Cullen flags the nationalist agenda as FF machine gears up for battle
FIFTEEN minutes before Bertie Ahern arrived on stage at CityWest on Saturday night Environment Minister Martin Cullen managed to encapsulate what this Árd Fheis was all about.
Mr Cullen was one of a couple of warm-up acts who took to the stage to fire up the crowd for the leader's address. At one stage, he turned behind him and pointed to the tricolour, one of two flags on the stage.
"Our Irish flag," he roared, "it does not belong to one organisation. It belongs to the Irish people and it belongs to Fianna Fáil."
The cut at Sinn Féin was one thing, and that threaded through the entire weekend. But the other stunning thing was that Mr Cullen didn't bother to refer to the other flag that stood like a lonely sentinel on stage, pointedly ignored by everybody for the weekend.
That was the EU flag. Ireland is halfway through its presidency of the union but you would never have thought it from the speeches, references, exhortations or rallying cries.
The FF Árd Fheis brought Fianna Fáil right back to basics, ruthlessly excluding anything that would shift the focus away from its core ambitions. In not so many words, those ambitions translate into two things; the European and local elections in June.
Last November at the party's Árd Fheis in Killarney, Micheál Martin's smoking ban proposals were so overwhelmingly endorsed by delegates that he looked like he had re-installed himself as favourite in any future succession stakes.
But this weekend, smoking was hardly mentioned though the imposition of the ban is only three weeks away. The pruning shears had been taken out and anything no matter how worthy was lopped off when it came down to the business end of the Árd Fheis on Saturday night.
This was war-footing stuff, the imminent battle being the local and European elections in June. That meant what mattered in descending order were:
Rural housing and decentralisation.
Adjustment and damage-limitation regarding the Hanly proposals for smaller local hospitals.
A sustained bout off slagging off the opposition mercilessly and viciously.
All this had its genesis at a FF parliamentary party meeting in Sligo last September when Taoiseach Bertie Ahern surprisingly announced that once-off rural housing was the number one issue in the country.
A couple of things need to be said about that. The Taoiseach on Friday referred to his party challenging the status quo. One of the things that happens when you are in power for a long time is that, despite yourself, you become the status quo. The biggest wonder of the emergence of this rural housing lacuna last September was that it had passed unnoticed for the previous six years in power.
Of course, the undertones for the discovery were the local elections.
The credibility of FF had taken a bad knocking, particularly because many of its pre-2002 promises and reassurances had been built on a foundation of sand. The party's own private polls and its own candidates told it that it would be shut out in the polls like they were being shut out on the doorsteps.
And so, one-off housing and decentralisation emerged as the two major issues that would be capable of stemming the tide. It was no coincidence that the Environment Minister announced his new guidelines on rural housing almost on the eve of the Árd Fheis, perfectly teed-up to give FF candidates glad tidings to bring back to their home turf.
Bertie Ahern's own key-note speech on Saturday night will not go down in history as the most remarkable he has ever made. It certainly covered the ground with its defence of his Government's record taking in the economy, the North, transport, crime, social welfare and a generous pat on the back for the PDs but included no new initiatives or key announcements.
IT was more important for its tone and the mood it set than its content. The Fianna Fáil he presided over, Mr Ahern argued, was made up of decent, honest and hard-working people, unsullied by the ghosts of FF past, or (more topically) by the allegations made by Tom Gilmartin at the Mahon Tribunal in the preceding days.
Unsurprisingly, it played big on rural Ireland and the benefits that the new housing guidelines and decentralisation would confer (rural housing got the largest roar of the night). It also fed into another predominant theme of the conference, that of FF reclaiming the high ground of republicanism.
Cullen's clutching of the flag was an indirect swipe at Sinn Féin and its claims for Ireland's republican heartland. It was inevitable that other parties would feel the heat of a FF verbal onslaught two months short of the election. But it was Sinn Féin, unsurprisingly, who was singled out for the most vicious and sustained attack.
You have to admire at how formidable the FF organisation and machine is. From a standing start six months ago, the party has devised and driven a strategy that will see it through the local elections. The triumvirate of rural housing, decentralisation and watered-down local hospital reform will drive its campaign.
A back to basics Árd Fheis. And basics, by FF's standards, means ensuring they win any and all the elections they fight.
