Gilmore Gale may be so much hot air compared with the Spring Tide

A WORD to new candidates.

No matter to which party you belong, this is relevant to you.

If you get the right number of preferences during the count on Saturday and Sunday next, congratulations. I’m sorry for your trouble. And listen up.

You will enter Leinster House on a little personal cloud of triumphant optimism, convinced you will immediately become a figure of influence, power and household name recognition. You will also be convinced that — now or later — you will become a minister. You may even, in some secret corner of your being, hold the belief that you will eventually become leader of your party and Taoiseach.

If you’re starting from here and you want to get there, you must take 10 steps.

* 1) Understand that you’re on your own. Create your own support system. Build a team every member of which would die for you. And vice versa.

* 2) Be ruthless with your diary so you stay connected with the people who elected you.

* 3) Be ruthless with your mobile phone so that it doesn’t keep you busy at the expense of being productive.

* 4) Use social media. Don’t be used by it. Remember Jay Leno’s crack that Facebook buying Twitter for $10 billion in order to combine the two companies will create “the biggest waste of time the world has ever seen”. And don’t say anything on Facebook, Twitter, in a text, email or snail-mail you wouldn’t want to see on a newspaper front page.

* 5) Prepare for every radio and TV appearance. Too many politicians get into the habit of preparing for Sean O’Rourke’s The Week in Politics or Prime Time, while not bothering to prepare for 10 minutes on their local radio station, which is arguably more important.

If you have the chance to talk to several thousand people in their own homes, you have no right to offer them top-of-the -head pub talk. You must find the time to sit down in advance and work out what you can offer that will constitute memorable added-value. Every time you appear on radio or television, you have the chance to convert or reinforce a voter.

* 6) Read books on subjects unrelated to your immediate responsibilities. It helps prevent tunnel vision.

* 7) Don’t believe your own publicity. And don’t hang around journalists. Make sure you have at least one “tough love” friend who gives you hell and keeps you real.

* 8) Fight the consensus within your own party and within media. If we wanted to elect sheep, we’d change the constitution to facilitate flocks.

* 9) Don’t be influenced by opinion poll results. If you’re very lucky, you have five years to do what you believe is the right thing. In Government, that’s going to make you brutally unpopular. So the opinion polls are going to be a monthly smack in the kisser. Observe but be uninfluenced. If you allow opinion polls to decide your priorities, you don’t know who you are or what you stand for.

* 10) Persuade your party to follow all 10 steps.

That last is important, because there can be no doubt that opinion polls have helped to shape the Labour Party’s election strategy, to its detriment, starting with its presidential approach.

Polls for several years have shown that the electorate loved Eamon Gilmore and liked the Labour Party.

The key insight to be drawn from that recurrent finding was that much more emphasis needed to be laid on getting the electorate to warm to Labour as a party.

After all, Gerry Adams was, at various times, at least as popular as Eamon Gilmore. So to use this finding as the basis of a strategy to make Eamon Gilmore Taoiseach was hubris.

THE psychological need of the electorate, coming up to this election, was for a different style of politics, a politics focussed on the national interest, a politics of honesty, promising blood, tears, toil and sweat in the medium-term on the way to rescue, survival and success in the long term.

The electorate wanted an election which was about them, the people, the innocent road-kill in Ireland’s economic car crash. Instead, from the Labour Party, they got an election that was about giving the role of Taoiseach to Eamon Gilmore.

That grievously ill-judged starting point put Labour at odds with the general public in a way which not even the best interviews by Gilmore, or the best performances in televised debates (and his TG4 performance was superb) could bridge.

Labour, in the early days of the campaign, lost sight of presenting to the Irish people what they would do differently and how that would benefit the newly impoverished, bitter and frightened public.

Through Gilmore and Burton, they had, prior to the calling of the election, diagnosed the problem and nailed responsibility for its creation.

What had driven Gilmore and to a lesser extent his party upward in public perception as measured by polls was persistent attacks on Fianna Fáil: on what it had done, what it stood for. As Fianna Fáil’s implosion became irreversible, concentration should have gone on hammering home what the Labour Party had to offer the Irish people, with a massive emphasis on individual candidate promotion.

Instead, energy went into distancing the party from Fine Gael and stressing the aspiration of Labour-led Government. The Gilmore Gale became an internal myth which built external media support (see Rule 7 above). Myths tend to link to historic achievements, and the inevitable comparator was the Spring Tide of the early ’90s when, on a little more than 19%, Labour won 33 seats.

This time around, were Labour to recover from the slump indicated by its weekend poll ratings, which dropped it to 17%, and get lucky with preferences, it might win the same number. If it won more, that would be seen as a triumph. But it wouldn’t be a triumph.

The fact is that when Dick Spring brought his team home, Democratic Left was still a separate party, with 6% of the vote. If they’d been added to his figures, it would have given the Labour Party close to a quarter of the electorate.

In the interim, of course, they have been added to the Labour Party, so the Gilmore Gale should deliver much more seats than Spring could ever have hoped for. Add to that the collapse of Fianna Fáil, whose lost votes should transfer to Labour in large numbers, and Labour at this point should be looking at more than doubling their seat numbers.

Few of those votes would ever have gone to Fine Gael, but the polls suggest that they are not moving to Labour in anything like the numbers they should have expected, and when it comes to examining the entrails of this campaign, what blocked that flow will be a key question to be answered.

The opinion polls at the time of strategy development had Gilmore top of the class. This weekend Enda Kenny was top of the class and Gilmore trailed Micheál Martin.

Opinion polls are good for filling pages and airwaves. They’re rotten as a foundation stone for an electoral strategy.