ANALYSIS:Fianna Fáil has just lost dominance of local government, the bedrock of its political supremacy. To add to its woes, it has a leader who does not inspire grassroots devotion, writes DIARMAID FERRITER.
WHEN HE was interviewed by The Irish Times in 1974, Seán MacEntee, one of the founding fathers of Fianna Fáil in 1926, recalled the concerted effort of the late 1920s and early 1930s to make the new political party a national movement: “For more than five years, hardly any of us were home for a single night or any weekend. Lemass bought up four or five second-hand Ford cars – old bangers – and with them we toured every parish in the country founding Fianna Fáil branches on the solid basis of Old IRA and Sinn Féin members.”
Their devotion to building up the organisation was exceptional and there was no let-up in between general elections, as the challenges of local elections kept the machine oiled. Cumann na nGaedheal, on the other hand, had a degree of indifference towards local elections in the early years and by the time it recognised the advantage of contesting them, Fianna Fáil had established control over a majority of the councils. This was something Lemass saw as a turning point, as in his words it “cemented Fianna Fáil into the political structures of the country”.
That cement lay undisturbed until very recently; it has now been smashed and ironically, the very forum that Fine Gael’s predecessor party ignored has now provided the arena for its triumph.
There was a justifiable scepticism during the week about labelling the recent election results revolutionary, as the ongoing battle between two large conservative parties that date from the Civil War era, and are not divided by any substantive ideological differences, took a new, albeit dramatic turn. Fianna Fáil will be relieved it was not a general election and, given its history and deep roots, only a fool would write it off.
But in light of the scale of last week’s defeat there are questions it might be contemplating. Were the results an indication that it is losing or has already lost the sureness of touch that has made it one of the most successful political parties in the world?
Does it still have its finger on the pulse of the Irish electorate? Has it lost its heart? Its soul? Or both? Just what does Fianna Fáil now stand for and is it in danger of losing its self-proclaimed status as a national movement rather than just a political party?
From the very earliest days of its existence it masterminded the art of securing local allegiance; within a year of its establishment more than 1,000 cumainn (branches) were in existence and it contested the June 1927 election, winning 26 per cent of the vote and 44 out of 153 Dáil seats.
From then on it went from strength to strength; over the course of 25 general elections it has secured an average of roughly 45 per cent of the vote.
It was a similar situation with local elections, but in more recent times it is at the local level that the decline has been most dramatic. In 1985 it polled 47 per cent of the vote in the local elections; last week it polled 25 per cent.
It is that spiral downwards that will have party activists fretting. They may console themselves that they still have a solid track record of polling over 40 per cent at general elections. But that was at times when their leader was a major electoral asset, most recently Bertie Ahern, but also his predecessors, in particular Haughey, Lynch, Lemass and de Valera, all of whom had election campaigns built around them as personalities and sterling leaders.
In contrast, Brian Cowen inspires no such cult of leadership, meaning that Fianna Fáil, for the first time, has a serious leadership dilemma on its hands.
Another difficulty for the party is the gradual erosion of blind loyalty on a grand scale. There was a time when it was unthinkable for Fianna Fáil supporters to give transfers to Fine Gael candidates or to actually switch party from election to election. In 1969, for example, 90 per cent of voters indicated a preference for the same party as in the previous election. By 1981 the proportion had fallen to 75 per cent. Thereafter, the electorate became more promiscuous.
When he was interviewed by political scientist Peter Mair about this trend after he resigned as taoiseach in 1979, Jack Lynch observed: “In the old days . . . one was either pro-de Valera or anti-de Valera, or pro-Lemass or anti-Lemass, or neither and then one supported Labour.”
That he could sum up Irish electoral behaviour in such a way was an indication that Fianna Fáil believed the political world revolved around it, and though it adopted slicker techniques and modernised from the 1970s onwards, it still stuck to that belief, despite the unprecedented challenge of a revitalised Fine Gael under Garret FitzGerald’s leadership.
It had, it seemed, something for everyone. While portraying Fine Gael as a party for the privileged, Fianna Fáil maintained it was classless. This was something it had insisted on right from its foundation. It did not accept the validity of class politics for Irish politics.
Fine Gael, which had a traditional reliance on wealthy professionals and large farmers, by this reckoning was “un-Irish”, while Fianna Fáil insisted, directly and indirectly, that there was no need for the Labour Party because it was the real Labour Party.
At the outset, de Valera invoked the rhetoric of James Connolly. The party maintained it was the duty of the state to provide work and it went about creating new layers of support in addition to its rural, small farmer base, by pushing eastwards into urban areas and gaining the support of the industrial bourgeoisie and the urban working class.
It gained the support of these groups from the 1930s onwards, and retained it. The longer it was in government the more likely it was to gain the approval of a significant portion of the wealthier voters also.
By the time Irish electoral behaviour was first professionally analysed in 1969 it was discovered that Fianna Fáil managed the extraordinary feat of receiving equal support from all social classes, an achievement no other party could match. Helped by Lemass’s courting of the labour movement from the 1960s, trade union members seemed to agree that Fianna Fáil was the real Labour Party; in the 1970s, an estimated 80 per cent of the members of the ITGWU (the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union – predecessor of Siptu) were Fianna Fáil voters.
IT IS because last week’s elections dealt such a blow to the leadership, mobilisation and organisation around which Fianna Fáil has built its unique success, in both rural and urban areas, that, as the dust settles, it will be wondering just how much damage has been done. The self-described “party of the nation” is, on the basis of last week’s results, no such thing, because its support in Dublin has collapsed and there has been a big swing against it in traditional strongholds like Donegal and Clare.
In relation to its heart and soul, there are other factors to consider. A party that historically built so much support by championing the dispossessed through such things as land redistribution, house building and welfare payments has in the modern era been repeatedly portrayed as a party in the pocket of bankers, speculators and the very wealthy. A party that prided itself on post-Civil-War austerity and probity has been exposed by an accumulation of revelations, financial scandals and cover-ups.
These problems began in the 1960s as some of the younger generation of Fianna Fáil ministers began to cultivate links with the business world, but it is in more recent times that the extent of the corruption of individuals associated with the party has been laid bare for all to see.
The anger at such activities, combined with a catastrophic year in which the true extent of complacency and incompetence of a ruling elite became apparent, has brought Fianna Fáil full circle. The party of self-proclaimed “men of no property” came to power in 1932 deriding Cumann na nGhaedheal’s patronage of wealthy backers.
The party that thrived on marshalling discontent, and promised, in the words of de Valera in 1926, to promote “a programme for the common good, not a class programme” and which crushed the Labour Party in the process, is now depicted after the recent election as an unrepresentative minority who contributed to the economic collapse by indulging the men of property.
Another obvious change has been the demise of the articulation of ideas; something Fianna Fáil was able to do convincingly in its earlier decades. It is not without significance that some of the older generation of Fianna Fáiler’s who have come in for praise in recent years, such as the late Patrick Hillery, are portrayed as having been more interested in policy than in politics.
Brian Cowen, born and bred a Fianna Fáil man, part of a family dynasty, deemed to be of the soil and who promised to bring Fianna Fáil back to its roots, has discovered that the difficulty his party now faces is that the roots may be permanently damaged.
When he took over the leadership, Cowen’s colleagues insisted he was a natural leader. That contention can now be seen for what it was – the arrogant, unproven, and as it turns out, misplaced assertion of a party with an unparalleled sense of entitlement and of its own worth. Such confidence, occasionally bruised in the past, has for the first time in Fianna Fáil’s history been shattered.
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD and author of Judging Dev, published in 2007