Biking backwards to be first past the post in the local election race

IT WAS one of those pictures that made you laugh, then roll your eyes to heaven. Very definitely not the kind of shot a candidate-to-be would want taking up half a page in a local newspaper. The picture showed a man in a long formal overcoat. A very Fianna Fáil overcoat, no offence to Louis Copeland.

On his face, an expression of fierce concentration such as you might expect of a man doing complicated equations in his head. His bottom planted firmly on the handlebars of a bicycle he was riding backwards down a beach.

What, any political adviser might ask, was the point? What did this picture convey about a man who was planning to be a political candidate in the local elections that were, at that time, several months away?

It revealed a competitive streak, a dose of impulsivity and an unsquashable sense of self.

Apparently, he had mentioned that, in his youth, he used to be able to ride a bike backwards. Someone present dared him to do it, and up on the bike with him, despite the presence of a press photographer.

I sighed when I saw the picture. Incorrigible, I thought. Exactly the same as he was nearly 40 years ago, when he was first elected to his county council. Back then, he didn’t do what wise heads told him was expected of a local politician, and he hasn’t changed.

The backwards biking was just “a bit of a cod”. He couldn’t even use the photograph on his election posters because he wasn’t planning on putting up any posters. Never does.

Now, I can tell you’re way ahead of me on this. You’ve figured out that this man is a whizz at social media. (Wrong, sorry.) Or that he does the most fantastic campaign leaflets. Wrong again. His campaign literature, as far as I can tell, was singular and so big — A3 — and laminated, it wouldn’t have a chance of getting through a letterbox. Weird it was, in a way that would render Fáilte Ireland orgasmic but confuse the hell out of your average voter.

This big laminated yoke didn’t fulfil even the most basic requirements of campaign literature. No claims that the sender was energetic, idealistic, loyal to his party, ceaselessly devoted to job creation. No achievements listed. No pictures of the candidate posed alongside properly grateful locals.

No picture of the candidate, full stop. When asked why no pictures of himself figured, the answer was immediate.

“I get it hard enough to look at myself in the mirror in the morning, shaving, without having to look at pictures of me on election literature.”

Instead of a reminder photograph of the candidate, one side of the oversized handout was taken up by a view of the Cooley Peninsula, taken from up the mountains. The other side informed the reader about Fianna Fáil policies, right? Wrong again, even though the candidate was and is one of the Soldiers of Destiny. It had dramatic outcries about potholes, perhaps? Nary a one.

The text told you that when you walked the Cooley Peninsula, you were walking through 9,000 years of human history. It got enthusiastic about geology, stating that the stones under King John’s castle are 400m years old.

That’s the sort of data that could be useful to a secondary school student doing a project, but as a method of motivating the recipient to get out of their house on a May day a few weeks later to vote for the sender might be questionable.

But it went further, the oddness of this piece of campaign literature. It mentioned the candidate’s name and those of his colleagues in a little stripe at the bottom. However, the stripe was so designed as to allow local traders to put a sticker with their own company name on the laminated sheet and use it for their own publicity purposes.

And, finally, it had a quotation. From Percy French’s grave.

“Remember me is all I ask. And yet if the remembrance prove a task: Forget.”

Forget? Forget an election candidate?

YOU WILL, by now, have got the message. Any election produces a few candidates who are out by the side of it, who don’t know the difference between Christmas and Tuesday, who fill the need for a bit of colour in the pub chat about the election, and who fade into obscurity thereafter.

This man is not one of those people. This man got elected, this time. And last time and the time before.

This man is one of the most electable human beings you have ever met, and it didn’t matter, in the last few weeks, that he belongs to Fianna Fáil, the party with the toxic brand. He was elected during the Haughey era and the Bertie era, even though he made no secret of his contempt for much of what was going on at those times.

He was elected, time and again, even though his best political friend was and is his Fine Gael counterpart, Terry “Scobie” Brennan, now a senator.

I know all this because Peter Savage, from The Bush in Cooley, Co Louth, is my brother-in-law. I address the peculiarities of his success over four decades because they add up to a fantastic template for political success at local level, and also, to a considerable extent, for any wannabe politician.

The first point is that this man — as evidenced by the photograph showing him cycling backwards — has no brand-management plan or media strategy. Not only does he not peddle his wares to media on a daily basis, but he gets visibly bothered when hacks ask him how he gets traction. “Traction,” he mutters, as if it was a dirty word. Which, in a sense, it is: A technical term applied to human relations, which is what Savage does. He works nonstop for people he knows, and he knows most people where he lives. He is ferocious in his partisanship. My husband remembers being menaced, as a young man, by a crowd when, as a GAA referee, he made a controversial call. Suddenly, his youngest brother had his back up against his, facing out and threatening unconscionable violence against anybody and everybody. To this day, Peter Savage takes that attitude to anyone delivering injustice to any of his constituents. At the same time, he’s irretrievably social, ready to bend your ear with chat or curl your hair with jokes that are unprintable.

His election, after lunch yesterday, went into the Fianna Fáil statistics, but it could just as easily have fitted in the lists of winning independents, because, just as every commercial firm needs internal entrepreneurs, so every political party needs internal independents, and that’s what he is.

Internal independents are part of the team but know how to operate as sole traders. As candidates, they don’t spend the election giving out about the tactics of competitors. They want votes, not personal affirmation or fame.

Best of all, when they get elected, internal independents take their role very seriously and themselves not seriously at all.