CONNECT: As voters turn into consumers, we form 'Ireland Incorporated' and political parties pander to the comfortably-off - Election 2002 may have been the most banal yet, writes Eddie Holt.
RTÉ's promos for itself were telling. Stressing the organisation's "public service" character, its collection of well-known political pundits and its results-gathering technology, the PR sought to sell traditional expertise and impending drama, upgraded, of course, with a hi-tech gloss. Established éminences grises (though in some cases "eminences Grecian 2000" is probably more accurate) oozed gravitas, crunched the figures and quibbled over predictions. In outline, it was the same as it ever was - yet it all appeared diminished and anachronistic.
This was not RTÉ's fault. Being undeniably dramatic, the requiem for Fine Gael and its high-profile corpses was treated as the dominant story. Fair enough. But the cause and context of this requiem was the contented majority. Despite the chancers, the sleaze, the golden circles - indeed, the full panoply of boom-time rats - Fianna Fáil would not be dislodged. Even after his convincing win in the TV debate with Bertie Ahern, Michael Noonan was always going to be political toast. It was only ever a case of seeing just how extensively burned he and his party would be.
Well, Noonan's Fine Gael was practically incinerated: Alan Dukes, Nora Owen, Jim Mitchell, Alan Shatter, Frances Fitzgerald, Austin Currie, Jim Higgins, Charlie Flanagan, Brian Hayes, Deirdre Clune and Avril Doyle were, politically, reduced to ashes. There's only so much room in the centre and Ahern's Fianna Fáil, having all but re-zoned that space for its own use, lives there now snugly and smugly. Given the chance, Fine Gael would have done the same thing, of course, but the coloniser in possession had too many advantages.
Ironically, despite the drama of established political names - remember that Dick Spring and Mary O'Rourke were also casualties - being burned out of the overpopulated centre, Election 2002 was the most banal in memory. To paraphrase Tolstoy: contented majorities are all alike; every discontented minority is unhappy in its own way. And so it has proved. Fianna Fáil had sufficient appeal to voters who are economically better-off than ever. In Britain, Thatcher's Tories managed to keep enough punters happy for a decade and Blair's New Labour is now following suit.
As an election-winning strategy, this business of keeping enough voters happy and forgetting about the rest - the whingers, malcontents and those outside what the contented call the "coping class" - is formidable. Service it with regular opinion polls, PR blitzes and focus groups and you can design your product (still calling its elements "policies", mind!) for your target market. It is, literally, designer democracy and it works once you have a contented majority. Stress individual initiative as the defining moral characteristic of the age and it's easy for people who are prospering to feel they have earned their good fortune.
Sure, such a strategy is legal and effective. In fact, for established and wannabe politicians, it evinces many of the necessary professional virtues: simple branding (keep the focus on the personable leader); tell the punters what they want to hear (your focus groups will keep you up to date); cultivate compliant parts of the media and demonise and/or ignore the "begrudgers". Yet such professional "on-message" political virtues are not the same as thoroughly moral political virtues, such as honesty, integrity and compassion. Rather, they are virtues of management types: result, not means, is all that matters.
In many respects, democratic politics has always been thus. By definition, your guff must appeal to voters or you risk being Noonan-ed. But with that "It's the economy, stupid" maxim proving as pertinent as it is ugly, the issues under which an election might be contested are now as restricting as a life on the dole. There were other issues this time - health, quality of life and crime featured (though poverty barely did) - but the euro in people's pockets was overwhelmingly dominant. Whether we like to admit it or not, the Republic now appears as obsessed with money as the US has traditionally been.
As a result, politics are impoverished. That's partly why RTÉ's election-count coverage seemed diminished and anachronistic. It was, if anything, too respectful of the unfolding story, its acute punditry and boffinology reminding us of times when politics had more ideas, more issues and more meaning. Ironic indeed that a party which has shafted it should be such a big winner on RTÉ. For its part, RTÉ can justifiably claim that its staff showed the necessary professional virtues in covering the election counts (though, inevitably, there were glitches). Pointed too, however, was the protest by RTÉ workers as Bertie Ahern arrived for the leaders' debate.
It was not a great election for the media, anyway. Certainly, many political journalists were broadly right in their forecasts and the campaigns of the party leaders were faithfully recorded. But there was no real purchase for news organisations.
Ahern ran around high-fiving shopping-centre punters and Noonan just couldn't get a shot at him until it was too late. By the time of the TV debate between them, the Fine Gael leader would have needed to prove that Bertie Ahern was the architect of the Holocaust, the Soviet gulags and September 11th. Even then, Ahern would probably have prevailed at the polls. "It's the economy, stupid" is as totalitarian as it's pertinent.
WHILE indulging in PR for its own technology, RTÉ lamented the passing of the tallymen. Electronic voting had ousted them in three constituencies and the rest will inevitably follow. In time, electronic voting will deliver quicker and crisper results and its benefits will outweigh its drawbacks. Still, there is a tactile experience to voting on paper which cannot quite be replicated on a screen. Efficiency has been gained but the process is more impersonal than before; you leave a record of your vote but not a personalised, handwritten mark. Ironic that, in this era of "individual freedom".
Mind you, electronic voting showed not only a glimpse of the future but acted a symbol of the present. Politics is increasingly impersonal - unless you consider Bertie Ahern's statewide dash through shopping-centres supplied an adequate personal element - and that trend will continue. It would have been no different with Michael Noonan as Taoiseach. Concluding a solid performance on the TV debate, he started to speak of "Ireland Incorporated" as if one of the oldest cultures in Europe had been reduced to a mere commercial business. Yes, yes, I know - it's the econo . . .
And so it went - the most banal Irish general election in memory. The successes of the Greens, Sinn Féin and the PDs suggest that more deeply ideological politics may yet come to the foreground. For the moment, however, we are left, like the world, with just one superpower.
Privately-owned media businesses will not be too unhappy about that and a state-owned one such as RTÉ will know it's got to watch its step. For the superpower, it all seems quite neat. For old people lying on hospital trolleys and young people sharing their schoolrooms with rats, it's not quite so neat, of course.
Then again, as such trouble-makers are not part of the contented majority, they can expect little sympathy. Why haven't they got private health insurance or go to fee-paying private schools? They can't expect the nanny-state to pamper them all the time. We could all whinge but we know that, in a competitive economy, you have to make it happen for yourself and we got up off our behinds and blah and blah and blah . . .
Expect more of that awful chorus. Legitimate personal ambition and initiative are fine and necessary. But has the Irish electorate become so grabby and grubby that any suggestion of a rise in taxes practically guarantees political suicide? If so, then RTE's stressing of its "public service" tradition was demeaned by the society to which it is transmitting its message. That is, in essence, why its generally excellent coverage of the election count seemed diminished and anachronistic. Given their anti-public service messages, the parties of the market simply didn't deserve such a public service.
Anyway, Fianna Fáil won fair and square and that's fine. The party has proved itself to be adaptable to changing historical circumstances in ways that Fine Gael has not. Back in its founding 1926 constitution, FF outlined seven basic aims, one of which was "to make the resources and wealth of Ireland subservient to the needs and welfare of all the people of Ireland". That "all the people" seems to have been abandoned now. So long as enough of the contented majority can be persuaded to vote, streamlined designer democracy, in which money is the only real issue, is all the party needs to party on.