Orgasmic about Enda or in bed with CJ – it’s all a matter of opinion

‘MY GRANNY doesn’t like you,” the student at the book-signing blurted out.

It came as a blow, I have to tell you. Usually I’m big with grannies.

I asked her if I’d ever met her specific granny. No. Me and her granny are strangers to each other.

“You were on TV recently and she said she’d never liked you since you had the affair with Charlie Haughey.”

I pointed out that it wasn’t me who’d been Haughey’s mistress. I’d just shared a first name with Terry Keane.

“I explained that to her and my mother convinced her it wasn’t you,” the student said.

“Did she accept it?”

“Yes. But after a long while, she said she still didn’t like you. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she knows there’s something wrong with you.”

So that leaves me one granny down. Somewhere out there, a grandmother, knowing I didn’t do what she disliked me for doing, still knows I’m rotten.

I got the impression the student and her ma tried to sell me as a cross between Mother Teresa and Cheryl Cole, but the granny wasn’t buying. Once someone gets imprinted with a bad impression, it’s difficult to shift (not, to be honest, that the Mother Teresa-Cheryl Cole scenario was ever going to fly).

I was reminded of the granny when a friend texted me after Enda Kenny won that internal vote. This friend had been texting me regularly throughout the contest about the inevitability of the Fine Gael leader going down the tubes.

When Kenny stayed on the upper end of the tubes, my friend acknowledged that the politician might have shown a bit of skill and strategy and maybe even some street smarts. Courage? Perhaps. Judgment? Possibly. But he wanted him down those tubes, nonetheless.

“Why do I still think he’s not up to it?” he asked.

The short answer is that a couple of dodgy TV performances plus a mountain of negative commentary added to less-than -enthusiastic poll results does tend to imprint upon the public mind a conviction as indelible as a tattoo. Ask Brian Cowen.

Or Michael Noonan, although the latter’s tattoo has been almost erased in recent weeks. Took a long time and a lot of personal suffering though.

When the Fine Gael parliamentary party met to decide the fate of their leader, the rebel group spoke earnestly and with regret about the stance they felt they had to take.

The others spoke of track record. Kenny spoke with an un-scripted passion that reduced many present to tears. And one man didn’t address either strengths or weaknesses on the part of the leader or the alternative.

That man was Senator Ciaran Cannon. And if you have to ask who the hell Ciaran Cannon is, that shows how quickly excitement becomes history and then forgotten history. Ciaran Cannon is a former Galway Person of the Year and a former political party leader. He could deliver training courses on the proper handling of poisoned chalices, having been handed one the size of a keg in April 2008 when he became leader of the Progressive Democrats.

Five months later, he told members the party was over and the best thing to do was disband it. Which they sensibly did. He then moved to Fine Gael.

ADDRESSING their parliamentary party on Thursday, Cannon mentioned the Irish Times opinion poll which had helped to precipitate the contest. He made particular reference to party leader popularity in opinion polls. When he was first attracted to the Progressive Democrats, he pointed out, their leader, Mary Harney, had scores of 70% and higher in the opinion polls. She was phenomenally popular. The most admired politician around, remember? You don’t? No, neither do most people.

But the fact is that, back then, the Progressive Democrats had broken the mould of traditional politics and, given their leader’s personal approval rating, they would clearly be a continuing major force in Irish politics. The opinion polls had spoken.

Except, of course, as Cannon pointed out, the opinion polls couldn’t have been more wrong. For Mary Harney, the payoff for phenomenal personal popularity is lone presence at the Cabinet table. Minister with portfolio. Minister without party.

But that wasn’t the only point Cannon made about his personal experience with opinion polls making a dog’s breakfast out of predicting the future. When the leadership mantle passed from Harney to Michael McDowell, the intellectual heavyweight of the party, the polls would have suggested a path from strength to strength (at this point in his brief speech, I’m told, Cannon rested his hand on the shoulder of Richard Bruton, who must have wanted to smack it away, but who is much too gentle and civilised to do so). And what happened?

No public payoff for genius. McDowell lost his seat and his leadership and when the party was handed over to Cannon, it was in terminal rag order.

The implication was inescapable: believing that opinion polls decide who gets voted for in a general election and who doesn’t is like believing those cult guys who claim not to have eaten or drunk anything in the last 30 years because they’ve worked out how to live on air.

Cannon didn’t just assert that opinion polls are a bad place from which to start planning an individual or a party career. He provided day, date and detail. Evidence. Proof. Lucidly presented logic, coming from a man who knows what he’s talking about and who wants Fine Gael to avoid the mistakes the PDs made. He wants everybody to understand that, even if the opinion polls say the public isn’t orgasmic about Enda Kenny, this doesn’t predict he won’t be Taoiseach. Nor does it predict Fine Gael disaster in a general election.

So that puts the argument to bed, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong. About eight hours after Cannon’s speech, TD Michael D’Arcy, who had supported Richard Bruton, stated on a morning current affairs radio programme that the party had done its business and was now reunited behind Kenny.

But what would happen, he was asked, when the next negative opinion poll came through? The party would be united behind Kenny, said D’Arcy. And what would happen after the second bad poll? The party would be united behind Kenny, said D’Arcy. When he got to the third affirmation, it sounded as if he was considering putting the message on a repeating DVD and going home to milk his cows.

Opinion polls skew and define political debate, despite repeatedly failing to be replicated in elections and despite Cannon’s demolition of their predictive capacity.

Until and unless Kenny becomes Taoiseach, those polls will probably continue to deliver kicks in the whatsits to Fine Gael about its leader. Because, until people are forced to see someone anew, the old tattooed impression tends to stick.

A bit like the granny who, even now she accepts I never had it off with CJ, continues to believe I’m the kind that would have, given half a chance.

I have to get over the granny. Fine Gael have to get over the opinion polls.