What won Fianna Fáil an election in which it was roundly predicted to take a battering? Was it the support of Breakfast Roll Man, Bertie's debating skills, electoral contentment, or a 'better the devil you know' attitude, asks Kathy Sheridan
The victor writes the final history, so damn it, Fianna Fáil is entitled to its first draft. It is a fact of life that Fianna Fáilers are more fun than all the others combined (which, of course, the media failed to factor into its pointless musings), so it will be entertaining. The storyline so far is that Fianna Fáil won it and the media lost it.
"We'd been fairly well written out of it. I have dealt with it for weeks on end - meltdown, 68 seats, nosedives, 20 seats gone, obliterated, all of that," sighed a victorious Bertie Ahern on the night of the count, more than a little peeved with the tongue-lolling media.
The first draft asserts that the masterminds in Treasury Buildings (Fianna Fáil's election headquarters) never dreamt such heretical thoughts. In fact, a reference to Treasury Buildings as "Meltdown Manor" in a piece of mine so electrified them that they put a spread bet of €3,500 on Fianna Fáil to win 68 seats, the odds rising for every one won after that, and scooped €49,000. Two comments: "Meltdown Manor" was a direct quote from one of their own inmates; and a cut of the proceeds should be winging this way, in fairness.
That gamble was a vital, morale-raising exercise. Halfway through the campaign, Fianna Fáil's leading backroom men were admitting that Bertie was in bad form, the atmosphere was poor, there was obvious tension between three distinct groupings, and no campaign cohesion. A prominent TD predicted 62 seats; many were talking about 64 and 68; others calculated 71 to 75; a lone special adviser said 78. Three days before the election, its own internal polling was showing Fianna Fáil at a maximum of 39 per cent, yielding 72 or 73 seats with luck and a "Bertie bonus".
Nor were they predicting the demise of the Independents; Fianna Fáil plus eight to nine Independents was already in the runes.
Ivan Yates, eight-time successful general election candidate and former Government minister turned bookie, whose computations are vital to the survival of Celtic Bookmakers and his 250 employees, was giving 47 seats to Fine Gael and only 67 to Fianna Fáil, a week before polling day.
"If I find one person in Treasury Buildings now who says that they said before the election that we'd win more than 70 seats, I'll hit them," said one Minister. On count night, Minister for Social and Family Affairs Seamus Brennan told a Sunday Business Post reporter that he did not "subscribe one bit" to the view that the party would secure 80 seats. "The first 10 days of the campaign were very difficult, and we have surprised ourselves with the outcome," he said.
"There'll be more people claiming to be in here now than there were in the GPO," joked a staffer at Treasury Buildings.
NO DOUBT THE first-drafters will reserve a chapter for Liveline - feared by politicians of all shades and the butt of some disdain in recent days - and the folly of talking to Joe. Health? Crime? All those whingers with nothing else to do? Heck, the real people have spoken and clearly don't give a toss; ergo, Liveline got it wrong.
Joe Duffy is bemused. "The last health surge [ on Liveline] was back in January. That's when 'Rosie' told her story." Rosie was the woman dependent on the public health service, whose diagnosis was delayed for nine months and whose illness is terminal. It captured the public mood at the time, crystallising deep disquiet about the two-tier health system. Or so it seemed. If there can be a happy ending to such a tale, it was for the HSE on the Friday before the election, when Rosie launched a new unit for them in Kilkenny - albeit on the very day the consultant concerned in her case admitted that the current system was responsible for the nine-month delay.
The only health issue to come up on Liveline during the election campaign was from a GAA boys' coach in Kilbarrack in Dublin. The coach was not calling to complain about having to take injured boys to the new, private A&E clinic in DCU (one of several fee-paying "cappuccino casualties" dotted around the city now). His beef was with the "greedy" consultants in Beaumont Hospital who were refusing to accept the private clinic's referral files and wanted to funnel them back through the hospital's choked-up A&E department.
"Pragmatism," concludes Duffy. "You say 'hang on, what about the two-tier health system?' They say 'just do it . . . You [ Government] have the money; whatever it takes, just do it, build it, get on with it. My health is important, I have some spare cash if I have to pay.' Pragmatism."
Duffy's theory helps to explain the dilemma of the Opposition in the campaign. Co-location was never a runner. "I'm getting private beds out of public hospitals," was Mary Harney's repeated campaign mantra. In the age of pragmatism, it hardly matters that priceless public land would be handed over to private developers. Just do it.
DESPITE HIS PREDICTIONS of Government meltdown, Ivan Yates is roundly disdainful of anyone still searching for altruism among voters. "Shock! Horror! People vote out of self-interest! Get real. Why not vote in accordance with human nature?"
It was Yates who pinpointed Breakfast Roll Man as the election winner, the one who turned to Fianna Fáil when the chips were down. Breakfast Roll Man, according to Yates, is aged 20-45, a blue-collar worker in a factory or building site, "a self-employed electrician or a Del Boy . . . and the one thing he has learned is to look after himself. He likes Sky Sports, likes to drink - and now drinks pints and wine at home, likes that his wife/mot/partner can go shopping and not wreck his head if she spends too much. And he wants the kids to do better than him."
But Fine Gael spent well over half a million on its American consultants, who got them out of bed for daily 7am meetings. Why did Breakfast Roll Man not resonate with some of them - or did he? "Enda didn't quite cop who Breakfast Roll Man is and where he's at," says Yates. "What Bertie did was connect to the aspirations of working-class people. To hell with the politics of protest; they don't want social housing, they want affordable housing. They don't want hand-outs, they want to do it for themselves. They want to be able to hold on to more of their hard-earned money. Celtic Bookmakers takes in €3 million a week in bets. My client/customer base is Breakfast Roll Man. Long live Breakfast Roll Man. He is my hero. The guys who get up at 6am are my heroes, out there doing real things for themselves, not people who dine out on 1970s college politics.
"The ones who call Joe Duffy are on because no one else will take their call; they need a priest, or a politician. Protest politics is dead. Lectures about poverty, telling them what their entitlements are, is not the future. It's about educating their kids, helping them own their own homes. The problem is there hasn't been a politician who has empathised with that. Bertie came closest; [ the way they see it is] he's doing his best."
Ireland has moved on, says Yates. "In the 1980s, I'd never leave home without a little notebook. I'd go canvassing in council housing estates, and by the sixth door the notebook would already be full, all to do with house repairs. Now the guys going out there tell me that the notebook would be empty. The house has been bought out, there are two cars in the driveway."
And yet, Breakfast Roll Man, for all the self-interest attributed to him, had some serious wobblies in the run-up to voting.
Mary Corcoran, a sociologist at NUI Maynooth and spouse of hotly-tipped Labour candidate in Dublin South Alex White, hit the doorsteps with a nice, old-fashioned line: Fianna Fáil had been in power for nearly 20 years; there was a need to "pay more than lip service to the Labour Party's principles of equality and social justice".
They met little abuse, huge engagement, and a vast appetite for change, she says, often from lifelong Fianna Fáil supporters, saying that the incumbents had become "too smug". In the last week, however, she noticed the momentum slipping away. She puts it down to Bertie's "highly competent performance" in the debate, and to the Fianna Fáil machine " at block level and in an almost military fashion". A deluge of literature was delivered, rounds of drinks were bought. "The soft Fianna Fáil vote that we had worked so hard to earn slipped away as pressure came to bear on people to 'stick with the devil you know'. All was well in the world under Fianna Fáil - why change it?"
Corcoran, licking her post-election wounds, is still grappling with the reasons behind what she calls "people's ultimate complacency in light of the clear problems . . . in our political and administrative systems". She has found them in JK Galbraith and his theory of "the culture of contentment". "Yes, people are angry about poor public services, about poor public transport, about lack of infrastructure. But many of them are also the proud owners of top-of-the-line cars, a second home in the sun, and a wardrobe for every season of the year. Consumerism has weakened political resolve. People are happy to critique the system, and all the better when you have a willing audience on your doorstep, but they don't really want to change the system, because ultimately it might upset their own apple cart".
CORCORAN HAS A theory about the canvasser's starring role in the era of pragmatism. She calls it "the fine art of venting". "Why phone Joe ? . . . That takes time to make the call, to establish your credentials with the researcher, to be held on the line while other people hog the airwaves, to be verbally massaged by Joe and then abruptly cut off mid-sentence . . . No, no. A better way to ventilate your issue is to wait for the canvassers to call. The canvasser is pleasant, smiling, and face-to-face. No virtual interaction here. The canvasser listens intently, absorbs the pain, interjects at appropriate moments, and makes a note of the problem or issue. Ideally, the candidate then appears, the issue is rehearsed, the candidate promises to take up the issue, hands are shaken, sometimes names exchanged and closure is achieved. The canvasser's role is more akin to that of a counsellor than a councillor . . . A lot of people vented in this way over the weeks and months that we travelled through the neighbourhoods of Dublin South. I think they felt better afterwards. They had gotten something off their chest. They could move on. And move on they did. Straight back into the welcoming arms of Fianna Fáil."
Quite why they moved back is another question. Corcoran reckons that people in the new suburban communities fail to see "the direct connection between the policies of those who govern and the transformation of their landscape", or they do not believe they have the power to change. "A politics of fear, promulgated by Fianna Fáil in its attacks on Opposition economics and by the PDs with their excoriation of the very idea of 'left-wing politics', made people mindful of what they have, and what they feel they must hold at all costs." And yet, valuable research conducted by Michel Peillon, Jane Gray and Corcoran herself a few years ago demonstrated that, despite the gaping holes in the infrastructure, people quite like their lives in new, commuter suburbia.
A QUESTION CONFRONTING all the Opposition parties now is whether vocal anger is the default mode for people with a problem. Having vented, is that it? Do they then sail happily on, leaving the politician with a notebook full of angst, entitlement and little else? This shifting sentiment is echoed in the RTÉ/Lansdowne Market Research exit poll, which shows that 12 per cent of voters made their minds up on election day (up 2 per cent from 2002) and another 16 per cent in the previous week (also up 2 per cent). It is echoed in three authoritative surveys and a question asking whether people's votes would be influenced by questions surrounding the Taoiseach's finances. A couple of weeks before polling, half said they would be influenced by the issue; a few days before polling, more than a third said they would be; by election day, just 16 per cent in the exit polls said it made them decide not to vote for Fianna Fáil. Six per cent said it had done the opposite, had made them vote for the party.
Health was by far the dominant issue at 45 per cent, crime next at 25 per cent, and managing the economy at 23 per cent. Bush-fire issues such as cost of living (18 per cent), education (15 per cent), environment (13 per cent) and housing (10 per cent) played second fiddle.
So was it a presidential campaign? In the exit polls, some 40 per cent said their primary concern was choosing a candidate to look after the constituency. Just 22 per cent said it was about choosing a Taoiseach.
So what won it? Was it Fianna Fáil's nursing of a dozen or so key constituencies, as the party itself claims? Was it Eoghan Harris and John Waters on The Late Late Show, two powerful polemicists granted a soapbox to evangelise about Bertie Ahern to three quarters of a million viewers, with only four days of campaigning left? How influential were Vincent Browne and Kevin Myers, two other powerful media performers, who came out for Bertie shortly before polling day? Did the TNS MRBI/Irish Times poll showing the huge swing to Fianna Fáil on the Monday propel Fianna Fáil over the line, as Ivan Yates believes? Was it - good grief - the media that won it after all? Or was it Ivan Yates's Breakfast Roll Man, personified by the construction worker standing beside him in an Enniscorthy service station early on election day? "I'm after voting for Bertie . . . Do you know that since they called the election, not one house in the estate where I'm working has been sold?" he said to Yates. "The devil you know."
Nearly 300,000 people work in the construction sector, about 12 per cent of the workforce. About eight days before polling, says Yates, an independent construction consultant, Jerome Casey, forecast a house price drop of 5 per cent this year and 10 per cent in 2008. Breakfast Roll Man saw it coming with his own eyes. He may also have seen developer Sean Dunne among Bertie's special guests for that historic address at Westminster. Message received.
For the record, Yates is predicting a "landslide" for Fine Gael in 2011 or 2012.