Fianna Fáil can snigger and smear but that won’t stop voters going Green

Knowing your competition and knowing your customer are vital in business. And in politics.

The first time this hit me was when I landed a bundle of books onto the cash desk of a bookshop in a shopping centre near where I live. The young woman behind the counter glanced at the books and exchanged a knowing smile with the man behind the counter.

“When we bought that book,” she said, nodding to one of the pile, “We knew either you or one other customer would buy it.”

We’d never been introduced. But these booksellers knew books and book-buyers so well, they could predict which two out of the thousands of customers crossing their door each year would pick up an oddball publication nobody else would look twice at.

That was twenty five years ago.

They made a success of that shop, starting in the depths of a recession.

They built it into a chain. And — because they were entrepreneurs to their back teeth — they started other businesses, too.

The female bookseller was Mary White, who is now the deputy leader of the Green Party, which is relevant, because this weekend a significant change happened in the political atmosphere.

Up to this weekend, (as this paper’s Political Editor noted on Saturday) Sinn Féin was the big threat. On the opposition side, they drive the Labour Party around the twist, particularly when commentators talk about the shinners being “very good on the ground,” implying that they’ve taken over the service-to-the-disenfranchised slot Labour traditionally owned.

Fianna Fáil don’t know whether to regard them as a postponed threat, unlikely to come to fruition until the election after this one, or as a busted flush, losing their appeal to the electorate as soon as the smell of cordite dissipated and the sniper posters stopped being topical, becoming only a reference to a half-remembered past.

In canine terms, Sinn Féin were a well- controlled pit bull, whereas the Greens, up to now, were the kind of amiable drooling Labrador who’d nibble your slippers if the longing was on him but mean no harm by it.

Even though Gerry Adams now behaves as if he was born as a middle-aged driver of the peace process, the pit bull surfaces whenever media get stroppy with him. The lips go back (hidden behind the facial hair) the teeth get bared and the growls leave the interviewer in no doubt that if they keep it up, they might lose a limb.

In contrast, when the Greens constantly hear themselves caricatured as sandal-wearing, bike-riding, brown-rice-eating leftover hippies, no teeth get bared. They shrug and smile, thus confirming to traditional politicos that they’re no threat.

Or at least, were no threat until the reasonably steady pattern emerging from a variety of opinion polls indicated that voters were less dismissive of them than was believed.

That concentrated Government minds wonderfully, and three kinds of responses kicked in.

The first was Michael McDowell’s stimulation of latent voter fear. The Tánaiste’s message is the Harold Macmillan claim from the sixties with a health warning attached: “You’ve never had it so good, and if you hand power over to Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens, you’ll have it so bad, you’ll be sorry. You’ll be SO sorry.”

The second response to the changed position of the Greens was the clothes- stealing argument. Applied to the Greens, that one goes like this: “The environment is now mainstream. The Government is stealing the unique selling point of the Greens, leaving them starkers and silly.”

Now, the environment has indubitably gone mainstream, and whenever we buy anything in a supermarket or garage shop, we’re reminded of the environmental coup achieved by Noel Dempsey with the decommissioning of plastic bags. Yesterday saw the unveiling of another Noel Dempsey move — on bio-energy — which takes the Government further down a road long signposted by the Greens. In addition, Dick Roche’s scheme for retrieval of electrical goods waste has been successful enough to have attracted overseas interest.

But here’s the rub. Fianna Fáil is the party that puts into law what other parties campaign about and gets no reputational bounce as a result.

The bulk of the legislation that has moved Ireland, in social terms, into the twenty-first century, whether related to divorce or the decriminalisation of homosexuality, was put on the statute books by Fianna Fáil.

They just don’t get credit for it. The last twenty years have seen the Irish public give credit to Garrett FitzGerald and Dick Spring for milestones which were actually laid down by Fianna Fáil. (Fianna Fáil occasionally resents this, but comforts itself with the thought that being in power is more fun than being admired, and they’re in power most of the time.)

No matter how much this Government does on the environment front, the public will still associate environmental leadership with the Greens and believe the Government only did what it did because it couldn’t NOT do it.

Media will talk about Fianna Fáil stealing the Greens’ clothing, but that won’t prevent voters around the country quietly giving second and third preferences to Green candidates without necessarily announcing their intention in advance.

Predicting that the Greens will carbon- tax industrialists into panic attacks likely to unhinge the economy is the first response to their emergence as a threat. Sniggering about stealing their clothes is the second. The third is the smear.

Which brings me back to the bookseller who is now deputy leader of the Greens, about whom I got a phone call, this weekend, from an activist from another party. The burden of that call was that Mary White was — to quote the inestimable Mr Goodman — anti-business, anti-the-economy, anti-bloody-everything.

The caller didn’t quite say that White wanted to personally dig up major roads and force us all onto bikes to cycle muddy boreens when collecting our inevitable dole, but he wouldn’t have been distraught if that was the conclusion reached.

It was a good try. But so under-researched as to be ineffective. The reality is that Mary White is the Gill Bowler of the Greens, a business-builder who knows it’s a hell of a lot easier to grow a business in a country with a roaring economy than in a recession or a slump. A car driver who can be assumed to have an interest in Ireland having a good road network, because otherwise where’s she going to drive her bio-fuelled car? In this particular instance, the caller didn’t know his competition or his customer.

But a palpable change happened this weekend. The big guns started to swivel towards the Greens for the first time.

Just as, in the United States, a sophisticated, tightly researched assault has been made on Al Gore’s reputation because his house is claimed to use more power than three normal homes and he flies everywhere, the next few weeks are likely to produce assaults on the credibility of individual Green candidates here at home.

How they cope will establish, better than any slogan, if they’re ready for power or are permanent slipper-nibblers.