FF faithful remember earliest days

Almost 80 years to the day since Eamon de Valera stood before the inaugural meeting of Fianna Fáil at the La Scala Theatre (now the somewhat less evocative Pennys), off O'Connell Street, Dublin, and fired the starting pistol of "a great national advance", hundreds of his political descendants converged on Dublin's Mansion House last night to feast on talk of their brightest days.

"It's a proud day for the family," said Terry de Valera, Eamon's youngest son and father of Minister of State Síle. Though he is only four years older than the FF party, he said, he retains vague memories of those early, heady days in the 1920s.

The event was entitled The Advance of a Nation - 80 years of Fianna Fáil, that half-heartedly modest hyphen all that stood between a causal bond between the two. L'état, c'est nous, it might have read.

Party luminaries, including Cabinet members Brian Cowen, Dick Roche, Dermot Ahern, Séamus Brennan and Noel Dempsey mingled with party members past and present.

Former president Dr Patrick Hillery and former taoiseach Albert Reynolds laughed over an election poster from the 1950s that offered the assuring: "Wives: Get your husbands off to work. Vote Fianna Fáil."

Charles Haughey, precluded by illness from attending, was represented by his son Seán and brother Fr Eoghan Haughey, and the first mention of his name by host Mary Kennedy drew some of the most enthusiastic cheers of the evening (as well as a standing ovation of one led by a gutsy fan near the front).

Seán Lemass and Seán O'Connor, grandsons of former taoiseach Seán Lemass, were there, as were Síle Baines, a niece of former taoiseach Jack Lynch, Pádraig Faulkner, who served in a number of Fianna Fáil cabinets and Máire Ní Cheallaig, private secretary to Eamon de Valera from 1957 to 1973. The crowd was dazzled with tales and trivia. Did you know that when De Valera died in August 1975, a month's mourning was declared in India? Or that the first financial donor to Fianna Fáil was - unpromisingly - a comedian?

Pat Dolan, whose father secured him a membership card aged one, in 1926, was told he is the longest-standing party member.

Invariably, what was a celebration of miles already clocked, was also a limbering drill for laps yet to come. "Fianna Fáil's record of achievement is a source of pride and a foundation for success in the future," the Taoiseach said. Onwards, that is. Onwards and pollwards.