Fine Gael should look back on the lessons it learnt 25 years ago
First published by Gill and Macmillan in 1986, and written by Stephen O’Byrnes, it tells the story of the transformation in Fine Gael’s fortunes under Garret FitzGerald.
By the time the book was published, O’Byrnes had become press director for the newly formed Progressive Democrats, but when writing the book he was a journalist.
As part of the research for the book, he appears to have had access to information from many leading politicians and backroom personnel within Fine Gael at the time. The book contains many interesting lessons which offer analogies with Fine Gael’s current situation, as revealed in last weekend’s polls.
In 1977, Fine Gael suffered a shattering electoral defeat and Jack Lynch secured his famous overall majority. Shortly after the election, Liam Cosgrove, who was Taoiseach in the outgoing national coalition, resigned the leadership of Fine Gael and was succeeded by Garret FitzGerald.
FitzGerald immediately set about healing and reorganising Fine Gael. He visited all the constituencies and held public meetings nationwide. Along with his new general secretary, Peter Prendergast, and others, he planned and executed the modernisation of the party’s structure and methods. The party took on the quota sitting habits of its TDs and targeted extra seats. FitzGerald also attracted hundreds of women and young people to join the party, and groomed many of them for political stardom.
FitzGerald and Prendergast did a lot of private market research as part of their reorganisation project and O’Byrnes details much of this in the book. In the spring of 1979, the research showed that Fianna Fáil’s extravagant 1977 manifesto was coming home to roost and people were very unhappy with the Government over prices, taxation and unemployment.
There was also a discernible feeling that Fianna Fáil was too large and too complacent.
In the months that followed, petrol shortages and bin strikes added to the Lynch government’s woes. The reorganised Fine Gael was well positioned to benefit from this and FitzGerald had reasonably successful local and European elections.
Indeed, as O’Byrnes points out, the real significance of the local election results was that a raft of new and very able Fine Gael councillors were elected in 1979 who would go on to win seats in 1981-82. People like Richard Bruton, George Birmingham, Bernard Allen, Hugh Coveney, Ivan Yates, Nora Owen, Alan Shatter, Brendan McGahon, Avril Doyle and Madeline Taylor all became councillors for the first time and would go on to be high-profile TDs for the party.
However, it was in the autumn of 1979 that the real effect of FitzGerald’s rejuvenation of his party became apparent, when Fine Gael surprised all by winning two Cork by-elections, including one in Jack Lynch’s own constituency where the Fianna Fáil vote fell by 22% from the previous general election. FitzGerald and Fine Gael were ecstatic. They were clearly on the way back.
The by-election results caused things to take a dramatic turn within Fianna Fáil. Jack Lynch was “persuaded” to bring forward his retirement and Charlie Haughey was elected the party’s new leader and Taoiseach. This temporarily upset Fine Gael’s recovery strategy. Haughey enjoyed a honeymoon period and promised to ensure the country would no longer live beyond its means. However, when Haughey faltered on that promise, and internal divisions in Fianna Fáil reasserted themselves, Fine Gael recovered its momentum.
In November 1980, FitzGerald faced his first electoral contest with Haughey’s Fianna Fáil in a by-election in Donegal. Because of the performance in Cork the previous year, and the changing mood towards Haughey, Fine Gael was expecting to win. It was shocked, however, when the Fine Gael candidate was decisively beaten by Fianna Fáil’s Clem Coughlan. O’Byrnes recounts how Garret FitzGerald stood at the count in Donegal, ashen-faced and with calculator in his hand, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
POLLS and focus group research for Fine Gael at this stage in 1980 showed that while there was still a lot of disillusionment with the Government, more than a quarter of voters were still undecided about how they would vote in the general election. The lesson should have been obvious for Fine Gael, O’Byrnes says: Government bashing was not enough; Fine Gael needed to demonstrate that it had a credible alternative.
One passage in the book states: “With the election imminent, it was obvious that Fine Gael were a long way from being perceived as a credible alternative government. They had no distinctive policy image, FitzGerald was seen as a nice, sincere man but no match politically for Haughey, and his front bench was nowhere.”
If you replace the name FitzGerald with Kenny and the name Haughey with Ahern, the passage could be a succinct summary of the situation Fine Gael now finds itself in at a similar stage in an electoral cycle, 25 years later. Fine Gael’s current leader is perceived as a sincere and well-meaning man, but the public are having difficulties measuring him against the politically mastery of the current Taoiseach. Kenny is also underserved by his front bench, few of whom are even close to being household names. Fine Gael had good results in the most recent local and European elections. However, it still, even with Labour, has not yet convinced enough of the public that it is an alternative government.
Of course, Enda Kenny’s situation today is not entirely comparable to that of FitzGerald’s in 1980. One significant difference is that FitzGerald had been one of the country’s most well known and popular politicians for a decade before he became Fine Gael leader. By comparison, the public have only been getting to know Enda Kenny in the past few years.
Another difference is that, in 1980, FitzGerald’s approval rating was almost 10% ahead of Charles Haughey; Enda Kenny was more than 10% behind Bertie Ahern in a recent poll. In 1980, Ireland was teetering on the brink of an economic crisis; in 2006, the country is enjoying a boom which will be even stronger once the Special Savings Incentive Account (SSIA) payouts arrive.
But Fine Gael need not be too despondent. Although it was demoralised in 1980, the party was back in government with Labour in 1981, albeit briefly. The turnaround came when FitzGerald realised Fine Gael needed to develop a distinctive and credible economic policy. Before the 1981 election, he spent a lot of time with economists, writing a new and imaginative economic policy for his party. Launching it just weeks before the election gave Fine Gael the initiative in setting the general policy agenda in the 1981 campaign.
Who knows, maybe Enda Kenny and his deputy, Richard Bruton, have a similar winning card up their sleeves?
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