FF must wake up to public fatigue

IT was Charlie Haughey who came up with the great little silver bullet that every senior Fianna Fáil leader and minister has loaded into the cylinder since then.

It goes something like this: “The only opinion poll that matters is the one that takes place on polling day.”

As a defensive strategy, the glory of it is that not only do you shoot the message, you can also take a potshot at the messenger.

A politician dismissing the results of an opinion poll is as predictable as the Cypriot jury awarding Greece douze points in the Eurovision.

C’mon, do you take us for fools? We know an opinion poll isn’t a general election (if it was, they’d be out on their ears). We know it’s only a snapshot in time, transient as a butterfly. We know there’s a margin of error bigger than the number of votes Bertie Ahern or Micheál Martin will willingly sacrifice to running mates.

We know all that. But the denial is complete. A couple of weeks ago, I met a senior Fianna Fáil strategist who referred to the spate of opinion polls that showed his party maintaining the kind of a steady keel that a sinking ship has. He blithely ignored them. Not important on the day, he said, before noting (purely academically of course) that Fine Gael and Labour support levels had flatlined.

We know polls are crude and that they have been wrong in the past. But the spectacular six-point fall in Fianna Fáil support in this week’s tns/MRBI poll for The Irish Times carries a message even the most recondite and impervious Fianna Fáiler will be forced to take notice of.

It can’t be dismissed out of hand. Unsubtle, crude and a bludgeon it may be. But it still tells us something. And that is: Fianna Fáil has a systemic problem that badly needs fixing. If it isn’t — and fast — the party’s backsides will have to get used to the opposition benches.

Four years ago, Fine Gael, we were told, was only a hair’s breadth away from extinction. Now they are only a hair’s breadth from Fianna Fáil — an impressive four-point jump (to 28%) leaves them snapping at the heels of the party that almost consigned them to oblivion four years ago.

If Fianna Fáil didn’t studiously blank out opinion polls, it could take some small crumbs of comfort from Labour, which seems to be superglued to the mid-teens, and from the still strong satisfaction ratings of Bertie Ahern — who is still the party’s strong asset, despite being frayed.

But it is the main findings that will stump it and force it to ask searching questions about where it’s all going wrong. Yep, there are fears (real this time, not imagined) about oil prices, about debt levels, about the property bubble bursting spectacularly. Yep, the phrases “e-voting” and “decentralisation” have become painful to the ears of Government ministers. Yep, the opposition have scored some big hits on health and crime and the hubris of Government ministers.

But is the sum equal to all those parts? What happened to the economy, stupid? Won’t the special savings accounts mature next year just in time for another five years of the good times with Ahern’s party animals? Hasn’t Ireland changed more since 1997 than it did in the previous millennium? Just what is it that people don’t like about us? Just last September at the Fianna Fáil love-in in Cavan, ministers were firing out what we hacks imaginatively described as the “first salvos” of the General Election. What did they major on? The economy. The opposition were derided as the “axis of taxes”. FF people were convinced that what had carried them home in 2002 would do the same bearing five years later.

But from the moment FF almost won an overall majority for itself, the writing was partly legible on the wall. That was a high watermark performance. In an era of multi-party representation — in which complicated government arrangements are increasingly becoming the norm — it was not going to be repeated.

As for its performance, you can’t say that it will lose the election on the economy, which remains strong. But the opposition has cleverly steered away from this, on the premise that any punt on this one will be a beaten docket. Instead, it has concentrated on the Fine Gael trio of crime, health and waste, which its own focus groups (and good old Eddie Hobbs) have said go down well with the punters.

And there is the almost ethereal sense of fatigue. The signs are worrying, perhaps irreversible. It may have nothing to do with being a little too wrong. It may have everything to do with being there a little too long.