WITH THE LEADERS:Although nobody dares to make predictions, there is a growing sense of hope in the party, writes JOHN WATERS
NOBODY LOOKS like they’re going to throw any shoes. On his way in, Micheál Martin has to get past a man determined to be able to tell his neighbours that he’s given the Fianna Fáil leader a piece of his mind.
He sticks close to Martin and berates him about the “Fianna Fáil mafia”. Martin affects not to hear and adopts a faraway expression as he’s bundled towards the hall.
Dunboyne is in Meath East. The gathering is a mixture of party activists, students in uniform and a few people in suits who don’t seem to be in quite the right place. The meeting is in the old national school, a bit decrepit and run down but spruced up a little for the occasion, with tea and sandwiches for afterwards.
On the day’s schedule it’s billed as a meeting for “FF members past Ógra age”, but this proves to be slightly misleading. In theory it’s an open meeting. The idea is borrowed from Barack Obama and Tony Blair and developed by the Futures Group, a local body set up by former TD Mary Wallace, which may soon go national.
The Futures Group comprises people aged 18 to the late 20s and is an experiment directed at attracting more members between the ages of 25 and 50. The thinking is that party meetings are attended mainly by over-50s, with Ógra FF catering for the under 25s, but the band in between has no place to go.
The Futures Group is headed up by Eoin Muldoon (23), a part-time student who works in a mobile telephone store. He explains that for today’s event they’ve invited outsiders from local community groups, farmer organisations, schools and the Chamber of Commerce, rather than friends of Fianna Fáil, to come along and ask questions of the party leader.
Martin is remarkably impressive as leader in a way he never quite seemed to be as a minister. In a room of freezing people, he stands out in his lightly pin-striped suit, blue shirt, striped tie.
When you get right down to it, Micheál Martin’s demeanour is about 90 per cent priest. Forty years ago, before the present crisis in Irish Catholicism, you would have had him down for one before he opened his mouth, and the first words he spoke would have settled it.
On the surface, he is a priest from central casting, a gentle, apparently non-threatening man of indeterminate age, who comforts and reassures and would, in normal circumstances, manage to be liked by almost everyone. But we should not be fooled by this. Underneath, barely detectable, is the quality of steeliness that has brought him to the leadership of his party, albeit at a time of unprecedented trauma and difficulty.
Martin was the perfect choice as leader for this moment. It isn’t just that he remains uncontaminated by economic ministry, although that helps. What it is is that, unlike his predecessor, he is capable of reaching people outside his own tribe. He is of Fianna Fáil, but not in the quintessentially tribal way that Brian Cowen or Bertie Ahern were.
Even without his making a speech about it, there is something intrinsic to his personality that places him ever-so-slightly outside his own tribe. And there is also the (possibly related) “Cork thing”, that lingering memory of Jack Lynch, a similarly gentle but steely soul, who somehow managed the same trick, which we perhaps put down to the hurling.
In a leader, certain qualities become important and therefore noticeable. Martin speaks calmly, perhaps with a little too much attention to detail. He’s not ingratiating, but answers questions calmly and politely, without any visible desire to please. Still, he never loses an opportunity to pick up a point. He answers a question about whether we have too many public servants by defending the public service and then linking the issue to his party’s present fortunes.
Public servants have already taken a 14 per cent pay cut, he says, and links this to Fianna Fáil’s slump in the polls. He talks about the need for change as though he were not part of the outgoing Government – no mean feat. He says the political system has failed the people and needs to be reformed.
He calls for serious debate. “There can be no room for fudging or shimmying or dodging.” He seems to be adopting a strategic demeanour of penitence-up-to-a-point. “We made mistakes,” he says. “And the biggest mistake was in not challenging the consensus. But the important thing about mistakes is that you learn from them.”
His main themes relate to the failure of the other parties to spell out what they are going to do, the inconsistencies. The election has been “disappointing” so far, he says in Dunboyne. The other parties need to up their game. Up until now, they’ve just been saying what people want to hear.
He always refers to “Enda”, whom he advises to ditch his advisers, in the first person. Perhaps he is trying to encourage the Fine Gael leader to be himself.
He persistently refers to his own ministerial accomplishments, while acknowledging that the broader story is not so good. A shopkeeper in Kells politely laments the failure of banking regulation and Martin nods quietly and says, “You’re right”.
There is a reserve about him that is interesting. He can engage in all the canvass set-pieces, even the baby-kissing bit, and yet seem to hold something of himself back. There is none of the usual Fianna Fáil nod-and-wink overkill. He speaks quietly and confidently. He isn’t fazed even by hostile questioners.
At every opportunity, too, he draws in a personal experience, in the style of Tony Blair. When a man asks him about the meaning of Fianna Fáil’s republicanism, he recalls a trip to the North as a young parliamentarian and the impression it left on him to encounter unionists his own age with a completely different outlook to his own.
He is clearly loved by the party faithful. In Kells he is greeted like a king. Although nobody dares to make predictions, there is a growing sense of hope in the party. The sense of Fianna Fáil’s unprecedentedly poor situation may well be Martin’s trump card.
Once or twice I caught him doing something no Fianna Fáil leader has ever done before: tacitly acknowledging that his party will be in opposition after this election. “We’ve done the heavy lifting,” he said at one point in Dunboyne, “for whoever comes in after us.”
It’s a good tactic: to ask people to provide for a strong opposition rather endorse the failures of the past. It might just work, at least to the extent of minimising losses.
There is only one unscripted moment in Dunboyne. A man at the back intervenes to ask why Fianna Fáil did not deal with the “crooked lawyers”. It is unclear precisely what he means and Martin looks briefly in the direction of the questioner before turning his attention to a young man who has been lined up to ask a question about the IMF. The man turns out to be a local party activist, who claims to have been putting up posters all morning. Originally from Leitrim, Kevin McWeeney is disgusted by some of what’s gone on in his party.
Later, for my benefit, he pulls from his pocket a newspaper cutting with a photograph, from May 2010, of Martin making a lifetime achievement award to Pee Flynn. “What would Dev make of that?” he demands, with the only wink I saw all day.