Gilmore should copy Kidney’s playbook for a political grand slam

ENFIELD isn’t far from Mullingar. It was a meeting in Enfield last Christmas that sowed the seeds of Ireland’s Grand Slam in rugby.

And possibly, just possibly, the same thing happened for Labour in Mullingar last weekend.

How realistic a possibility is it, I wonder, that Labour will be the lead party in the next Government? I know I’m biased in the matter, but I happen to think it is a real possibility — for the first time in the party’s history. They have to make a huge leap if it’s to happen. But after listening to Eamon Gilmore’s Saturday night speech, you’d have to think he has what it takes to acquit himself more than well in a position of national leadership.

It had everything a speech of that sort needs. It was thoughtful, and at the same time there was enough in it to raise the rafters several times. It had a sense of real vision and purpose — not just for the party, but for the country. Above all, it told it like it is. Labour has been criticised in the recent past for attacking the Government without providing real alternatives. After that speech, I don’t think anyone will be able to accuse the party of anything other than a pretty unflinching grasp of the realities. And the “one Ireland” phrase he used several times will resonate with a lot of people. It’s the language that has been missing from recent government actions and pronouncements.

It happens at party conferences a lot (for all parties) that just as euphoria is going through the roof after a bravura performance by the party leader, some news item or other erupts to cast the delegates down. The last Fianna Fáil conference, for example, took place in the shadow of terrible opinion polls, and it took quite a bit of doing to get the delegates safely home in a reasonably good mood.

And sure enough, before Gilmore spoke on Saturday night, the Labour delegates heard on the 6 o’clock news that the party had dropped five points in the latest Red C opinion poll. Nothing like an opinion poll to put a knot in a party activist’s stomach. Mind you, the Government must have been thanking their lucky stars for the feel-good factor that permeated the country after Ireland’s triumph in rugby and Bernard Dunne’s fantastic achievement in the boxing ring. (I don’t expect that feelgood factor, and the Government’s bounce, to survive the budget they are putting together — but more about that next week.)

But the Labour figures are still historically high, especially in a mid-term situation. In the previous Red C poll the party had shot up 10 points (something that never happened before, even in Dick Spring’s heyday), and the figure has now stabilised, it seems to me, in the late teens. Every bit of progress from here on will be incremental, and hard fought. But 17%-18% is an incredible base on which to build. I wish I’d been working off figures like that back in the days when I was working in politics.

That’s where the comparison between Enfield and Mullingar comes in — or perhaps, to be more accurate, between Gilmore and Declan Kidney.

We will probably never know what happened in Enfield in detail. But it seems clear that a somewhat dispirited and disjointed Irish rugby team gathered there around Christmas, after a very lacklustre series of matches in the autumn and a disastrous World Cup. They were team-mates, but not friends; professionals who weren’t prepared to risk their all for each other.

All of them had what the psychologists call “issues”, and those issues added up to a complete and total lack of belief. It wasn’t a lack of self-belief, because these were each individuals with a great deal of skill and talent — genius, in some cases. But there were huge personal and psychological barriers between them and the creation of a team that was greater than the sum of their parts.

Whatever happened in Enfield — and Declan Kidney has described it simply as “we were honest with each other” — they emerged with a structure that each player was happy with, and that enabled them all to work to their strengths. There was a captain, but there were also team leaders, and they each had a job to do and the understanding of different roles. The process of turning team-mates into friends, and friendship into a shared set of goals, had begun.

The rest, as they say, is history. I’m not saying that sort of bonding happened to the Labour Party in Mullingar — but in adopting the Greg Sparks report on new structures for the party, they were able to jettison a lot of baggage. No organisation can succeed unless it has clear and respected lines of authority, and the Mullingar conference will have resolved a lot of ambiguities on that front for Labour. It gives Eamon Gilmore the scope to be Declan Kidney.

And what does that involve? Well, Kidney himself has outlined the recipe, in four public phrases and one private one. Honesty and hard work are the first two things he insists on. Pat Rabbitte used to say there was no substitute for wearing out shoe leather in the run-up to any election, and Gilmore will now have the authority to insist that each and every candidate for the party be measured on those criteria.

There can’t be any more talking the talk. Every party has candidates — and Labour has its share — who are spoofers. There’s no room for that any more.

The next Kidney ingredient is teamwork. A fantastic group of people work for the Labour Party, both behind the scenes and as elected representatives, and there are many more who volunteer their time.

They have to be melded now into a fighting machine, with one coherent set of objectives. There’s always a tendency in politics to insist that the campaign be about “me” — all of Labour’s future campaigns have to be about “we”, and everyone working for the party has to see themselves as part of the bigger picture.

Declan Kidney’s last public rule is “one match at a time”. Labour has to be serious about its work, day by day. If it’s opposing, it must oppose tooth and nail. If it’s in any contest — referendum, local election, European election, whatever — it must be in to win. No half measures can be allowed from now on, no equivocation on issues. Labour knows instinctively what side it’s on in any argument — and from now on, there must be no fear about taking sides.

The last thing Kidney gave his team was something intangible, and something they were never allowed to speak about in public.

From the start of the first match in the Six Nations tournament, and certainly from the moment they beat France, they had internalised something, and projected it without ever saying it.

It was more than confidence or determination. It’s true for a political party as well — they have to internalise a core set of values, that need never to be spoken but will manifest themselves in everything they do and say.

Bernard Dunne said it best, in one word. Believe.