WITH THE LEADERS:The Labour leader was a different man after his showdown with Micheál Martin, writes JOHN WATERS
THE FACTORY walkabout is one of the staples of the election canvass. The location is Oriflame in Bray Business Park, a Swedish-owned company involved in the environmentally friendly sector of the cosmetics industry. The Bray factory specialises in research and development, and Eamon Gilmore is being shown around by Michael Farrell, its finance and HR director.
These things are almost always embarrassing charades. The politician is decked out in a white coat and led about the various parts of the manufacturing process, having everything explained to him.
I have not seen Gilmore close up before. Perhaps today is not an ideal day, because later he will face Micheál Martin in the TV3 debate. All the same, he doesn’t appear exactly nervous – perhaps just a little hyper and distracted.
He seems shy, self-conscious, and his slight diffidence is visible as he goes through the motions for the benefit of the cameras, talking to the chemists, all female, involved in different aspects of Oriflame’s research work.
“What have you in there?” he asks, indicating a glass vessel half-filled with a whitish liquid. Deirdre, the chemist, starts to explain the procedures she’s engaged in, which involve making up some kind of herbal-based foundation cream for sensitive skin. Eamon punctuates her response with “okay” and “right”.
Out on the street canvass in Bray town centre, he’s even less comfortable and doesn’t appear to be enjoying himself. A man on the main street says they’ve met before and Eamon hesitates, then touches the man’s elbow in a gesture of intimacy that the man interprets as recognition. A woman delivers a denunciation of all politicians, declaring that they should all be in jail “for what they done to this country”, and Eamon finds a new energy.
He seems happiest when he gets a chance to explain things to people, to give them detailed responses to questions that in many instances are as perfunctory as the ones he was asking the chemists a short time before. Someone mentions the IMF and he launches into a long speech about renegotiating the bailout and turning things around and instilling a new confidence.
Yesterday, with the big debate behind, Eamon Gilmore is a different man. He bounds from the car in Dunboyne and wishes everyone a good morning. His first engagement is a meeting with the student council of St Peter’s College. But before that he fields some questions from the media, mainly about the night before. He insists that he got what he wanted from the exchange. “Nobody is going to go into a polling station in 16 days’ time, bite on a pencil and wonder to themselves whose debating tactics were best,” he says.
Even more convincing is the expression on his face, which, compared with the one he wore in Bray, is a study in relief.
Gilmore handles the students’ questions without raising a sweat. He spells out in detail the Labour Party positions on education, international trade, waste disposal, the Irish language in education, what to do about developers’ wives, the bailout, electric cars. As he goes to leave the room, he is asked by one of the students, Sinéad Cornyn, what advice he has for young people thinking of entering politics. “That is the person I want to get to,” he says. He talks about the responsibility implicit in that act of delegation, when the voter extends his or her trust to you. This implies a huge burden of responsibility. “It is very important for them to have it in their soul.”
All the time, the cameras are rolling. The final stop-off of the day is in Navan. First, to Eason's bookshop, where a group of schoolchildren from the local Educate Together school have gathered to hear Eamon read them a story. He reads The Gruffalo, a story in rhyming couplets about a mouse who invents a giant animal friend to ensure his own safety from larger animals. "It bears no relationship to any political leader," says Gilmore. He reads it well and appears to enjoy himself hugely. At the end he can't resist: "I think the Gruffalo might be a member of Fianna Fáil!"
A boy with a north of England accent tells Gilmore about the state of their playground. “If we fall we’re gonna hurt us head because the concrete is very slippy,” he explains. The boy explains that his father, who makes windows, got “fired” not long ago and Eamon takes this on the hop to launch into outlining all the work the Labour Party is going to create insulating the houses of the nation.
On walkabout in Navan shopping centre, he engages freely with all and sundry. A young woman who tells him she’s emigrating to New Zealand is challenged and cajoled. “This is a good country,” he insists.
Apart from a few isolated pockets, Labour has no tribe. Gilmore’s politics seem to be entirely rooted within himself, a clear set of principles and aspirations that now seek their correspondence in this unprecedented crisis. The question is: will he need a tribal Gruffalo to shield his path to power, or can he emerge from the Irish left’s pathology of losing to impose his passion on Ireland? Like Enda Kenny, he follows hot on the heels of a long line of failed leaders of his movement. I ask if he realises that himself and Enda were both born, albeit four years apart, on April 24th. He laughs spontaneously: he didn’t know. “A cost-saving job. One cake!”