Gilmore back to basics rallying cry
Think about it. There's the staged play-acting, the incessant attempts to play to the crowd and the laboured delusion that what's going on in the ring is real and significant.
Eamon Gilmore, Labour TD for Dun Laoghaire and party leadership hopeful, is more than aware of this. And he realises that national politics is on the ropes and if it keeps going down this road, it will become more and more of a national joke.
"We've to stop seeing politics as a spectator sport, as something that goes on in Leinster House," Mr Gilmore says. It often seems to be about performance, parliamentary games and all that type of nonsense. Politics needs to be rescued from Leinster House insiders. It needs something that re-communicates with the people."
"I don't accept the notion that people are increasingly a-political. I think they're against the practice of a tired, stale, old-fashioned form of politics.
"There are a lot of young people who are highly exercised by children dying of AIDS in Africa. People in their own communities are highly exercised by the state of local schools.
"But these people don't necessarily see a political solution to these issues. What we as party have to do is make politics more relevant to these people."
If these comments sound like they're leading up to a Big Idea, then you're right. His main message is a back-to-basics rallying call which would see an enhanced Labour
eventually becoming the main alternative to Fianna Fáil. His blueprint to build up Labour involves activists getting involved at local level on issues that matter to people and making the party reconnect with voters.
"The idea that Labour can succeed by having a relationship with its electorate mediated solely through Leinster House and the mass media is wrong," he says. "I'm not saying they're not important it is important the party puts in a top-class performance in Leinster House. But you have to do the business on the ground. It's hard work, it's not the glamorous end of politics. It means spending a lot of time in cold community halls, in school halls, talking to people who sometimes can be very angry and frustrated. It's a dialogue."
Hold on just a minute. This all sounds a bit familiar. Aren't Sinn Féin using the similar tactics with great success? Mr Gilmore says Labour has been doing this kind of work on the ground for a long time they just haven't been doing enough of it. "If you look at the constituencies where Labour is doing that work on the ground, Sinn Féin is not succeeding," he says. "And Labour has to do this work. Politics has been distorted by a drive for focus groups and research and all this stuff, and then you produce what's very often a bland political package which is marketed with glib phrases and nice pictures.
"Politics shouldn't be about constructing some kind of political package which it tried to sell to the public. Politics needs to be about identifying with issues, problems and aspirations already there. Parties should be at the service of the public and a resource for people through which they can resolve problems." This could be interpreted as a criticism of Ruairí Quinn and his team of advisers, but Mr Gilmore says it's not. Rather, it's an acknowledgement of mistakes made by the party as a whole, backed by its supporters who voted in favour of the Labour's current direction.
Mr Gilmore sees himself as the man who can deliver a major change in the party's fortunes due largely to his life experience. First elected as a Workers' Party TD for Dun Laoghaire in 1989, he was a co-founder of Democratic Left in March 1992; he became a member of Labour in 1999 following the merger between the two parties.
Prior to being a public representative, he worked as a trade union official and helped organise campaigns such as the PAYE tax marches of the 1980s and the Peace Train movement of 1989. "I've worked in the trade union movement, so I know what it's like to be in the factory canteen when the management announces that people are losing their jobs," he says.
"Labour has to reconnect with a lot of these working people. It has to reconnect with the trade union base of the party. This means understanding the fears, aspirations and worries of working people. And they range from rights of workers in the workplace, to income, taxation and childcare."
While the days of widespread unemployment of the 1980s are not with us, he says there is still some of the same sense of helplessness that characterised those bleak years.
"We now have a generation of mortgage slaves, who are stuck with high mortgages, high childcare costs and in some cases, jobs that are not that secure, Mr Gilmore says. Ballot papers for the election of a party leader will begin to arrive in the 3,900 eligible Labour members' letterboxes from today. They have three weeks to decide who is the best person to lead the party forward, and Mr Gilmore believe he is right up there with a chance of taking over the reigns.
He says: "This will be an election where members will cast their own vote in the privacy of their own sitting room, so you can't assume anything. "I'm satisfied about the level of support I'm getting, especially from younger members. I'm in this contest to win it."
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