An Irishman's Diary

THE COMMONWEALTH of Massachusetts has given us some famous political phrases in its time, none more so than a truism credited to the late congressman Tipp O’Neill.

Still not a day passes in these parts without somebody somewhere echoing his immortal words, “All politics is local”. But the same state has given the lexicon even more enduring gifts than that, including a word that has its origins in events of 200 years ago today. It so happened that the governor of Massachusetts then was a man named Elbridge Gerry. On February 11th, 1812, he signed an act that redrew the state’s electoral boundaries in such a way as to heavily favour his own party. Sure enough, in the subsequent elections, 50,000 Republican votes translated into 19 seats, while the 51,000 ballots cast for their Federalist opponents won only 11.

The gift to the dictionaries dates from a dinner party in the house of a Boston merchant some days after the law was signed, where guests marvelled at the grotesque shape of one the new districts. Going to desperate lengths to connect Republican voters, it was deemed to look like a “salamander”. So an artist at the party added some suitable cartoon features to the map.

Somebody else, meanwhile, quipped that the monster should be called a “Gerry-mander”. And the name stuck – sort of. In fact, the original Gerrymanderer’s surname had a hard “G”, as in Gary. So for long afterwards, US lexicographers fought a rear-guard action against the soft-G usage of the term, by which it caught on in Britain (and of course in Northern Ireland, where republicans called Gerry are also well known). It didn’t work, however, and the soft-g Gerrymander is now universal.

The practice described by the term was not new, even in 1812, no more that the practice of boycotting began in Mayo circa 1880.

Just as people were being ostracised or “sent to Coventry” long before it happened to Charles Boycott, so politicians were attempting to draw election maps in their favour long before Gerry’s party did it. But sometimes a new brand name just takes off on its own momentum. And so it happened here.

During the 20th century, on this side of the Atlantic, the word would become a commonplace, especially in Northern Ireland; although whether the underrepresentation of nationalists was more due to unionist-friendly boundaries or to the first-past-the-post voting system is still debated. Of course, the Border itself was a line drawn to optimise unionist votes. But in any case, the soft-g gerrymander would not be confined to the area north of it.

In the South, Éamon de Valera, who also twice tried to introduce first-past-the-post voting, presided over a notorious redrawing of constituencies in 1947, expanding the number of three-seaters with a view to strangling his threatened nemesis, the new Clann na Poblachta party, at birth. He won that battle, since in the following year’s snap election, the Clann took only half the seats expected. Unfortunately for Dev, the opposition still had enough numbers to depose him, so he lost the war.

Undaunted, Fianna Fáil tried again in the 1960s, when minister for local government Kevin Boland tailored boundaries to the governing party’s needs. It worked in the 1969 general election, but backfired in 1973, allowing the new Fine Gael-Labour government partners to see if they could do better. And they certainly tried.

So bold was their attempt, indeed, that for a time it threatened to wrest from Massachusetts the nomenclative honours for describing the practice. Having a two-syllable surname ending in y, the Labour minister for local government, Jim Tully, was certainly well suited to the task. Furthermore, his innovations were radical enough to launch at least a local variation on the term.

But the “Tullymander”, as it was was soon christened, was probably undermined from the start by his attempt to maximise Labour seats, in particular. It was in any case also vulnerable to a collapse in the government vote. In the event, his reforms only contributed to the Fianna Fáil landslide of 1977.

The term “Tullymandering” thus became a mere footnote to the general practice, which itself had fallen into even more disrepute than usual by the late 1970s. Returning to power, “Honest Jack” Lynch decided to make the job of drawing electoral boundaries independent of government. And it has remained so since, although the g-word still somehow finds plenty of work.

Elbridge Gerry may be another example of what Mark Antony complained about when, in his oration for Caesar, he said: “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” Before the 1812 act, Gerry had had a long, distinguished career in politics and diplomacy, now largely forgotten.

He was a signatory of the US Declaration of Independence, and then one of a handful who opposed the constitution, on principle, because of his anti-federalist beliefs. Nor did he benefit personally from the redrawing of boundaries. On the contrary, he lost the governship in 1812. After that, he recovered to become US vice-president under James Madison in 1813. But he then had the misfortune to die mid-term, in 1814, by which time his dubious immortality was assured.