So bland it can’t hurt
The best example of recent years, inevitably, is Barack Obama, who wrote not one but two such efforts. In the first, Dreams from My Father — a surprisingly candid memoir — he told the public about himself. In the second, The Audacity of Hope — more of a policy prescription — he told people what he would do were he in charge.
Eamon Gilmore, in his book, does neither. Or at least, not in any great detail.
While the Labour leader says the idea for the book wasn’t his — the publisher approached him — he embraced it for precisely the same reason that US politicians do. He pointed out at the launch of “Leading Lights” that it was routine for politicians seeking office in other countries to write such books, and he was doing likewise because he wanted to tell people what made him “tick”.
So this, then, is a pitch for votes. Mr Gilmore is currently the most popular politician in the country, based on personal approval ratings, and wants to be Taoiseach. But Mr Gilmore has ground to make up, and probably felt a book like this could do no harm in that regard. And he would have been right, because it is so bland it couldn’t possibly damage him, unless people come away from this thinking he is just another dull, predictable politician and lose interest in his brand.
The book does what it says on the tin: Mr Gilmore selects 12 people, ranging from Sean O’Casey to Martin Luther King, who have inspired him and shaped his thinking.
He opens with a chapter on his grandmother, Ellen Gilmore, in which he documents how she became like a second parent after his father died when Mr Gilmore was just 14 months old. He talks of the tough but happy childhood on the family farm in Galway in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, and touches upon the importance of knowing one’s roots and being grounded in a community.
He cites the Irish concept of an meitheal, or solidarity, and explains why he embraced that term when the economic crisis struck. “It was clear to me that Ireland, as a community, would have to pull together in order to get out of the crisis,” he writes.
Next is one of his teachers in secondary school, Fr Joe Cassidy (who would later become an archbishop), in which Mr Gilmore talks about the importance of education. He reminds readers that Labour abolished third-level fees in the mid-1990s, and he argues why they should not be reintroduced.
Chapter three is about a cherished family friend who died of cancer, in which Mr Gilmore outlines his arguments for a system of universal health insurance.
By then, the pattern is already clear. The problem is that the material about his personal life and political formation is, while affectionately written, all fairly anodyne stuff. For example, he writes of the fact that he abhors violence, and joined Official Sinn Féin as a college student in 1975 because he felt they were “the most courageous in standing up to the sectarian violence that was being conducted by the Provos in Northern Ireland, and supported by Provisional Sinn Féin”. Yet Mr Gilmore fails to mention the uncomfortable fact — as documented by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar in A Lost Revolution, their forensic history of the movement — that some members of the Official IRA, which was linked to Official Sinn Féin, were still engaged in violence at the time.
On a much less contentious level, Mr Gilmore also fails to explain how or why he progressed from the hard-left dogma of Official Sinn Féin and its later incarnations to the soft, centre-left leanings of the Labour Party. He does, however, make sure to inform any middle-ground reader that he doesn’t rate hard-left politics (they are “self-defeating”) and is, therefore, a safe voting choice.
As for when Mr Gilmore gets to the policy part, he goes for the broadest of brush strokes, and again avoids the fine detail. He ticks practically all the boxes — committed to equality and the environment, a lover of sport and a patron of art, an Irish speaker and an educationalist, a supporter of public servants but also an advocate for public-sector reform, a worker’s friend but no foe to business — but never gets into the nitty-gritty. He wants a universal health care system and free third-level education and other first-class public services, but who doesn’t? The most pertinent question right now is how Eamon Gilmore is going to fund such things if and when he gets into Government when the country’s finances are, to use Labour’s own term, banjaxed. This book doesn’t answer those questions.
As a superficial guide to Eamon Gilmore, it works fine; but as an effort to spell out solutions to the country’s problems, it doesn’t work at all.
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