Eamon de Valera said he had only to examine his own heart to know what the Irish people wanted. His present-day successors have abandoned this cardiac survey test, choosing instead to examine the results of research carried out by MRBI or one of the few other professional opinion poll companies operating in Ireland.
Jack Jones, through his 41 years of consumer research and 28 years of political polling as founder and now chairman of MRBI, has been the leading practitioner in this field. This book is an account of close to a lifetime's work in an area once seen as an exotic and marginal practice, but now acknowledged as a central political tool - to the point where political handlers from all parties can reach a state of near-frenzy on the eve of the publication of opinion poll results.
It is only recently that politicians of all parties stopped saying "I don't believe in opinion polls" every time a poll showed them doing less well than they had hoped. "The only real poll is at election time," they would say the morning after their aides had spent the previous night desperately seeking advance information on the poll results.
Jack Jones's book shows that politicians have taken polls seriously for a very long time. He and MRBI began in 1962, surveying consumers on everything from air travel to biscuits, coffee, soup and washing powder. However, as early as 1973, Garret FitzGerald and Richie Ryan commissioned the company to survey voters in marginal constituencies. Politicians of all parties have been using them ever since. They take political opinion polling seriously, commission many private polls, and use the results to hone their image and even to make policy decisions.
Among the most successful uses of polling was by Fine Gael in the Dublin North Central constituency in 1981, a four-seat constituency where the party won two seats (George Birmingham and Richard Bruton) with 33 per cent of the vote while Fianna Fβil with 51 per cent also won two (Charles Haughey and Vincent Brady). Fine Gael split their vote perfectly between the two candidates to ensure their election. MRBI poll results told the party what it needed to do, and Birmingham's selfless instruction to some supporters to vote tactically for Bruton ensured the result.
MRBI have regularly surprised and disappointed those who hired them. In the 1973 presidential election, the media was tipping Fine Gael's Tom O'Higgins to defeat Fianna Fβil's Erskine Childers. However, when commissioned privately by Fine Gael to conduct a survey, MRBI's research showed Childers ahead of O'Higgins. "This was not a comfortable position," remarks Jones. Indeed not. The results were not only in conflict with the common media wisdom but were also the opposite to what the people paying for the survey wanted to hear. MRBI was proven right.
The book goes into some detail to dispel the common myth that polling involves walking up to strangers in the street with a clipboard full of questions. In fact a lot of trouble is taken to ensure the sample of respondents - 1,000 people for a typical survey conducted for this newspaper - fairly and adequately reflects the characteristics of the whole electorate. If 3 per cent of the electorate lives in Limerick East, then 3 per cent of those surveyed must be from Limerick East. These will be distributed over the urban and rural areas, and will reflect the population in terms of age, gender, and socio-economic classification.
Jones devotes considerable space to the 1996 divorce referendum, and the way MRBI's polls - for this newspaper and privately for the government - accurately showed first the decline and then the stabilisation of the pro- divorce vote, right up to the hair's-breadth victory for the pro side, again accurately predicted by MRBI.
Jones, with some justification, clearly sees the High Court decision to rely heavily on his expert evidence in the case taken by Des Hanafin against the result, on the basis that government advertising had influenced it, as an acknowledgement that what he does is a science.
Having surveyed public opinion on almost every controversy over the past three decades, Jones gives not only a history of polling, but a history of that period. And unlike most histories, it contains few of the author's opinions, but many of yours.
Mark Brennock is Political Correspondent of The Irish Times