elections these times. For FG, its biggest project has been to build Mr Kenny up. For all his mercurial abilities as a debater, there were doubts about Mr Rabbitte's populist appeal. But if he's not loved, he is respected, and that's backed up by the deference accorded to him on the streets.
Michael McDowell also personifies the PDs. In survey after survey people profess to despise or loathe him. But like Nicholas Sarkozy he sets out to be deliberately divisive or provocative because he knows that at the same time as he alienates some, he attracts others. But will it be enough to save his party from the meltdown that has been widely predicted?
For SF, it is Gerry Adams's face we will see though he's not a candidate and not as major a player in Southern politics as he likes to think. The Greens will be only party that will trade on its message rather than on Trevor Sargent's image. Both parties will do well, so well in fact that they will prevent a clear-cut overall result either way. The green message - be it republican or environmental - has huge potency with the Irish electorate right now.
If Fianna Fail win through, it will mean Bertie Ahern will be the longest leader in office since de Valera. Perhaps people have not yet tired of Bertie but have tired of his ministers. One of the imponderables (until polling day that is) is if the Government retains enough affection or if people have finally tired of this administration.
The picture will be complicated. We now face 25 days of claim, counterclaim, attack and counter-attack. What is certain is that on May 24 the people will speak. It's only then will we know if the status quo has prevailed or has fallen. Or, more likely. that we're entering into the limbo of a hung Dáil.
Monday, April 23, 2007
INSIDE POLITICS - ELECTION DATE
Mondays in Leinster House are as quiet as a country graveyard. Usually. Not this week. Already we're just a couple of hours into the week and the usual trickle of Monday-morning emails have turned into a torrent.
As has the weather. Labour launched its new advert campaign in driving rain. It's based around the theme of 'The First 100 Days'. This was originally an American concept. When there was a change in regime or administration, the acid test was how active they had been in fulfilling their promises in the first 100 days. The week before last, virtually every major American media organisation did the same for Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, who gained control of the Upper House. (see Labour's 10 promises here).
If you parse this morning's papers, the story count for political stories is high. Two opinion polls were published yesterday. Expect them to become an almost daily occurrence between now and election day.
Both polls in the Sunday Indepedent and the Sunday Business Post give mildly good news for Fine Gael and show some slippage in Fianna Fail support.
Both polls have added to the slew of speculation around Leinster House about when the election will be held. With FF faltering a bit in the polls, there's a nervousness creeping into its backbenches, with a sense that most TDs want Bertie Ahern to call an early election.
The longer they go on, the more that malaise and uncertainty will creep in, they say. They are also worried about the potential damage that may be shipped by Fianna Fail and by Mr Ahern from the Quarryvale module of the Tribunal - Tom Gilmartin is due to give evidence this week.
Most think that it will be held on Thursday May 24. That would mean the election would be called next week. That would allow the passage of the Criminal Justice Bill and also allow Bertie Ahern to bask in the glow of Northern devolution.
I had a hunch that it would be held a week later, and that the reason that Ahern was holding it on a Thursday was to allow people get away for the June Bank Holiday weekend. Like a lot of my hunches, I think it's wrong.
As has the weather. Labour launched its new advert campaign in driving rain. It's based around the theme of 'The First 100 Days'. This was originally an American concept. When there was a change in regime or administration, the acid test was how active they had been in fulfilling their promises in the first 100 days. The week before last, virtually every major American media organisation did the same for Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, who gained control of the Upper House. (see Labour's 10 promises here).
If you parse this morning's papers, the story count for political stories is high. Two opinion polls were published yesterday. Expect them to become an almost daily occurrence between now and election day.
Both polls in the Sunday Indepedent and the Sunday Business Post give mildly good news for Fine Gael and show some slippage in Fianna Fail support.
Both polls have added to the slew of speculation around Leinster House about when the election will be held. With FF faltering a bit in the polls, there's a nervousness creeping into its backbenches, with a sense that most TDs want Bertie Ahern to call an early election.
The longer they go on, the more that malaise and uncertainty will creep in, they say. They are also worried about the potential damage that may be shipped by Fianna Fail and by Mr Ahern from the Quarryvale module of the Tribunal - Tom Gilmartin is due to give evidence this week.
Most think that it will be held on Thursday May 24. That would mean the election would be called next week. That would allow the passage of the Criminal Justice Bill and also allow Bertie Ahern to bask in the glow of Northern devolution.
I had a hunch that it would be held a week later, and that the reason that Ahern was holding it on a Thursday was to allow people get away for the June Bank Holiday weekend. Like a lot of my hunches, I think it's wrong.
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