‘A FEW LARGE bottles will do grand,” my defeated cousin said. He wasn’t a bit happy to meet, not a bit happy. I had betrayed him once by linking with the dark forces of the media. Writing poems about the Party is all very fine – sure nobody in their right mind reads them, and nobody we know cares – but quoting an innocent canvasser in the papers is a different matter entirely. He was doing me a big favour, he said, which is why I wanted to bring him to the Tannery in Dungarvan or Deavys in Cappoquin.
Anyway, he wasn’t going into Dungarvan any time soon, he said, after what the voters had done on the Party; an ungrateful town, he said, where Jackie Fahey had put arses on the trousers of half the populace. Surely Tom Kyne had done a lot for Dungarvan in his time, I suggested; surely that’s why there’s a brand new Barnardos’ TD, Ciara Connolly.
“Waterford and Tramore let ye down too,” I suggested, and he replied sharply, “Are you looking for an argument? I’m not meeting you if you just want to be fighting me. I have timber to cut.”
The ground had opened and swallowed my cousin, along with his chainsaw. You could say it was a massacre. He hasn’t been out of the house since last Saturday evening’s vigil Mass. It is only now he is climbing out, still hurting from the worst defeat of the true Gael since Kinsale.
To go from 23,025 first preferences in 2007 to 7,515 first preferences in 2011 is some feat of electoral incompetence, and my cousin knows it. Even allowing for boundary changes – parts of Waterford appearing and disappearing in south Tipp – it is far worse than the defeat of Fine Gael in the byelection of 1952, an election where William Kenneally won the seat of the deceased Bridget Redmond, widow of Willie and daughter-in-law of John Redmond. That day in 1952 Kenneally extended by more than 3,500 the combined first preferences of Paddy Little and John Ormonde from 1948. But there is no warmth now in thoughts of former glory. A fog of defeat has descended. Politically, everything has become hollow for my poor cousin. The Party is like a tree rotting from the inside. The great towering tree and all its shelter have come crashing down.
We meet in a pub at the bottom of a certain hill by a bridge over a certain river in west Waterford. I arrive before my cousin. The pub is quiet, as it has been since the introduction of a certain smoking ban by one whose name is dirt in these parts.
A fire crackles and a forlorn sheepdog sighs disconsolately while its owner visits the toilet. The door opens, and my cousin peeps inside.
“You can come in,” I shout. “There’s no one about.”
“Well.”
“Well yourself.”
“Who owns the dog?”
“A man in the toilet.”
“Is he with you? Is he from that paper?”
“No.”
“Good.”
I order a large bottle for my cousin and a Deasy’s lemonade for myself. I’m conscious that I’ll be driving back to Cork in the dark. True to its name the lemonade explodes when the barman flips the cap, but my cousin’s porter flows dark and smooth.
He hasn’t quite got over the car crash of the election. He says he needs to think about it. Then he tells me his wife, Imelda, is calling in. He has hardly told me when she opens the pub door. She is as cheerful as my cousin is morose. “I haven’t left him alone for 10 minutes since the exit polls,” she says, laughing. “I’m desperate worried about him.”
“The people are treacherous,” her husband says.
But he’s not speaking to me. He’s speaking to a denuded forest of 13,000 first preferences. Where did they go to? Who stole them? Who will bring them back?
“And there was that turf-cutter from the west, Ming what’s-his-name, and he comparing ye all to dandelions!” Imelda laughs. “He says ye should all have been dug up with spades.”
“We’ll throw a gallon of Paraquat on them fellows when the next election comes round.”
“Ah, that’s the spirit, pet,” says Imelda.
I can see my cousin is still in the early stage of grieving. It’s called denial. The facts are dreadful. The statistics are truly shocking. Fianna Fáil, now wearing only the thin underwear of 20 Dáil seats, has to wait in the vestibule marked Small Party. From here it is a very short walk to the toilet. He agrees this defeat has nothing to do with history, with the Civil War, with the North. He agrees this defeat is a personal message from the people. This election was about jobs, about unemployment and emigration. The heavy clothing of faux-republicanism was no protection against the chill wind of bare facts. That other republican party, with more recent certificates of authenticity, had shown how bread-and-butter issues mattered now – more than origins, social or historical. Frankly, dear cousin, the people didn’t give a damn.
“We had nothing worthwhile to say to the unemployed,” my cousin agrees yet again. “We’ll have to have plans for employment.”
“Not employment, that’s stupid! It’s not as simple as that,” Imelda says, tearing into us both.
“What?”
“It’s customers. Customers. How can we create a million customers by next Christmas. The shops are crying out for customers. I hope this new Government can create a million customers by next Christmas. The shops need a boost. Reintroduce the double payment in December. Offer to deduct 2 per cent from every worker’s pay packet and use that as a double payment next Christmas. People are too skint to save for Christmas by themselves. You’d have to wish the new Government well. For the sake of Ireland, you’d hope they’d all be well.”
“What’s all this wishing them well? They took all our bloody votes.”
“You must practise forgiveness,” she says. Then, “Is anyone here going to buy me a drink?”
Imelda has been practising a form of kindness. It’s a foreign import, of course. Along with three other women from the west Waterford cumainn she was already in training for the catastrophic defeat of the Party. The Party women had enrolled for a course on meditation and loving kindness with a super-thin youth from the north of England. Two of them will be going to Limerick to hear the Dalai Lama speaking on this very subject.
“Maybe Willie O’Dea will be there,” I suggest.
“You must wish the new Government well,” Imelda insists, ignoring my jest. “Not just for Ireland but for your own well-being.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, get me another large bottle. We’re lucky to be out of it. The next three years will be hell.”
“That’s exactly why ye were defeated,” Imelda says. “Negativity. Frightening people.”
The man who owns the sheepdog finally emerges from the toilet. He looks at my cousin: “Ye were hammered.”
“Don’t you start, Pat Dineen.”
Silence in the pub. There isn’t much communication; no effort to communicate, just a silent weariness. This was a waste of a journey into my childhood heartland: one should never try to go back. There is still such a gulf in my cousin’s mind between those lost first preferences and this tectonic shift in Irish thinking. In the city this morning, I explain to my cousin, the German and Scandinavian workers who crowded round me on the No 2 bus that goes to Apple Europe were talking about the resignation of Angela Merkel’s aristocratic minister. One more local crisis in Germany, discussed as we climb through Billy Kelleher’s constituency. Hundreds upon hundreds of foreign workers pile into the Apple campus each day. Except they are not foreign. No, they are Europeans like us, like the young Polish woman who served me coffee before I boarded the bus driven by a serious young Slovakian. Everywhere we are surrounded by multilingual techies. They are here because we haven’t groomed our own. They are flooding in to create a new republic, based less on nationality and language and more on a communal citizenship.
“History in general treats the working class as the manipulator of politics treats the working man: that is, with contempt when he remains passive,” wrote James Connolly in Labour in Irish History.
What my cousin has missed is the true meaning of that tectonic shift, the end of a contemptible passivity in the Irish psyche. The unionised working class may survive, but the passive worker, the cannon fodder of every Fianna Fáil campaign, has been replaced by new Europeans. From the introduction of the Poor Laws to the Land Acts to the defeat of conscription in 1917 to the end of land annuities, the great mass of our people have exercised a spectacular capacity to be led by hierarchies and elites. A haughty political elite grew up from the bogland of that passive life. A communal sense of belonging, a committee in every parish, a dressingroom in every GAA field, was the simplest expression of passivity rewarded.
This year and last year it was not the mythical rural poor, loyalty born in subsistence, that was attacked but the entrenched and expensively educated families of the suburbs. A new sense of national bewilderment has been gripped and honed sharply by the rage of the educated. The middle class are less forgiving, as the French aristocracy discovered. When you damage the long-term prospects of the middle class you are met not with large bottles or rosary beads but with the guillotine.
As Iseult Honohan once said in an RTÉ Thomas Davis lecture: “From a republican perspective the grounds for civic virtue and solidarity among citizens are seen as relying on the recognition of interdependence rather than ethnic and cultural identity.” Patriots have now reclaimed the ballot box; patriots in the 18th-century sense, leaders of communes, parents of auditors.
Going from 23,025 first preferences to 7,515 first preferences in the constituency of Waterford is a crushing and spectacular rejection. We have gone from the van driver and the small bit of sheep farming on the side to the ownership of juice bars and working for Barnardos. The only thing my cousin has going for him is Imelda and her friends; Imelda with her capacity for forgiveness and her curiosity about the Dalai Lama. The world has gone over my cousin’s head, and Imelda, as usual, has begun to run ahead of him.
“Maybe Waterford will get its university now,” I suggest. “Dick Spring promised that in the 1992 campaign.”
“If Wexford got a new opera house surely Waterford can get a university,” Imelda agrees.
“With Martin Cullen gone we’ll never again get anything. We’re better off out of it,” says my cousin, looking into his empty porter glass. “We’re better off.”
I look at Imelda and raise my glass to her. “It’ll take a while,” she says.
