Gilmore’s baby is a labour of love

WHEN a political leader comes to a constituency, the standard event sees him or her make a carefully orchestrated speech in a public forum – say a town hall or hotel conference room.

But political speeches tend often to be dull and boring. And so Labour leader Eamon Gilmore has opted for a slightly different approach as he tries to build support in key constituencies.

He has opted for a series of public events called In Conversation with Eamon Gilmore, which sees the Labour leader interviewed by broadcaster Ken Murray, formerly the political correspondent with INN.

The first such event took place in Roscommon a few weeks back. The latest takes place in a conference suite at Thomond Park stadium in Limerick. The venue is not full, but there are probably over 100 people present, which doesn’t seem a bad turnout.

The stage features a couple of comfortable armchairs for interviewer and interviewee, against a backdrop of a screen carrying the Labour Party logo and slogan: “One Ireland: jobs, reform, fairness.”

It’s very much like a chat-show, except there is little prospect of the interviewee being caught unawares by a question.

This is a party event, after all, and the bulk of the questions have been carefully pre-arranged to cover the topics that Labour want covered: Gilmore’s background, his family life, his entry into politics, his views on current issues and so on.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a gentle, rather than a probing interview, so when Gilmore confidently asserts that Labour can provide solutions to all sorts of issues, he’s never challenged on the fine detail of the policy, or where the money will come from.

Nonetheless, there are some nuggets as the evening goes on. Asked how and when he became politically aware, for instance, Gilmore, who was born in 1955, talks about the civil rights movements in both the US and the North, but also about realising in his teens that Ireland was an unequal society.

That he found the Church’s “enormous power over the people” to be “stifling” is not surprising. But for an Irish politician to say the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising opened his eyes to wider inequality perhaps is.

“There was a lot of pageantry and pro- grammes on television and so on about it – but you began to raise very basic questions about, ‘Okay, we won our freedom, but my uncles and aunts had to emigrate’. And by that stage a lot of my cousins were emigrating and our neighbours were emigrating. You began to say, ‘Well, what it’s all about?’”

Similarly, he tells how when he went to University College Galway to study, theatre rather than politics was his biggest interest (some on the Fianna Fáil benches, irritated by Gilmore’s ability to portray anger in the Dáil, might argue that it still is).

He defends Labour history against old and not-so-old attacks about communism (just last month, junior minister Martin Mansergh cited the fact that Gilmore was a member in the 1980s of the Workers’ Party, who were “fraternal mendicants of the Soviet and North Korean communist parties”).

Says Gilmore: “Anybody who stuck their head over the parapet, going right back over the years – Larkin, Connolly, Noel Browne, Jim Kemmy – the first attack on them always was that they were a communist, some kind of a red, they were dangerous and the world would change as we know it.

“And to some extent, that is still the first line of attack that comes from Fianna Fáil. Now, that had a lot more traction at a time when it was possible to combine that with a denunciation from the pulpit or whatever. It had an ability to frighten people. I don’t think that applies anymore; I think people are much more open to the ideas that the Labour Party has.”

But he’s also careful to say that the Labour Party itself, too, has changed.

“We talk a lot more now for example about good business and growing business and about enterprise, which is something perhaps which in times past the Labour Party mightn’t have talked about.”

He insists he can understand the hardships that many families currently face, having endured hardship himself growing up and then working as a union official in the ‘80s when lay-offs blighted the country.

“The abiding memory that I have from that period was sitting in factory canteens with groups of workers who were being given the bad news,” he says.

Many of the workers were in their forties and believed they would never work again. “The great thing was they did work again,” Gilmore says, trying to convey a positive message that the country’s current difficulties will end in time, too. But while conveying that message, he’s careful to throw in the standard attack on the Government.

“It does work its way through,” he says. “I think the problem now is that kind of cyclical thing has happened again, and it’s a global thing as we know, but the big problem... that has added to that is the absolute hames that was made of running our domestic economy.”

The conversation moves on to local issues and eventually the floor is opened up to questions from the audience.

Gilmore deals with issues such as the Dell redundancies, the future of Shannon Airport, the Limerick regeneration project, and so on. It’s mostly vague, crowd- pleasing stuff: he says the regeneration project must be continued, for example, and promises that Labour in govern- ment would invest in it.

But he doesn’t say how much Labour would invest, which is arguably the crux of the issue right now.

On the gangland crime situation in Limerick, he suggests the problem is a lack of enforcement rather than a lack of legislation.

“I saw a figure recently that out of 139 gangland shootings that have taken place in Ireland, only 23 convictions have been secured. Now, that isn’t a problem with legislation. Shooting somebody is illegal, it’s a crime,” Gilmore says.

“The problem is actually assembling the evidence and getting the detection and then getting the conviction in court. And I think that that has more to do with resourcing the gardaí.”

There are a couple of non-routine questions. One which comes from the floor is whether he would support an Irish-style affirmative action programme for immigrants. He indicates that he would not, suggesting that it’s a question of ensuring the right supports are in place for people rather than “legislating for quotas”.

He says he’s not convinced that affirmative action programmes, particularly in the US, have achieved their intended objectives.

The other non-routine question concerns Labour’s likely coalition partner, Fine Gael, and whether Leo Varadkar is the latter’s “de facto” leader.

Gilmore chuckles, and says Varadkar is a “very impressive” and vocal politician. But some of Varadkar’s policies tend to come “straight out of the handbook of the American republican right”, Gilmore says, which Labour, needless to say, would not agree with. Should a coalition emerge between the two parties after the next election, it will be interesting to see how they reconcile such differences.