General election results have been intensely interesting over the past 68 years
WHILE WE await the election results there isn’t much more that I can usefully say about this election, the outcome of which will emerge during this weekend.
So, while awaiting the outcome, I have been reflecting on my past experience of elections, which began in 1943, when my father, Desmond FitzGerald, was coming to the end of a 30-year political career. In that election 68 years ago, I addressed envelopes for Fine Gael at a temporary office in at the end of Nassau Street, and also faithfully recorded the election results – a practice I continued thereafter, sometimes even including the time at which each count came through.
In the following year’s general election, my father stood in Dublin County which had been his constituency in the 1920s before he was sent by the party to Carlow-Kilkenny in 1932, and with my elder brother, Pierce, I went around the constituency to public meetings with him. And in the 1948 election my wife Joan and I canvassed for Fine Gael in Ballsbridge. However, as I was now a member of the staff of Aer Lingus, I decided that from then on I should opt out of any engagement in party politics.
But my interest in politics remained intense, and from that year onwards, Joan and I always invited our friends around to listen to – and later, when television began, to view – the results of all Irish and British elections.
In 1965, RTÉ faced the challenge of presenting the election results on TV for the first time, and they asked me to join the panel of commentators. I agreed, but I didn’t think that they realised how much more of a problem the presentation of the results on TV would pose by comparison with radio. So I proposed that I would prepare a simulation of the first 70 counts likely to come through, with a possible time for each of them. Our election results have tended to peak between 6.30pm and 7.30pm on the day following the election and I knew that acute problems of TV presentation of counts would arise around that time.
When on the morning of the election count our panel met at 10.30 to test the system using my simulated results, we had to wait almost two hours for the first such result to emerge from what must have been a very early computer. As soon as we started to comment on that result a whistle blew, and everybody started running for the exits.
“Fire?” I queried, anxiously.
“No, lunch,” I was told.
But the bugs had been got out of the system, and for the first two hours of the results programme all went smoothly. However, as we approached 6.30pm our commentary began to be inhibited by the presentation of a rapidly rising flow of election count figures.
Believing that the fairly newly established RTÉ had not yet worked out what to do if a member of a panel absented himself, I had decided that at that point I would return to my nearby home to join our domestic election party for an hour or more. As I had calculated, in my absence from RTÉ the panel was suspended, thus enabling all the peak-time results to be presented!
I am not sure that this has ever happened since – to the distress of many serious psephologist viewers!
There was an unexpected, and unintended, consequence of my presence on TV for the bulk of this 10-hour programme. Shortly before that 1965 election I had decided not to stand for election to the Dáil, but in its aftermath I was persuaded to stand for the Senate in the Fine Gael interest – something I had never thought of doing.
As I sought the votes of county councillors around the country it became clear that a number of them – I guessed about a dozen of the 64 whose votes put me into that House – did so because of that TV programme.
On my election to the Senate, Liam Cosgrave appointed me to the Fine Gael front bench – but, curiously, nobody thought to ask me to join the party! So, when Tom O’Higgins stood for the presidency in early 1966, I went to my local TD, John A Costello, to find out how I could join Fine Gael so as to play a part in this presidential election.
His response was disconcerting.
“Forty years in politics; twice taoiseach. Never joined Fine Gael!” he said.
Nevertheless I persuaded him to tell me where to join the party at local level. I then had to address meetings in Co Wicklow at the first of which in Bray, beside the courthouse where half a century earlier my father had received a six-month sentence for seditious speech, I made my first political address.
My acute nervousness was intensified by the fact that friends of mine, Michael McDowell’s parents, had chosen to have dinner at a window of the Royal Hotel, right beside the platform. I also had to speak at a final rally (the last of its kind in Dublin – at the GPO) – all of which I found quite terrifying!
The 1977 election gave Fianna Fáil the last overall majority ever secured in Irish politics. When, after the declaration of my own constituency result, I arrived at RTÉ, Liam Cosgrave was in the process of conceding defeat. So, when I joined the panel of commentators I did not have to pretend that things were better than they actually were for Fine Gael.
In those days, the media had no belief in polls, and none was published showing likely party voting strengths. But in Fine Gael we had the benefit of two post-dissolution polls, the first of which gave Fianna Fáil 59 per cent. However after a vigorous campaign a second poll showed that we had pulled Fianna Fáil back to 51 per cent – which, of course still gave them a clear majority. But the media knew nothing of this, and continued to delude themselves into believing that the coalition of Fine Gael and Labour were on course to win. Listening to broadcasts during the day of the count I had formed the impression that because of this delusion, media commentators had been unable to take in the scale of the swing to Fianna Fáil that was emerging.
So, when I joined the RTÉ panel I inquired about their forecast for Fianna Fáil. “Seventy-eight seats,” I was told. I challenged this, saying that nine hours earlier on the basis of lunchtime tally figures, Jim Dooge and I had calculated that they would win between 80 and 84 seats – and that now the outcome clearly lay between 82 and 84 – the latter figure proving to be the actual result.
I could see that Séamus Brennan, Fianna Fáil’s spokesman on the panel, foreseeing the destabilising impact of such a large majority upon Jack Lynch’s capacity to survive an onslaught by Charles Haughey’s supporters, was clearly horrified at the prospect of 84 seats for his party.
Those were among my experiences during the first half of my 68 years of involvement in general elections.
