Fine Gael and Labour could score own goal demonising opposition
MICHEÁL MARTIN was never going to star as a bogeyman. It shouldn’t matter but, he has the best poster of any party leader. The cerise tie gives definition on the lamp post and the close-up shot cropped at the forehead before it becomes follically challenged is a well-constructed image. And time has passed. It is not 2011 and some hurt has healed. New anger has arisen and is now directed at the present incumbents. They are present tense and between the crosshairs now. They have a future tense narrative about keeping the recovery going. But too many of their proof points are past tense.
If Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin would wreck the economy and be improvident, Fine Gael and Labour have let them off the hook. Their economic policy of the past year beginning with the Lansdowne Road Agreement and continuing into Budget 2016 has been irresponsible. More especially giving out €1.5bn in supplementary estimates for 2015 — as much as they provided on budget day itself — days before the budget last October, was a caricature of what the Government says the opposition parties would do. People aren’t stupid. They hear the pot calling the kettle black.
The frightening fact of this election for the Government is that neither Fianna Fáil nor Sinn Féin are terrifying voters. With nine days left to polling day, that is a sucker punch to their strategy. Portraying them as parties who have wrecked the economy in the past and would wreck it in the future, isn’t creating mass panic. Competent performances in debate — which do no harm but also deliver no change — are not enough to deliver momentum for the coalition parties. Their deepest problem is not the finer points of this campaign, it is that increasingly they look like they are rerunning 2011, not campaigning in 2016.
Today is the equivalent of the chat in the dressing room at half-time. It hasn’t been a very exciting first-half, though it warmed up in the last few minutes. The Government didn’t play to expectations. Expected weaknesses in the opposition side haven’t been evident, yet. And a few newcomers are showing surprising form. But it is all to play for. Like all clichés, that’s a fact.
Labour’s specific difficulties of credibility date to its time in opposition. The Government’s political wrong turn, which prefigured its subsequent economic démarche, can be traced to the night of December 15, 2013. In his state-of-the-nation address on the eve of Ireland’s exit from a humiliating Troika bailout Enda Kenny said that recovery had begun. The trap he stepped into that night, is the same dilemma he is in now. With the departure of the troika the following morning, for the first time as Taoiseach he undertook the full burden of responsibility.
He simultaneously inflated expectations which he could not meet. In loosening fiscal restraint since, he has chased a phantom he cannot catch. In latterly abandoning the basis of prudence, the government parties blunted the sharpest weapon in their arsenal, against the opposition. Micheál Martin hasn’t become a bogeyman because he has successfully moved the dial for himself, somewhat. His greater help is that the Government bears more than a passing resemblance to the accusations it wants to make against him.
Gerry Adams is a more curious phenomenon. Last night on the Peacock stage at the Abbey Theatre David Ireland’s new play Cyprus Avenue opened starring Stephen Rea as Eric. Demented, paranoid and obsessed with Adams, Eric is a study in the psychosis of loyalism. What he fears most is that “maybe we are Irish as well”; and Adams as president of all-Ireland. He knows to fear the avuncularity of the aging, bearded revolutionary.
“The Gerry Adams beard,” he says, “is part and parcel of the Gerry Adams persona. It symbolises his revolutionary ardour, his passion for constitutional change. And now as it whitens it cements his status as eminence grise, aging philosopher-king.” Such is Eric’s paranoia he sees Adams “squinty little Fenian eyes” in his new born granddaughter. The fortress of his house and family has been infiltrated by demonic, Fenian, fecundity.
In the south, less removed than we imagine from the loyalist Ballybeen estate, whence the aptly named playwright Ireland comes from, the whitening beard is a trope for passing time. For older voters like Eric, the terror never goes away. Those with most to lose are less likely to want to ever take the chance. But for younger voters or for families for whom being talked-at about recovery is implausible, Adams is no bogeyman either.
They may or may not turn out to vote for Sinn Féin but its leader is not a feared, alien infiltrator. There is something of the government narrative in this election that reflects the prejudices of a conversation between the socially superior talking to the morally upright. It says more about them, than it says to us.
But it is early days. It is only half time. My prediction is that Fine Gael and Labour will double down on their narrative. People have only begun to deeply engage this week. The coming week is crucial. Next Tuesday’s Prime Time debate on RTÉ will be the last chance to see the four main party leaders, on stage. Then there will only be a further 48 hours for reflection, before we finally vote on Friday 26.
The possibilities of the demonisation narrative or at least the sowing the seeds of fear is evident in the repeated, intense efforts by Micheál Martin to take on Gerry Adams; to be a voice for Eric if you will. Though Eric, a staunch loyalist, wouldn’t thank him. The object for Martin is not to take votes from Sinn Féin, it is to remind Fianna Fáil voters who lent themselves to Fine Gael in 2011 that he shares their concerns. Fine Gael may allege a Fianna Fáil–Sinn Féin coalition, but “it’s not on, really and truly, cross my heart and hope to die”, says Martin in attacking Adams.
The Coalition wants to create foreboding about change. But they enacted most of the proof points for the behaviour we should be afraid of. Their bogeymen frustratingly, act-out like teddy bears, on stage. One, Gerry Adams, actually has a teddy bear. Enda Kenny can convey menace in private but, is incapable of doing so in public. Joan Burton an authentic Labour persona, has failed to define herself or her party in contrast to Fine Gael.
That the intended plan hasn’t worked so far, is not the point. There is more than a week left. When we think about it a second, and a third time perhaps we will hesitate and our ardour for change will cool. But maybe like Eric, more Irish than he feared, our final verdict — like his last line — will be: “I’d forgotten how much I enjoy saying ‘no’.”
