Higgins looking at table for one as Socialist Party loses firebrand Clare

THE chances of a cracking Socialist Party ard fheis have just been cut in half.

It’s difficult to have a decent knees-up when two of the usual four knees have gone AWOL. Clare Daly’s are the knees in question, and they, along with the rest of her, have high-tailed it out of Joe Higgins’s party, leaving him on his own on the Opposition benches. He is now a party of one. He does, of course, have other knees around him, but none elected last time around, whereas my constituency returned Clare Daly to the Dáil. My personal belief is that we did more than that. We returned Clare and her anger to the Dáil. Two for the price of one.

Clare’s anger is as much part of her brand as her burgundy hair. During the last referendum, on one particular night, RTÉ had herself and Lucinda Creighton debating with each other on Prime Time. Clare and her anger swooped on every issue from above like a kestrel and worried the issue until it wished it had never been born. Meanwhile, Minister Creighton kept looking sideways at the socialist TD with an astonished horror as if Daly were a newly discovered species that should be undiscovered as soon as possible.

Around the same time, near where I live, I noticed a poster with Mick Wallace on it. The poster was cleverly positioned at a bend in the road so that if you wanted to read it, you had to commit to being severely rear-ended by a minimum of three other cars, and so I could never find out what Mick was doing in my neck of the woods. We were — and perhaps still are, I haven’t been paying enough attention — threatened with an impending sewage treatment plant, and I suspect Mick was agin it, but it might have been something quite different.

When I wondered aloud as to why a Wexford man with a resistance to the Revenue Commissioners would be inviting me to meetings in my own constituency, someone gave me that tight mouth, raised eyebrow look of contempt, always directed at those who are not in the know. Clare Daly, for Godsake, they muttered. She’d have invited him. Why? Oh, come ON, they’re an item. A what? It took a while for my brain to accept the notion of Clare Daly and Mick Wallace as a couple, although I did remember them sitting together on the Opposition benches and being photographed in each other’s company. Life is full of interesting contradictions, and these two sure qualify for that category.

Here, for example, is a radical feminist who stood silently by while her beloved bad-mouthed another woman for having the temerity to wear pink, which, coming from himself, did carry a sound effect as of the rattling of kettles and pots. However, many a woman in the first flush of love has jettisoned philosophical stances and the loyalties attendant thereon. There’s no talking to anyone in love for a while after it hits them, but they revert to normal a bit later on. In this case, Clare’s abandoned a whole political party, albeit one as small as a marble, compared to the beachball-sized parties in Leinster House. Party. Policies. Brand. Collegiality. The whole lot got tossed in the wheelie bin (not that I would mention a wheelie bin in this context, you understand) because the rest of the tiny party took a dim view of Mick the Wally not paying his VAT.

Which brings us to the first point in this column, which is this. It is fair to predict that the next annual gathering of the Socialist Party won’t generate quite the same demand for tickets as it might have before Clare’s departure. Which is not a bad thing. One of the problems great big parties always face, at home and abroad, coming up to their conventions or ard fheisheanna or party conferences, is that someone always wants to muck with the format. Refresh it. Show creativity and innovation. Especially during the televised bit, so that the viewers at home don’t get bored.

In Ireland, that leads to pre-recorded packages. Party grandees don’t much like it when these packages are historic, because they show the grandee with more hair and less weight than is currently the case, and also remind viewers of unfortunate wardrobe choices from the past. So when all the possibilities and objections are boiled down, the political party usually ends up having its celebrations interrupted to give space to footage of ordinary Joe and Josephine Soaps saying improbably positive things about the next speaker. Every one of these interruptions slows the build-up of emotion that’s crucial to a successful annual conference. They don’t refresh. They dampen down.

Pre-packaged vox pops are bad enough, but once a political party begins to consider comedy or satire, they’re headed into the danger zone. It happens when the people organising the event lose contact with the people attending and the people watching. People who go to an annual conference don’t want interruptions and innovations. They want more luxury and style, but, like children listening to a much-loved story, they want the storyline kept. Just as any parent knows that cutting or fudging any line in a Roald Dahl story will provoke an instant demand for the unedited original, so people going to political conventions want to undergo the conversion-and-reaffirmation process delivered by leaders doing inspiring oratory about the future they hope to deliver to their people. They neither want nor need entertainment jiggery pokery.

At any time, the pressure to go the jiggery pokery route is strong. It gets much stronger when the organisers have no faith in their leader. They’ll do anything to distract from the dull bloke — and the distractions invariably backfire, as they did when the Republicans, trying to get George Bush the elder re-elected, handed almost half an hour, in advance of his keynote speech, to Pat Buchanan, who did such an astonishingly right-wing rant that someone observed that it “probably sounded better in the original German”. George Bush, the elder, went down the tubes.

FAST forward to another dull woodener, Mitt Romney. Panic among his spin doctors and image managers, convinced they have to deflect attention from his wooden dullness. Draft in his wife. She’ll do the passion bit. Give him a speech where he tells the public he knows they want to know more about him. Uh uh. The public does not want to know any more about Mitt. Or about his Mormonism. No matter how objectively strange the back story and clothing of their own religion, many Americans find the back story of the Mormons subjectively strange, and the underwear thing weirder still. What they want to know is what he would do for them that Barack Obama isn’t doing for them.

The organisers, however, ignore all that and get Clint Eastwood to do the updated version of Pat Buchanan. They don’t check what Clint’s going to say, so what he says is tasteless. They don’t rehearse him, so he rambles through a pointless discussion with an empty chair. And then, in essence, the organisers say to their candidate: “Follow that.” God love poor Mitt.