Martin leads a shared confessional moment for post-purge Fianna Fáil

THE official title of the Fianna Fáil ard fheis was Empowering the Grassroots.

The unofficial title, of course, was Dancing on Ice.

Particularly when Bertie arrived. Like the parting of the Red Sea it was, some of the lads falling over themselves to get their picture taken with him and others hiding behind curtains and on fire escapes to preclude the very possibility. The snappers, of course, tracked him everywhere in the hope of getting him and the current leader together in a photograph. God love Micheál Martin, he hit new heights in choreography, steering clear of Bertie on the one hand and Dev Óg on the other.

You have to hand it to him, he has a great turn of speed. Must be all the fruit.

For Micheál, the timing of this ard fheis was lousy. In an ideal world, he’d have arrived on the platform waving the equivalent of Fine Gael’s Flannery Report: a complete strategic plan to recover from an electoral mugging with enough restructuring and re-branding to get the party back into power within a decade.

He couldn’t go that route because of the possibility of further embarrassing issues emerging from the Mahon Tribunal which would reactivate Fianna Fáil-haters into saying: “Our issue with you lot isn’t that you lost your grip on your own backbenchers. Our issue with you is that you plunged us into poverty.”

In addition, when Enda Kenny waved the Flannery Report at the world, he had the advantage of not having been part of the Fine Gael administration that had bitten the dust, whereas Martin was a real and present minister in the Fianna Fáil-led government which didn’t so much bite the dust as give it a vigorous chew.

The timing of the flurry about Éamon Ó Cuív, coming as it did slap bang before the ard fheis, may not have been welcome, but was ultimately useful to his leader. Ó Cuív demanding that Enda Kenny rush out to Europe and demand concessions before agreeing to push for a Yes vote recalled the lion-tamer wielding a chair at two lions in a recent New Yorker cartoon. One of the lions is asking the other: “Remind me. What’s frightening about a chair?”

The possibility of us stamping our little foot and threatening to saying no to the Fiscal Treaty is about as frightening to the other Eurozone countries as a chair is to a lion.

In the event, Martin canned Ó Cuív and the mutterings that the latter had a good deal of support died away some time late on the first day of the ard fheis. The nearest thing to a headline, on Friday, was the leader’s coded reference to firing Bertie out of the party if the Mahon Tribunal finds him guilty of evil deeds — said coded reference clearly designed to separate Martin from Ahern.

It somewhat missed the point that nobody needs to wait for the Mahon report to take such action. A party leader who takes vast sums through dig-outs and briefcase delivery doesn’t exemplify the values Fianna Fáil is trying to rediscover, no matter what the motivation. The problem is that Bertie’s cabinet were like the apocryphal frog in the saucepan who gets heated so slowly that he’s boiled before he notices he’s even a bit on the warm side.

Members of his cabinet rationalised each incremental revelation in the light of their genuine regard for the man, some of them even to the point of assuming (and seeing it as acceptable) that “Bertie was doing it only because he’d been cleaned out by the settlement with Miriam.”

Having, back then, defended Bertie, Martin can’t now claim to have seen the light, unaided, about his former leader. He has to rely on Mahon to shine that light for him. The first day of the event, accordingly, was less than stellar. While a few of the attendees grabbed journalists metaphorically by the lapels and said versions of: “Don’t you bad-mouth us, there’s life in the old dog yet,” the problem was the age of the dog. The RDS was far from full and the majority of those being shepherded into the sparsely attended breakout sessions were grey-haired men.

WHILE less than stellar, it did manage to be unique, in being the first unbranded party conference in history. Participants eager to see the FF logo had to search for it, so resolutely was it underplayed. On one of the podia, it was melted into the background paint so only a good squint would reveal it. It looked as if the organisers were in phase one of a re-brand they couldn’t afford to implement in its entirety.

Saturday was different. Around noon, the area around the RDS was a solid traffic jam, with people getting out of their cars to try to see what was delaying forward movement by as much as 20 minutes.

Could it be — could it possibly be — that a massive mob was headed for the RDS to hear Martin’s keynote address? No, was the short answer. A massive mob was headed for the RDS to attend the Working Overseas event, running side by side with the ard fheis. But the crowds created a buzz, and a lot more people actually did turn up at the ard fheis the second day.

Which had its downsides. During the leader’s speech that night, even though the seats directly behind him were — no doubt with marketing intent — filled with younger people, every time the cameras sought a reaction shot, they tended to pick out the old brigade of Cowen, Hanafin and Coughlan, which didn’t help Martin’s portrayal of a post-purge, purer-than-the-driven-slush party.

Many in the audience would have been edgy in advance of Saturday’s oration. Edgy because Martin, while a good TV performer, does not have a reputation as an orator. Edgy because of the importance of the speech. Edgy too, because of the risks implicit in doing it in the round, with a portion of his audience behind him.

That edginess receded within minutes of his arrival on the platform — a platform exemplifying, in its severe simplicity, the unbranded approach. No politician has ever matched the Taoiseach in the use of SpeechCue, but Martin managed his first use of the technology with aplomb, even at one point clearly acknowledging RTÉ’s floor manager’s instructions.

What defined the listeners’ response, however, was the speed at which he reached the apology. And the nature of the apology. No free-floating guff about ‘regret’. He said he was sorry. No hiding behind global factors: Fianna Fáil had been in government. No reliance on the weasel word ‘mistake’: they’d done wrong. The audience rose to him in a shared confessional moment that welded them together better than any wide blue yonder aspirations would have done. From then on, more spontaneous applause points happened than in any previous ard fheis speech by any Fianna Fáil leader.

Through that speech, Martin turned the ard fheis into a success and bought himself time. Whether it will be enough time to achieve what Kenny did for Fine Gael, given that Martin starts from an immeasurably worse position, is anyone’s guess.