Students’ political loyalties are shifting, and Fine Gael appears to have become the biggest party on Irish campuses – just. But, in a generation disillusioned by politics, even active students are wary of it as a career
LABOUR YOUTH is brainstorming for a new party slogan within an hour of Brian Cowen relinquishing leadership of Fianna Fáil. Darren Bates, an excitable 20-year-old recruitment officer, suggests tying it in with the McDonald’s Eurosaver menu, as the number of friends he has made through the party makes its membership fee the best €2 he has ever spent. The idea is politely but firmly shot down.
The group is on the verge of holding a competition for a tag line when Mike Spring, the party’s 24-year-old international officer, casually but assertively plucks three key words from a Gandhi quote to sum up what the movement means to him. “Labour Youth: Be the change.”
There’s a brief silence, then an eruption of enthusiasm – the kind it takes to bring 10 people from around the country to a stuffy meeting room on the deserted campus of University College Dublin to discuss recruitment and communication. It’s an enthusiasm that has them strategising social media rather than whiling away the day on it, asking for banners “just to barge around with” and spending their free time canvassing, rallying and recruiting – at their own expense.
To many in the same age bracket this may seem like an alien existence. But in a way that’s what motivates the party members. They recognise the stigma attached to politics and are compelled to counteract the apathy it produces among their peers.
Just 104 of Labour Youth’s 1,000 members are registered at NUI Galway, where Spring was party chair until he graduated and became a teacher last year. He admits that, while the uptake in membership across different political parties in NUIG is relatively low for the student body, it doesn’t mean people aren’t interested in politics.
“I think a lot of people just don’t trust political parties,” says Spring. “When you see people who are interested in political issues like the fees struggle or protesting to keep resources, there is a disconnect between interest levels and engagement with political organisations. I think the biggest challenge for Labour is convincing people to believe, to get people to give us a chance. Reasonably enough, a sentiment you’ll hear again and again is, ‘You’re all the same.’ Our job is to try to overcome that.”
It’s something everyone present agrees on, yet outwardly they seem an unlikely team. Given their assorted political pasts, it’s hard to imagine any other reason why Spring, Bates and Mick Reynolds, the communications officer, would be found sitting together.
Spring began “a bit of a political journey” by zigzagging from the Socialist Party to the anarchist Workers Solidarity Movement, then the Green Party and, finally, Labour, believing it’s the only party with a legitimate vision of how socialism can be applied.
Bates, meanwhile, joined Ógra Fianna Fáil at 16, recruited for the Progressive Democrats and started a Labour Youth branch at Dublin Institute of Technology. Reynolds went from being the chair of Ógra Shinn Féin at UCD to growing disillusioned with politics in general after the last local elections. He took a year out, examined his principles and decided Labour matched them best. All he’s asking from others his age is for them to do the same.
“I’ve a lot more friends asking what the differences between political parties are now,” he says. “If that’s happening among young people, hopefully it can bring some kind of clarity to it all. It’s not even a matter of people voting for Labour: it’s a matter of people looking at what their values are and seeing what party suits them. If that happens in Ireland, hopefully there can be a more enlightened political culture.”
By their own admission only 150 of the youth party’s members are considered active, but the nature of that activity and the disparate backgrounds of its volunteers suggest something is buzzing in the Labour camp.
In what is considered an unusual move for student politics, this week the deputy president of the Union of Students of Ireland (USI), Cónán Ó Broin, resigned to campaign full time for a councillor, Robert Dowds of the Labour Party. Whether or not that’s a sign of shifting priorities within student politics, all parties can agree that voting according to family tradition seems to be considered almost unthinkable among the current generation of young party-political enthusiasts.
“The days of Civil War politics are over,” says Colm Taylor, policy officer for Young Fine Gael. “If I stood up on a podium and started talking to people about Michael Collins and de Valera they’d laugh at me. People my age coming through the party are more interested in policy than local issues or history. Some might come initially because it’s tradition in their family, but the vast majority who are active and who want to debate – the people really driving the organisation – are there because of policy and because they want to fix the country.”
Taylor, a 20-year-old studying history, politics and public administration at the University of Limerick, says Young Fine Gael has “about 4,000” members across the country, although only between 300 and 400 attend its events.
As with any society on a campus, plenty of students sign up during freshers’ week and don’t give it another thought for the rest of the year. Mostly, those geared towards party participation are arts students engaging with politics as part of their course – like Taylor, who has already mastered a politician’s way with words, parrying questions away without answering them.
Fine Gael’s national youth officer sits in on every meeting, liaising between the two parties, ensuring they have whatever resources they need, such as enlisting ministers for guest talks. But the challenge, says Taylor, is reaching out to private colleges with small student unions and “more technical” universities like UL, where he chaired Young Fine Gael, as well as holding on to members once they leave college and move away.
“The most important thing is convincing young people that politics matters to them,” he says. “A lot of them would consider it an old man’s game, and they’re sick of hearing about it because they think it doesn’t matter to them, but it does. Every decision made in the Dáil matters to everybody in the country.”
AS CHAIRMAN OF Ógra Fianna Fáil at Trinity College Dublin, Declan Harmon knows all about the indifference, frustration and outright hostility of fellow students. “A lot of my friends would have a go with me over things the party does,” he says with a laugh. “It’s like, ‘Here, I’m as annoyed over this as you are!’ The difference is I try to work within the structures that are there to have my voice heard, and the voice of the students in Trinity heard, by bringing the message up the line.”
Harmon, a 22-year-old studying business and politics, is a good example of someone who sticks with a party out of an underlying conviction for what it stands for – or, in Fianna Fáil’s case, what he believes it should stand for. Lately the youth party’s Twitter account has been understandably quiet – just one post since December 9th – and a glance at the official blog shows no hint of newsworthy activity within the party.
Harmon understands when those within Ógra Fianna Fáil, which claims to have 3,000 members across the campuses (but just 92 in Trinity, according to the college’s administration), struggles with associations with controversial decisions. Still, he believes the party’s greater purpose should compensate for those points of contention.
“You’re never going to agree with everything; we’re not robots,” he says. “But if you were to stop party members right now and ask them ‘What is Fianna Fáil about?’ I think a lot of them would struggle to give you an answer. That internal conversation is going to be a big challenge after the election. That’s why I think it’s important that the people who inherit the party have their say in that.”
Though Harmon is confident that some of those currently involved in Ógra Fianna Fáil and its national executive will stand for election in the future, he’s unsure how far his own participation will take him. He’d prefer to have a career outside of politics before ever considering it an option. Given the amount of grief politicians endure and the hours they clock up, he’s content to wait.
“I think the best politicians are people who have life experience elsewhere, not those who’ve spent their whole life working their way up the greasy pole,” he says. “The careerist can be pretty easy to spot. You’d see people who would latch on to particular TDs or candidates so they can be swept along on their coat tails. There’s no point in denying it: they are there in every party. But I think for most people involved in politics it’s a bit like a drug. You get hooked and it’s hard to pull back from it.”
Some start early. Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire launched his political career when he ran for his local council elections in Cork last year, at the age of 20. As a law student in his final year at University College Cork, he’s also the national organiser of Ógra Shinn Féin, which now has about 800 members.
Ó Laoghaire believes the party appeals to students as a “radical alternative”, although he sees it as the only viable option on the left. Almost everyone he has seen come through the cumann had no previous tie to the party, and, like him, they first attended a meeting out of curiosity before feeling compelled to invest more time in it.
His involvement, which he says amounts to the equivalent of “three full-time jobs”, makes it difficult to focus on his degree, let alone a part-time job. Yet for all his efforts, and for all the experience he gleaned from interacting with the community as part of his previous campaign, he is quick to play down any talk of a political future.
“We have enough problems with people who went into politics for the wrong reasons,” he says. “I think people don’t appreciate the public-service ethos enough. Politics should be seen as a vocation, and if you happen to be fortunate enough to be paid to serve your community, well then that’s great. I’ll be involved in politics regardless; I just don’t see it as a career option in that way. I’m fairly focused on getting an ordinary job.”
Even Cian Prendiville, one of the country’s youngest general-election candidates, classifies himself as an activist who’s standing for election rather than a politician. At 21 he has deferred his degree in politics and sociology to stand for the Socialist Party, whose youth branch he joined during secondary school after the war in Iraq sparked an interest in left-wing politics.
By the time he reached UL he was primed to take over the party’s presence on campus, where he says there has been a noticeable increase in interest since the financial crisis. The current climate of unease, he says, will inevitably force more people like him to have an impact on the political landscape.
“If ordinary workers, young people and the unemployed don’t put themselves forward and build a political alternative, we’re destined to be ruled by politicians who don’t give a damn about us,” he says. “We’re the ones shackled with paying off these debts for our whole working lives. From my point of view, I’m not willing to emigrate. I want to fight for a decent quality of life here in Ireland, so standing in an election was an obvious next step.”
Whether many will join him remains to be seen. Although these voices are fired up about the importance of political reform, they are cautious about putting themselves on the front line. But that, some argue, should be the litmus test for Ireland’s future political leaders: to subject themselves to some serious self-analysis before wading into an unpredictable political arena with little more than good intentions.
“People get into politics, presumably, to improve their community, to make things better,” says Mike Spring of Labour Youth. “I think I do that by doing what I’m good at, which is teaching. There are good young politicians in Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and probably Fianna Fáil. But there are notable characters, even at student-union level, who cut an awfully typical walk about them. If you look at people in the Dáil like Enda Kenny, the longest-serving deputy at the moment, he inherited his seat from his father. Brian Cowen is the same. You wonder in a lot of these cases whether they actually care or if they’re doing it because it was the path marked out for them. That’s why I hate the idea of politics as a career. It’s something you really have to believe in to be good at.”
