Fianna Fáil must rekindle its long-lost grassroots activism

DAITHÍ DOOLAN says the election was over at Christmas. The newly-elected Sinn Féin councillor for Dublin’s South East Inner City felt confident going before the people.

He could stand on his record as a well-known and hardworking community activist.

Doolan talks the talk alright. Speaking to me after his election victory, he gives me the Sinn Féin line on social housing, criticises the 'unregulated rental sector,' and praises a Ringsend-based city housing initiative which will provide homes at an affordable price.

He recounts his involvement in Ringsend Action against Drugs, providing an ad hoc detox programme in the community and accompanying people personally through their recovery from drug addiction.

Fair is fair. This man's route to the city council has involved years of activity at local level. On returning from London in 1992, he was full-time with Sinn Féin for six years. In 1998 he became a community development worker in Ballymun. He went half-time in 2000, to devote more time to Sinn Féin and his activism in the inner city. And he signed on the dole last December "I was entitled to that" in order to concentrate on his election campaign.

He doesn't seem to think publicity had much to do with Sinn Féin's success. He emphasises community work, dismissing the other candidates who came around "lashing in leaflets" and their "glossy brochures".

But something doesn't quite fit. Sinn Féin was THE party of publicity in this election. Mary Lou McDonald's final leaflet before polling day was impossible to ignore, partly because it was so very big, and partly because of the large photograph of the candidate. Yet in the Sinn Féin perception of events, it is not a party of slick PR but a movement of selfless community servants. Other politicians and parties they are the opportunists.

Doolan cites a "tragic and inspirational" Mass for those affected by drugs which he attended during the campaign. He criticises a Fine Gael candidate who came along to canvass at the end.

"I made a conscious decision to go to that service and not canvass. There would have been 30 or 40 people there that I know very well. I wanted to show them at the height and frenzy of the campaign this is what I am."

At this point in the conversation I am wondering if the Sinn Féin man thinks I was born yesterday. I point out to him that what he did amounted to a very effective canvass, and was not so different from what local politicians do in rural Ireland when they attend funerals. They don't wear rosettes either. But Doolan is unable to credit any politician outside of Sinn Féin with interest in the community. When I mention Tony Gregory as an easy example, he mumbles something about it being very easy for an independent.

He also talks about 'gombeen politics' and Fianna Fáil politicians arriving with goodies at election time.

Perhaps this blind rhetoric is no different from that of any other political party. It just seems more manipulative coming from Sinn Féin because they are staking the high moral ground on the back of their local community service. Good community activists don't denigrate the efforts of others.

The truth is, there are selfless, hardworking people inside and outside all the political parties, but Sinn Féin's master stroke has been to convince many people otherwise. The party secured 8% of the national vote in the local elections. Much of that came from urban, deprived areas but they also scored successes across the country. They made gains among the middle classes.

Sinn Féin can certainly thank the visibility and hard work of politicians like Doolan. But its publicity machine does the rest.

Last weekend, even Sinn Féin activists without a track record at local level triumphed at the polls. For example, the Sinn Féin poll-topper in Mulhuddart, Martin Christie, did not run a highly visible canvass, lives in Lucan well away from his constituency and still hasn't decided whether to move to the area he now represents.

There are other contradictions. Many of the successes Sinn Féin claims have been achieved through the efforts of other people and politicians.

Daithí Doolan can cite his activism against drugs, but it was the Government which set up the drugs task force, stimulated community groups and released funding for their activity. It was the existing local authority which made land available for social housing in Ringsend. And, of course, it was the taxpayer who paid Daithí's dole while he combined social activism with Sinn Féin canvassing in recent months.

SHOULD we be so begrudging of Sinn Féin's success? If, as they claim, they got people voting who had never voted before, that is a good thing. But if their message continues to be so negative, selling people a sense of alienation from public institutions, then the end result for Irish society will be more conflict. For example, Doolan doesn't have anything very positive to say about the role of the gardaí when a north inner city community moved to drive out a drug dealer in 1996. He seems not to approve of the gardaí for having removed the dealer under police protection.

When I put it to him that the gardaí were right to prevent the dealer from perhaps being lynched, he responded by criticising the authorities for failing to protect the community from the dealer in the first place.

Time will tell whether or to what extent the Sinn Féin rise continues. As their representation increases, so will the expectation that they deliver results. It will also depend on whether Fianna Fáil can regain some of the working class heartlands which Sinn Féin and other extreme left-wing elements have begun to corner.

Once upon a time FF had an effective local organisation with visible, motivated local activists who got the vote out at election time. Then they lost the plot. The leadership thought it could win public support through slick publicity and media management. While this worked for a while, the reduction of the local organisation to holding fundraisers, organising church gate collections and putting up posters damaged the perception of Fianna Fáilers as effective local activists. Now, when the media turns up the heat on FF, the party has few persuaders at grassroots level to give its side of the story. The main beneficiaries in working-class areas are the parties of protest. Last Friday, it was Sinn Féin supporters who spent the day knocking on doors and getting the vote out excelling in an activity for which Fianna Fáil used to be famous.

Labour, Fine Gael and the smaller left-wing parties simply do not have the people on the ground to repel the Sinn Féin challenge. FF still does but it needs to transform their role from the merely social, making up the numbers at the Árd Fheis, to committed social activism.

Change is in the air. FF will need to provide highly trained, articulate and committed local activists to rival those of Sinn Féin, if it is to experience this change as positive.