I was looking at the posters on the way into work this morning. The first said: Pay Less Tax. The second bore the legend: Pension €300. There was a Fianna Fáil logo at the bottom of both.
It would have been hard to encapsulate the party’s election promises in relation to Stamp Duty in a single pithy slogan – but the fact is that they outbid the opposition on that front too.
So. Analysts can kick the stats around till they’re blue in the face and try to make something complex out of what is really quite simple: in the end, Fianna Fáil offered a bigger payback to the electorate, and the people went for it in just about sufficient numbers to carry the day. That’s the essential reason why Bertie Ahern is on his way to being elected Taoiseach for a third term. People believed that they’d be better off with a Fianna Fáil government.
There is no point in running away from the facts either: this was as true of carpenters, plumbers, construction workers and taxi drivers as of the traditional middle class. The truly disenfranchised do not go out and vote. But in working class areas of Dublin, those who did make it to the polls had decided that they didn’t want to rock the boat. Too much gravy around to do that.
That’s why Sinn Féin fared badly. That’s why Labour didn’t do better. That’s why the Socialist Party failed to make the promised breakthrough.
There were, however, some interesting undercurrents to the election. The first is the demise of the PDs and the unceremonious ousting of the party leader Michael McDowell, who lost his seat in Dublin South East. A friend made the observation that it was a vote against arrogance and he had a point. In fact this may just be the theme by which the 2007 General Election will be defined in the future.
The PDs came into being as the party that would clean up Irish politics and take Fianna Fáil on in the process. They staked out their position on the high moral ground – and yet they went into government with Fianna Fáil immediately the opportunity arose. With Mary Harney as leader they could just about get away with that stance. Once Michael McDowell took up the reins, however, they were doomed: he was too strident, too judgemental, too convinced of his own rightness. Whatever about in private, in public he never came across as a nice man. He lacked the common touch. He was, well… arrogant.
But he also had feet of clay. One of the most dramatic moments of the election campaign came when he was about to mount a lamp-post to put the first of the PDs ‘Left Wing Government – No Thanks’ posters up. He was confronted by John Gormley of the Greens, with whom he would bitterly contest the last seat in Dublin South East. In front of the cameras, Gormley accused McDowell of lying about the Greens position on Corporation Tax. The accusation stuck and McDowell’s righteous rhetoric suddenly seemed all the hollower. It was typical that, a few days before the election, he was forecasting that the PDs would win over 12 seats. Could it be that he was blind enough to get it that wrong? Or was it just a desperate attempt to rally his own failing vote?
And yet the manner of his final exit was strangely moving: outside the RDS, before the count had even finished he made a valedictory address, retiring from public life, leaving us with the words “I love Ireland” ringing in our ears. He may have been acting on impulse. Then again, he may have got the brunt of enough negative feedback on the doorsteps to ensure that he came prepared. Either way, the thing is, you could tell that he meant it. I know why he was jeered by the crowd at the RDS. But in that brief moment, I saw the hint of something better in him.
A lack of the common touch may have contributed to Labour’s disappointing results too. During the course of the election campaign, Pat Rabbitte grew in stature, but he has never been populist, never looked fully at ease on the hustings. He is smart and funny and knows it – but the problem with juicy Bon Mots is that, no matter how well crafted, they can have the opposite effect to the one intended. To take one example, Willie O’Dea’s moustache may be a common object of derision – but lampooning him apparently has no effect other than to increase his vote in Limerick East.
The fact is that Irish people – or enough of them to make all the difference – have consistently shown that, in politics at least, they tend to take the side of the ordinary guy who has been turned into the underdog by the media. It isn’t a cast-iron rule but the more an individual politician is targeted, the greater the extent to which he (or she) is likely to be supported at the polls. Look at the performance of Michael Lowry, who was elected on the first count with 13,000 first preferences. Do the voters of North Tipperary care that he is embroiled in controversy over the circumstances in which the second mobile telephone license was awarded? Only to the extent that he has been ringingly endorsed every time, since it became an issue. Beverly Flynn too has survived her media mauling as a TD.
This may well have been the other ace in Bertie Ahern’s hand. The more the media ganged up on him, the more uneasy a lot of ordinary people felt about it. And understandably so. The fact that, at the beginning of the 1990s, our Minister for Finance didn’t have a bank account of his own, or a credit card, might strike some people as absurd – but to a lot of Irish voters that revelation makes Bertie all the more endearing. The harder Bertie was pummelled, the more sympathy was evoked for him. If auction politics hadn't been enough on its own, the sympathy factor might have carried him over the line anyway.
Someone made the observation that politicians of the left need to get caught offside a bit more often to make any real inroads. I’ll say only this: it’s a strange country. But I guess you already knew that…