Filth
Eh, any interesting pictures from the election trail to spice up de collume?
It’s been a dull enough campaign.
We have a good one of Michael Healy-Rae hammering his nuts.
I beg your pardon?
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Yeah, the photographer caught him at it – standing out in the open on an old stone bridge in Kerry. Cars passing and everything, hammering away at his nuts.
Excuse me. This is The Irish Times.
He just needed something quick for his lunch.
Moving on. Anything else?
We have Micheál Martin ridin’ a buffalo. Pictures and video.
Pass.
What about a nice shot of Michael Collins of Independent Ireland flaunting his chest hair during the 10-way leaders’ debate free for all?
Better not. Sure it’ll drive the laydeez wild.
Well, could we imagine the picture Mary Lou McDonald painted at her final election press conference outside Government Buildings?
She was asked what parties Sinn Féin might consider as possible partners. Is she making “cow eyes” at any in particular?
“No, I’m not making eyes at anyone,” she giggled. “I believe in absolute fidelity to my cause. We’re not at the flirtatious stage quite yet. We have to, we have to get to first base before we pass it, if that’s okay.”
If Sinn Féin win enough seats, government formation talks should be interesting.
What’s in a name?
We’ll soon find out. True to form, parties played the political offspring card to exploit that all-important name recognition advantage in constituencies, selecting new blood with old names to run for the family firm.
Here’s one from Louth.
“The name’s McGahon. Something McGahon.”
James, John, Jack, Jim?
“The name’s McGahon. Just McGahon.”
It’s actually John, but the big political name in the ether around Dundalk is that of his late uncle Brendan who was a Fine Gael TD in the area and nationally known for his trenchant views on law and order.
The party was happy to have the McGahon name on the ballot paper; it would give the outgoing Senator a head start in the race.
Then details of a violent incident from his recent past resurfaced when the Sunday Times published photographs showing the extent of facial injuries suffered by Monaghan farmer Breen White who was involved in a fracas with McGahon outside a pub in 2018.
The Senator was cleared of assault following a four-day trial at Dundalk Circuit Court but a jury in a civil action earlier this year found him 65 per cent liable, ordering him to pay €39,000 damages.
The graphic photographs appeared on the morning of Fine Gael’s manifesto launch in Tipperary, seriously denting McGahon’s election chances and adding further to the woes of Simon Harris’s stuttering campaign.
The Taoiseach doggedly defended his candidate’s presence on the ticket but as the days went on he began distancing himself from John’s campaign.
Best entrance (timing is everything)
The Social Democrats want nothing to do with the Labour Party in the post-election mating dance. Despite constant questions about the possibility of some sort of arrangement – or even a merger – between the two, candidates staunchly rejected even the merest suggestion of such an abomination.
And then, early on election day no less, what did party leader Holly Cairns do?
She went into labour.
It was the happiest event of the campaign – signalling as it did the end of one of the dreariest elections in recent memory and the birth of Holly’s first child, a baby girl.
Deputy Cairns and her partner Barry posted a lovely picture of Holly and her new arrival on Instagram writing: “She’s here. We’re completely in love with her.”
Congratulations to all.
Location, location, location
Posters, and where to put them, is a perennial topic.
Up on lamposts everywhere or everything pinned on to centralised notice boards?
An admobile provides a versatile answer.
Gerard “The Monk” Hutch – rival criminal gang bosses are reputed to have a price on his head – adopted a moving target approach with his van tootling around the less-leafier areas of Dublin Central to the general bemusement of onlookers.
He occasionally parked it in high visibility areas for maximum exposure.
One such spot was outside the former Regency Hotel on the busy Drumcondra Road. This was the place where Kinahan gangster David Byrne was shot dead during a boxing tournament weigh-in, sparking a deadly escalation in the violent feud between the Hutch and Kinahan criminal gangs and the candidate’s flight to a Spanish bolt-hole.
Hutch, who divides his time between his Spanish bolt-holes and luxury Clontarf home in the Dublin Bay North constituency, wants to see more gardaí on the streets.
He arrived back in Ireland from Lanzarote on the morning of the Fianna Fáil manifesto launch, out on bail of €100,000 after he was arrested as part of a Spanish money-laundering investigation.
Hutch’s slogan steals from Sinn Féin’s main selling point: “We need a change and I’m your man.”
Apparently young fellas in Dublin Central have been robbing his posters.
There’s never a guard around when you need one. Thank God.
Cllr Kevin Daly, an Independent candidate in Dublin Rathdown, had a much more arresting slogan on his posters.
But then, Kevin knows how to get a message across. A few years ago he got into hot water over a “sleigh car” which was being driven around Stepaside with a big boxy contraption and a real Christmas tree on the roof, along with tidings for a very happy Christmas from “Cllr Kevin Daly, working with Shane Ross TD. Like Santa we deliver”.
The Road Safety Authority took a dim view and then minister for transport Shane Ross, who has endorsed Daly’s campaign this year, retired the sleigh from active service.
Cllr Daly had an election message specially tailored for his South County Dublin voter base: “Homes for our middle-class children in our area.”
Clanger Central
In 2007 Fianna Fáil went into the election as the governing party but with big trouble brewing on the economy front and then taoiseach Bertie Ahern up to his neck in tribunal woes. The campaign got off to an awful shambles of a start.
Election headquarters was quickly dubbed Meltdown Manor. But with a strong leaders’ debate performance from Bertie Ahern and a decisive steadying role from Brian Cowen, the party pulled off a famous victory.
This year, Fine Gael started its campaign in great shape, with a new, hugely popular young leader at the helm and the party outstripping its main rivals in the opinion polls.
Steady as she goes and no surprises and Simon Harris looked set to deliver a famous victory.
When all of a sudden, after an election build-up which went on for months, Fine Gael veered off the path of certainty and straight into Clanger Central.
While Simon Harris was showcasing a “new energy” by haring around the country in an effort to shake every voter’s hand before polling day, the wheels were slowly coming off the wagon.
This was Meltdown Manor in reverse. Fianna Fáil had time to reverse the rot and activate Cowen. Fine Gael’s unforced errors hit hard in the final stage of the campaign when prudent Paschal Donohoe was finally activated, but was it too late?
Sinn Féin, meanwhile, after a disappointing showing in the local elections and internal party scandals causing turmoil, powered back up the opinion polls overtaking Fine Gael by a small margin and neck and neck with Fianna Fáil.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum and TweedleLou in the reckoning now.
Paschal The Rock Donohoe
Speaking of the Minister for Public Expenditure, Paschal Donohoe was the only senior Fine Gael politician who was true to his word when he repeatedly insisted he was not going to jump ship and quit politics before the election. A host of his colleagues were blue in the face saying the same thing before they upped and left.
He went out to bat for former TD Noel Rock, who returned to contest Dublin South West when Róisín Shortall’s departure from national politics offered a possible way back to the Dáil.
In a toe-curling video which even topped the one where Tánaiste Micheál Martin showed off his election shoes, Paschal looked earnestly into the camera and said: “So when I was a younger man The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, was a real hero of mine. Whether it was Summer Slam, WrestleMania, Jumanji, Fast and the Furious – I had to give Baywatch a miss – he was always somebody I really admired. But now, there is only one Rock in my life, the man I want to support, and that is Noel Rock, the man here beside me.”
Barftastic.
A reader got in touch about Paschal reminiscing about loving The Rock in Jumanji when he “was a younger man”.
Johnny told us “after a quick bit of research I found that Jumanji was released seven years ago, which would have made Paschal 43 years at the time. Talk about complicated gyrations to force the word ‘Rock’ into a promo video, he must have been awake all night trying to make that one fit.”
The Sh*t Stirrer Supreme
Government Minister Peter Burke thought it was a great wheeze to have Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary launch his campaign in Longford-Westmeath. In the course of the usual O’Leary knockabout, the budget airline’s Chief Exhibitionist Officer slagged off teachers while his audience, clearly there for the laughs, guffawed along.
“I wouldn’t generally employ a lot of teachers to go out and get things done,” said O’Leary, prompting a major fit of the vapours among teachers and delighted political opponents.
With Fine Gael in pole position, the main objective was to get through the campaign without committing any major gaffes or taking unnecessary risks.
And then Peter invites sh*t stirrer supreme to be the star-turn at his big launch.
Did nobody think to say: “I wouldn’t generally employ Michael O’Leary to go out and not insult anyone.”
They aren’t laughing now.
Handbags at dawn
This was a difficult election for the big two. Joined at the hip since 2016 when Fianna Fáil agreed to shore up a Fine Gael government in a ground-breaking confidence and supply agreement and then sharing power in the 33rd Dáil, marketing themselves as very different political packages was always going to be a tricky task.
They were sniping at each other well before the campaign began, with Fianna Fáil accusing its Government partner of dissing their leader Micheál Martin to the political correspondents behind his back. Describing him as cranky and a bit too long in the tooth for the young man’s game of top-rank politics, apparently.
Voters aren’t stupid and they began asking how the two groups went from saying they were working wonderfully well together in Government to tearing lumps out of each other’s track records and policies.
The carry-on was dismissed as nothing more than “handbags” between candidates jockeying for seats. As proper confrontations go, these handbags were more cheap knock-off than designer.
Except, perhaps, for the epic roaring match between Minister for Finance Jack Chambers and Government Chief Whip Hildegarde Naughton on Virgin Media’s Tonight Show. Chambers of Commerce deserves the lion’s share of the blame for losing his cool early doors and bellowing over his Cabinet colleague when she tried to take issue with tax figures in the FF manifesto.
The delicious highlight of this unedifying display was the sight of Sinn Féin’s finance spokesman – the usually very shouty but now very smiley Pearse Doherty – sitting between the warring pair with a big happy head on him.
Jump starts and sneaky starts
Roderic O’Gorman discommoded his Coalition betters in October when he jumped the gun on the election date by saying the public needed clarity on its timing. He said he would be telling fellow leaders Taoiseach Simon Harris and Tánaiste Micheál Martin: “My preference is for a November election, for November 29th. I think that gives us the opportunity to get those final pieces of legislation through.”
They were disgusted with him, even though everyone knew that was going to be the date and the other two were just milking the situation.
Then Micheál stole a march on Simon by doing an interview in early November and naming the date. Virgin Media rushed out an advance clip from its 5.30pm news bulletin for social media. Whereupon Simon belted out to RTÉ to reannounce the date on the Six One news.
Who needs banana skins?
Labour’s Ged Nash slipped on a post-Halloween pumpkin skin when canvassing in Drogheda. Didn’t see that one coming.
The Kanturk Disaster
Taoiseach Simon Harris went down the more traditional route, coming a cropper on a few banana skins as the finishing line approached.
But it was an incident, forever to be known as The Kanturk Disaster, which halted the already slowing Harris juggernaut in its tracks. His testy and uncharacteristically dismissive reaction to care worker Charlotte Fallon and her question about equal pay for colleagues outside the HSE was filmed and posted on social media.
The footage did no credit to a clearly tired Taoiseach and it was viewed more than a million times. Simon Harris, who looked haunted after this misstep, spent the rest of his campaign apologising – never a good look.
Will the electorate forgive him?
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