Fianna Fail running scared of the Irish electorate August 23, 2011
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Fianna Fáil.Tags: fianna fail, Irish Politics
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So there we have it, Brian Crowley will not seek the Fianna Fail Nomination for the Presidency
Mr Crowley said he would not be seeking the nomination because the party leadership made it clear it did not see an internal Fianna Fáil candidate as the way forward.
Mr Crowley described the decision as a mistake and said he believed Fianna Fáil should be running an internal party candidate.
So it looks as if Michael Martin and others at the top of Fianna Fail are running scared of the Irish electorate, much to the dismay and anger of many within Fianna Fail.
Are they so broke? Are they so afraid of a trouncing?
Needless to say I wouldn’t have voted for him, but Crowley has an image of being a decent enough individual, probably the most presentable face of Fianna Fail nationally. He may not have won, but he would I suspect have on the day polled over 20% which given their current circumstances would have been a boost for Fianna Fail.
He may even have outpolled Gay Mitchell, which would certainly been a shot in the arm for Fianna Fail.
On his Facebook page earlier Senator Marc McSharry wrote
Very sorry to hear MEP Bryan Crowley has ruled himself out of Presidential election as FF nominee. His participation in the presidential race would have given our party a real bounce in my view. Support of a quasi celebrity will not serve Ireland or our party well
Amongst the Responses …
Im so annoyed Marc we need to let the people know and see that FF are alive and well and not going anywhere and will be around for along time to come.instead of worrying about finances my god its a disgrace.
Bryan could have been a great candidate for us, Longest serving MEP, impeccable record out there and could weather the legacy stuff better than most. a genuinely inspirational guy with a great story to tell and a person in my view that once a campaign got underway would put in a performance that at the very least would give us a very credible performance.
.. why cant our leader see this..? its unbelievable its like he is trying to make an xfactor competition out of the campaign for president.
Brian Crowley would have been an excellent candidate and one who could have transcended even party allegiances…what future has our party without running a candidate in an election we have always had one? Mary Hanafin or Brian Crowley would be excellent candidates, and yet the leadership insists on looking at crazy outside ones like Gay Byrne that ff members wouldn’t even vote for. Serious disconnect with grassroots on this issue.
Brian Crowley was left with no option but to rule himself out, as our leader had already done that! Madness, Brian was the best chance we had of shout at the Aras. The man is an inspiration, can hold an entire room with a few words, as you say he has an impeccable record, and no tarnish form the cabinet table… Why can’t MM see this? As I said in other pages, who will we go for next Bosco?
You’d wonder if Michael Martin realised what a hornets nest he was opening when he had that chat with Gay Byrne?
crowley pulling out is a bit strange. is it part of a leadership challenge maybe.
MM is going to have to get used to it. In an organisation like FF, the authority of the leader was always based on patronage: people toed the line in the hope or expectation of being rewarded. Nowadays, and for the foreseeable, there are no goodies in the bag, so there will be a lot more of this.
Not surprised Crowley pulled out, it must be humiliating to see the leadership casting around for anyone but him when he wants to run for the presidency.I’d think he’d have done very well, during the Euro elections when the roof was falling in on FF elsewhere he topped the poll in Munster. Not that the welfare of FF is paramount for anyone on this site but I think the members of any party would surely be queasy about seeing someone who’d served that party for a few decades being shunted aside for an outsider. So I have sympathy for Crowley who does come across as a likable gent. The media fixation on the idea that someone off the telly should run strikes me as a bit Anyone But Michael D at this stage.
I think Martin’s obsession with a media connected candidate also reflects the great self delusion which FF have clung to since the last election. Namely that it is not the disastrous decisions they made which saw them get trounced by the electorate but their inability to ‘get across our message.’ Reports of their post-election think-in (pause for cruel laughter) seemed to show a fixation with the idea that somehow it was poor presentation skills which banjaxed them. Perhaps that isn’t so surprising given the amount of pol corrs, Collins, Whelan etc. who assured them that the voters would actually admire their austerity policies once they had a think about it.
By the way, in the current issue of Harpers magazine there’s a very good piece by Thomas Frank on the legacy of Enron which skewers the delusions of neo-liberalism very succinctly. If I could do these things, I’d put it up here. It’s well worth a look.
I’ve said it before but it bears repeating. Strong anecdotal evidence suggests to me that apart from those with something to profit from the party machine (i.e. would be obscure nobodies without it), everyone else has left the “National Movement” over the past ten-fifteen years and it’s just waiting for someone to turn out the lights.
I hope you’re right.But I wonder where all the voters who discover that the new government are just going to give them more of the same are going to go? Remember after the 2002 election when the pundits agreed that FG served no meaningful purpose and were finished. But the purpose FG served was not to be FF. And the purpose FF will serve is not to be FG, if for no other reason that they have the structure at local level, the councillors etc.which enable them to fight elections better than someone like SF. Like I said, it would be great if you were right but I suspect FF may yet come back like your man rising out of the bath in Les Diaboliques.
There’s a lot of people who before would have been FF and nothing but, who now talk about voting SF rather than the neo-liberal consensus that rules this country.
It’ll be interesting to see how FF fare In the universities & colleges fares come September.
Certainly last year in the one university that I’m familiar with they were still, in 2010, cock of the walk and I was advised that they remained far bigger than any other political grouping.
If they hook and retain a student cadre over the next few years they could make a sort of revival. But if they fail to pick student members in law, accountancy, property qualifications, medicine, business studies, future teachers etc, then they’ll be in big trouble given that the caste system in FF demands that its election candidates be drawn from a very narrow pool of occupational, professional groups.
I found it funny, and typical of his superficiality and lack of self-awareness, that Martin made such a song-and-dance about his father being a trade unionist and bus driver. While FF surely has members from unskilled occupational backgrounds it’s notable that none of its candidates for a general election are ever drawn from an unskilled occupational category. Has a truck driver ever stood for the FF at a Dáil election, for instance? By drawing attention to his father’s trade unionism and occupation Martin was paradoxically underling what an elitist outfit FF are now and have been for a long, long time.
“Has a truck driver ever stood for the FF at a Dáil election, for instance?”
Had a brief look at some old Nealons guides last night and found Denis Lyons a former FF TD for Cork North Central who listed his occupation as a “Sheet Metal Worker”.
@CMK,
It’s not just FF though, is it? FG are obviously the same, but so to are Labour and have been for a generation – I’m sure someone will be able to think of an exception, but of the top of my head, I can’t think of a Labour TD who doesn’t fit into the same narrow band of occupations.
Re: the universities – good point: I remember Freshers’ week last year in TCD, FF were promoting themselves as the ‘party party’ with pics of Cowen attached to a pint…..
I remember looking at the last list of local election candidates in Dublin and seeing, I think, a single candidate who was a manual worker. It’s the same in most country constituencies. Yet if one takes the very unscientific approach of looking at the occupations of the members of a GAA club, there are, or at least were, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, butchers, bricklayers, labourers galore. But you get the feeling that the mainstream parties would find it infra dig to nominate one of them as a candidate.
You could see the same kind of attitude in the furore about Wallce, Boyd Barrett and the Dail dress code when many of theletters of the paper made what they felt was the unassailable argument that, ‘most professional people’ had to weara suit to work so TDs should do the same. The fact that most ofthe workingpopulation don’t wear a suit seemed beside the point. Perhaps because those people don’t really count to the same extent, not being members of what is always termed the ‘articulate middle class.,’which from my
experience isn’t notably more articulatre than any other class
Yet if one takes the very unscientific approach of looking at the occupations of the members of a GAA club, there are, or at least were, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, butchers, bricklayers, labourers galore
How many of them end up on committees?
from my experience with football clubs with membership structures, the majority of the active membership would fall into a similar occupational bracket as the above, but the board will be ‘the suits’ – solicitors, accountants etc.
I know it’s a simplistic point to make but just at a personal level many people are reluctant to speak in front of a group of any size, let alone in public. The jobs where people are used to talking for a living (teachers, lawyers etc.) or have daily experience of speaking authoratively in terms of imparting professional advice (accountants etc.) gives those people a natural head start when it comes to the self-confidence to put themselves forwards for committee positions and then as representatives. I’m sure if the whole population practiced neuro linguistic programming techniques we’d get around that problem, but as the school curricilum doesn’t necessarily cover that type of thing, or much education for citizenship at all really, then we fall back onto the nature/nurture strengths and weakness, and of course class prejudice, and select our political representatives accordingly from the earliest stages on that path.
I agree that the domination of middle class professionals among elected representatives is not restricted to FF and applies just as much to FG and Lab. I’d speculate and say there is a subtle but nonetheless rigid ‘property qualification’ operating across most capitalist liberal democracies, and particularly here. It was notable during the week skimming the IT’s ‘where are they now’ pieces on TDs who were booted out in February, that Micheal Kennedy, who lost his seat in Dublin North could return back to his insurance business, which had been run by his son while he was in the Dáil. Since, a firm foothold in the professional and business classes seems a pre-requisite for advancement in FF, and those classes aren’t going anywhere soon, it follows that FF still have a chance, once serious disenchantment with FG and Lab kicks in later this year. The beast is not dead yet.
What annoys me about the FF ‘national movement’ bullshit is the fact that, at least since the days of TACA, FF couldn’t get elected without the votes of people who the same party would never, under any circumstnances, permit to stand for election for them. That unspokent contempt which pervades the political elite is likewise unlikely to die out any time soon.
@LATC,
Good point – certain jobs do give a head start in sounding articulate, even if you’ve nothing intelligible to say. Again, though, a previous generation of workers would have had the experience of TUs to give them a platform and an opportunity to learn, but, outside the public service, this is becoming rare enough too.
It’s one huge advantage kids from the US take from high school and college: presentations are routine in classes over there and there’s no getting out of it. Consequently, a fair proportion of American are perfectly capable of talking confidently in public without fear, and not just ‘the professional classes’
That’s interesting about the US education system and the creation of self-confidence. The point you make about sounding articulate in the absense of useful content is a valid one. Coincidentally I was reading Noel Browne’s autobiography this morning where he is very critical of some of his FG cabinet colleagues from the inter-party government on both scores, lack of articulation skills and/or lack of content. Plus ca change in the political sphere. Part of me adheres to the old adage that if you’ve nothing useful to say, say nothing, whereas I’m also torn by a post-modernist democratic urge to dismiss such “wisdom” as being elitist. In the era of the internet, and a profoundly different norm in terms of acceptble and expected signal to noise ratio, perhaps increased self-confidence is the better result for society regardless of the associated negatives.
Its a given for me when teaching small seminar groups, that, when I ask for questions, if there are any non-Irish students in the class, that’s where the first ones will come from, and if there’s enough furriners, the Irish students will sit back, relieved at the burden of participation being lifted from their shoulders. A class full of Irish kids and you’ll get stonewall silence, at least to begin with. All the visiting student I talk to mention it, and feel it incumbent upon them to make up what they see as an embarrassing deficit.
Sure, they may not have anything useful to say, but at least if you learn to speak, by the time you do have something to contribute, you won’t be hamstrung by nerves.
HEre’s the link to that piece though it’s subscriber only – do they upload articles after a new issue is out?
http://harpers.org/archive/2011/08/0083527
I’d like to read it. I remember watching the Enron documentary years ago. There’s a bit at the end where soeone kinda says “Ah yeah you see this was just a one-off, no chance it could happen again.”
Amazing how what went on there was very similar to some of the banks here – secret loans to a certain circle some of which were to fix the share price, loands hidden off balance sheet and books cooked etc.
Brian Lucey on Vincent Browne (when Max Keiser was on) tried to argue that we just had a good old fashioned property bust where too m much money was borrowed in a bubble and that there wasn’t rank and file corruption. And he said this with a straight face.
Yeah, I’m a Philosophy Undergraduate and American students always comment on how passive Irish students are in seminar groups. Any question posed to a group of Irish students will be met by a Pinter pause.
Don’t spoil it for people who haven’t seen it, it’s just been re-released y’know.
That’s not Norman Bates’s mother up in the room, Bruce Willis is dead and The Planet of the Apes is actually Earth. And The Tree of Life makes no sense at all.
I see Dev Og has come out today saying that they should run a candidate. I’d say that FF Presidential strategy committee meeting can’t come soon enough for Michael Martin.
Even in the days of Cowen there were few if any public spats within Fianna Fail.
I’d say Martin is banking on O’Muircheartaigh getting him out of this particular hole. Dev Og fancies himself as the candidate and it would certainly be fun to see himself and Mitchell scrap it out for the Holy Joe vote which O’Cuiv never managed to conjure up during the Donegal by-election.
Put a stake through FFs heart. They destroyed Ireland.
No disagreement there. But they put a stake through Dracula’s heart in the first Hammer film, and there were many sequels after that. They will flip without shame into a mode where they can launch populist attacks on the austerity measures. This, after all, is the party which fought the 1987 election on a platform of being against health cuts and then cut far more savagely when they got back into power. I don’t see who’s going to fill that FF shaped hole, especially not in rural constituencies. For example, my own in Cork SW currently reads 2FG, 1 Lab.That will not happen the next time, SF are miles away from a seat, there’s no ULA and no strong independents. So who else but FF is going to pick up one next time.That’s replicated in a lot of places.
And the worst of it is, all they did with the bank bailout was do FG’s dirty work for them.
They’ll be back yet. Their support has risen modestly in the last couple of opinion polls, due to the lack of any real alternative to austerity. There is likely to be a high rate of abstention in the forthcoming Presidential election, due to the Norris fiasco, so FF would be providing the only ‘Opposition’ candidate at a time when the coalition’s popularity is declining. Running Crowley or O’Cuiv would see a respectable result and it’s a mystery to me why noone in the FF leadership sees this.
Turnout for the last president election – in 1997 ffs! – was about 48%. Robinson’s in 1990 was low as well compared with other turnouts.
When you consider we’ve only had three presidential elections in nearly 40years you can see how little impact it has and how it’s not taken in any seriousness. Essentially it is a similar to the British voting for a Monarch head.
The Presidency is so meaningless that whoever wins this time will automatically be judged to be doing a fantastic job and be elected for a second term by acclaim. The quasi monarchical status accorded the President would almost make you pine for the days of Paddy Donegan.
Personally I think Brendan O’Carroll would make a great candidate, (A) He comes from a left wing political background, his mother having been a Labour Lord mayor of Dublin (B) He could be his own first lady by dressing up as Mrs.Brown and (C) Who wouldn’t like to hear Sarkozy being asked, ‘how’s your mickey’ or Merkel being asked how her wobbly bits are. And most importantly he’s been on television a lot which appears to be the main qualification being sought at the moment.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0827/1224303046802.html
The above piece in Saturday’s IT is an enjoyable read and fitting postscript to this thread. Almost unrelenting pessimism about the party’s future among the grassroots; Happy Days!
“A trend emerged in urban areas over 25 years,” he says. “Aspiring politicians tended to create their own organisations, parallel to the cumainn. That, to some extent, caused disenchantment among traditional members who found themselves excluded. Fianna Fáil in Dublin then emerged as a franchise. Workers and supporters worked exclusively for the TD’s franchise and departed when he or she no longer had a seat. It consequently led to a weaker structure.”
That’s interesting – one more case of ‘more Boston than Berlin’ because that sounds very much like the way the Democrats work.
Although the problems with FF identified in the article are not unique to them, and in a way, they are probably typical of the modern political party – and not even viewed as problems. Top down selection of candidates, the removal of policy making from branches and conference and their replacement by pollsters and focus groups, and the reduction of the role of the ordinary member to leaflet distributor has been replicated by each of the three big UK parties in turn, starting with Thatcher’s Tories. An active mass membership is an irrelevance in modern mainstream political parties. What you really want is something like a large Facebook group, that you can tap for money and allow to hit the ‘like’ button for policies emanating from central office.
The decline of mass parties is actually a Europe wide phenomenon. Pretty much every country has seen a major drop in party membership and a shift to the sort of PR and media driven politics you describe. Voter turnout has shown a general downward trend since the ’60s and it seems to be more difficult to get people to personally take part in other forms of political activity, like trade union activism, on a consistent basis. People will turn up for the odd demo, join a facebook campaign or sign a petition, but that’s about it.
At the same time NGOs have multiplied, suggesting a shift to a much lower level of personal engagement and single issue politics, divorced from explicit political ideologies. People are far more likely to give a monthly subscription to Amnesty or Concern than a political party, and the appeal of these organisations is precisely that they are seen as ‘non-political’ because they are based in lowest common denominator values like humanitarianism and human rights.
Latin America is about the only part of the world where you still have vibrant mass movements and also the only place with a real left-right party political divide in the sense that either side has similar levels of mass support and is promoting something significantly different – as opposed to shades of ‘left’ or ‘right’ neoliberalism.
they are seen as ‘non-political’ because they are based in lowest common denominator values like humanitarianism and human rights.
And of course, the very political nature of the replacement of ‘politics’ by such values is the real sleight of hand.
Perhaps it’s cynical to suggest this, but I can’t help but think that all the dynamics you both describe above are because they’re intrinsically easier on some fundamental level than the sort of mass, or even sub-mass engagement by large scale political parties in the past. Getting people out on a fortnightly or monthly basis, let alone a weekly one, is just really difficult. It’s not that no one can or will do it, but for most it just doesn’t happen.
Even in the mid 1980s I remember my branch in the WP in Kilbarrack could fairly easily get together a reasonable group of people on a weekly basis for meetings, and this would be in addition to other activities that went on, whether paper selling, collections, activism, community meetings etc. Of course the level of involvement was scaled in terms of peoples commitments but what’s striking to me now is how many of the people were in their 30s and 40s then, way older than I was at the time, with children etc. I wonder how easy that would be replicated today adn even by the tail end of the 80s and into the 90s I think it was fading for the party.
Even with community activism any of us know that in reality it’s largely the same old faces who turn up time and again or keep organisations staggering on. Or take Tony G’s operation. That became an incredibly well honed political machine, but it tended to coalesce in its broadest expression at election times and then focus on a much tighter group between elections.
I’d half ascribe it to age profiles and demographics. The instant children appear in the equation it’s goodbye – for many – significant political involvement, and perhaps that’s a function of the fading away of large scale families living close together where grandparents could take up the slack when parents [or parent] needed to get out. I know myself my involvement in political activism at local level has fallen off a cliff since the arrival of my daughter three years back and I’ve fallen back on providing sort of support services to various campaigns ie people tend to arrive at my door for stuff to help out or I email them stuff rather than going myself. And yet I can’t really see a way around it.
Another aspect is the break up of original working class communities and the scattering of them across cities both in the original when they were moving from inner city to far flung suburbs, as took place across the 20c but particularly in Ireland say in the 30s to 70s and then as they moved again from the Kilbarracks to the dormitory towns etc.
There’s loads more reasons, but these are two that come readiest to mind.
The growth of the ‘precariat’ as Mark Fisher calls it, is another factor – not knowing what your working hours are going to be next week is a big drawback when it comes to organising meetings, scheduling canvassing and so on.
That and commuting ……
Commuting perhaps even bigger than the precariat, at least initially. No?
‘Sins of the Father’ is proving a deeply thought provoking work. Specifically, the connection between FF constructing a housing market to expand and consolidate a middle class who would vote for them in perpetuity. From 1997-2008 they nearly pulled it off.
My point in raising that is the link between the geographical spread of suburbia and the rise of the commuter towns, while keeping the locus of the economy rooted in one city, was to ensure that that layer of the middle class had no time for anything but work, commuting, family, shopping and maybe a bit of sport.
I saw it myself when living close to the city centre in Dublin you could be home from work, had your dinner and be ready for meetings etc by 6.30pm. While in the dormitory town you’re home by 7, 7.30, 8pm, if you’re lucky, and by the time you’re fed and watered it’s nearly 9, and that meeting on the EU/IMF deal started at 8pm and is nearly over, etc, etc,.
So, what happens, and this feeds into SoS’s points above, serious political activity is viable only for the local worthies, drawn from the property professions, the law or small business, who can delegate their work while they concentrate on political activity, these people can then create the local franchises against which the parties can plant a logo come election time. That’s why our council chambers are stuffed to gills with dangerous mediocrities, many of whom will make it to the Dáil for no other reason than that the outlasted the competition over the course of decades.
The contemporary structures of life militate against meaningful political activity by all but the seriously ideologically committed or the upper middle classes. So, for many politically aware people it’s easier to take out an amnesty sub, follow the blogs or ‘like’ something on Facebook. Evgeny Mozorov’s ‘The Net Delusion’ is excellent on the limitations of virtual activism.
Finally, the toll any kind of political activism takes on life outside of politics is greatly underestimated and even a glimpse at it can put many off of it. That’s why I’ve long held the belief that the ‘Left’ should put as much effort into creating social spaces which are lightly political but more focused on socialising and where people can drop in or out. This would create a more sustainable basis for activism for those you can only give modest degrees of commitment. FF were on to something by creating a ‘party Party’ to hook the young on campuses.
Another obvious barrier which WbS half alluded to is the otherwise wholly positive change in the participation of men in family life: whereas an earlier generation of lads could happily come home from work, have the tea and be off out to a meeting, leaving looking after the kids to herself, these days, as most of us know, this won’t do, especially if you’re kids have been at a childminders/ with their granny all day because both of you are working.
Good point, childcare is probably the decisive factor; it was/is for me.
‘your kids’ not ‘you’re’ – oh for an edit button!