Plans set out for a long road to recovery

A YEAR down, an ard fheis down, and Micheál Martin is a few steps further along the road of rebuilding Fianna Fáil.

But it’s one hell of a long road.

Mr Martin was only leader for a few weeks before last year’s near wipeout of the party in the general election.

He had taken on the leadership despite he and his wife Mary suffering immense personal tragedy — the loss of seven-year-old daughter, Leana, who had fallen ill with a heart condition and died in October 2010.

No one in Fianna Fáil was quite sure where he found the strength to assume the leadership just a few months later, but assume it he did, and threw everything into stemming the seat losses in the election.

It didn’t work — Fianna Fáil lost 58 seats — but nobody blamed Mr Martin for the electoral humiliation. Instead, the blame was heaped on his predecessors — mostly Brian Cowen and, to a lesser extent, Bertie Ahern.

Mr Martin’s first significant electoral test, then, will be the 2014 local elections. The weekend ard fheis in the RDS — his first as leader — was very much about getting the party in some semblance of shape for that contest.

For a start, the event demonstrated to the party’s own members that there is some life in the organisation yet. Fianna Fáil claimed 4,500 people attended. Whatever the precise numbers, it was a reasonably impressive show of force at the party’s first ard fheis since 2009. Members will no doubt have seen the size of the gathering and reassured themselves that the party isn’t going to fold overnight.

Secondly, Mr Martin attempted to move the party beyond the controversies of the Ahern and Cowen eras.

* He apologised for Fianna Fáil’s mistakes in government during his televised speech, saying: “We should have acted differently. We made mistakes. We got things wrong. And we are sorry for that. No equivocation. No half-apology.”

* He signalled that Mr Ahern will, in all likelihood, be expelled from the party if the Mahon tribunal report looks unfavourably on the former leader’s “whip-arounds”.

It could be argued that Mr Martin has only half the job done on both of the above issues — he insisted yesterday, for example, that the apology did not cover the infamous bank guarantee, as it was too early to judge whether that had been a good or bad call. It’s conceivable he may have to come back to that issue, especially in an election context. And as for Mr Ahern, the job won’t be done until the Mahon report is published and Mr Martin takes whatever action he deems necessary on the back of its findings.

Still, Mr Martin has begun the process. He has also embarked on necessary reforms of party structures. Delegates agreed at the weekend to move Fianna Fáil from a system whereby just three delegates from each cumann (branch) had a vote at conventions to one where every member of the party will have a vote.

To see how this is important, one only has to consider that when Fianna Fáil was winning general elections, its TDs tended to control their local cumann, and therefore their delegates. Ordinary members had little enough say, especially those who disagreed with the TDs, who were not immune to blocking candidates they considered a threat. The one member, one vote system will change that, Mr Martin hopes, and rejuvenate the grassroots of the party, encouraging ordinary members to get involved.

Fianna Fáil particularly needs this to happen in urban areas, especially Dublin. The party has no TD in Dublin, following Brian Lenihan’s death, and fewer than 20 councillors. It now has to resort to appointing “local area representatives” in parts of the capital where it doesn’t have elected representatives. The hope is these local area reps will become the equivalent of a TD or councillor, knocking on doors, dealing with constituents, and working to recruit new members.

But it will be a tall order and they have relatively little time to do it. The local elections are just two years off. Two years is nothing in politics in terms of the preparatory cycle. And as Gerard Howlin, a former adviser to Fianna Fáil governments, pointed out in this newspaper last week, the party will be doing exceptionally well just to stand still in those elections.

In the 2009 local elections, they won 25% of the vote, lost 84 seats and were left with 218 councillors nationwide. The polls in recent months indicate that Fianna Fáil is stuck somewhere between 16% and 18%. To get back to 25% and merely hold represents, as Howlin put it, a political “Everest”.

And in attempting all this, Fianna Fáil is doing so with a leader who was part of the Ahern era from which he is now so desperately trying to disassociate the party.

Mr Martin was a member of all of Mr Ahern’s cabinets. He was also a member of Brian Cowen’s cabinet that approved the bank guarantee. He has now delivered the apology, but it remains to be seen if people will accept it or if Fianna Fáil would be better off with a leader untainted by the past. The jury is still out on that one.

But Mr Martin has at least shown signs he is a reformer, both in terms of party structures and policy. At the weekend, for example, he said he was personally in favour of allowing same-sex marriage. And while he conceded there would probably be “different views” within the parliamentary party on the issue, one would expect Mr Martin to get his way, given what we have seen of his leadership so far.

He is in control of the party for now, and comfortably disposed of Éamon Ó Cuív as deputy leader last week when the latter challenged Mr Martin’s stance on the European fiscal treaty.

Yet there isn’t the “cult of the leader” about Mr Martin in the way there was about some of his predecessors — de Valera, Haughey and Ahern, to name but three.

He doesn’t attract slavish devotion. He has to make arguments and win them through common sense rather than simply dictating. That’s probably not a bad thing for a party which so lost its way.

No one would say Mr Martin has set the party on fire in his first year. He is still trying to repair foundations. In the circumstances, incremental progress was probably as much as anybody could have realistically expected. It took Enda Kenny nine years from his election as Fine Gael leader in 2002 to get his party back into government.

It looks like Fianna Fáil will need a similar amount of time. But will the party give Micheál Martin that long?