Terry Prone: As election looms, the real experts to seek out are the canvassers
Taoiseach Simon Harris canvassing voters on St Stephen's Green, Dublin earlier this month. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA
Let’s confess, first of all, to a grievous moral sin. It is a sin committed not just by me but by a rake of people who comment on politics.
The occasion of sin is the election. By-election, local election, Seanad election, general election or presidential election. Most of all, perhaps, a presidential election gives rise to this offence.
Which takes the form of being on such an adrenalin high from talking to TV, radio, and podcast hosts about the progress of the contest, that one forgets the people involved are — well — people.
Humans, in other words, who go out into their locality, knock on doors filled with the hope and belief that their neighbours will register their wonderful potential as public representatives.
Humans, some of whom, as they hit the middle of the electoral cycle, get that asexual dragging period pain, that gut acknowledgement that their chances are slipping, an inchoate something has changed, and changed for the worse.
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Humans who want, on the day of the count, to hide under the duvet with a stiff whiskey but who drag themselves down to the count centre to watch the speeding fingers of the officials and note the static height of their own vote pile as it becomes evident that they don’t have a snowball’s.
The sin is seeing them — all of them — as almost theatrical characters. The bright new thing. The wise old soul. The energetic leader. The firm experienced leader.
Then there’s the one who keeps talking. Even though Ronan Mullen isn’t running in the general election, he best represents that character.
While David Quinn and himself have lost every major social argument over the last two decades, neither has registered that relentless transmission doesn’t necessarily equate to persuasiveness.
Interestingly enough, Sinn Féin is ad idem with Quinn and Mullen in its conviction that keeping on keeping on is the way to go.
Remember that saying about doing the same thing and expecting a different result? It applies, with bells on.
I have in the long distant past worked with David Quinn and Ronan Mullen and liked them personally.
But that’s the thing about their kind of communication. It reduces them to less than the sum of their parts because the likeability factors get amputated.
During any election, the Fergus Finlays of this world (not, honestly, that there are many in that species) get rolled out on mainstream media to draw on their vast repository of experience.
Chancers like me get rolled out, too. It’s the best fun in the world, especially when some politician makes some godawful mistake that you get to discuss.
It reduces in fun when you remember the human beings thing.
The impression is left that advisers and communication experts are the people to whom everybody should listen.
This is not the case, not that I want to dent my prospects or Fergus’s; Christmas is coming and the odd extra fee is always welcome.
But — at least before the election breaks out — the experts to seek out are the canvassers.
Political leaders are surrounded by opinionated staff and volunteers who, on hearing from one of their peers something engaging, pass it on a shattering verity to the leader.
The leader, if he’s Simon Harris or Micheál Martin, listens silently, thanks the sharer warmly, and mentally bins it.
The people the two of them really want to hear from are canvassers. Folk who know all the canvassing rules, right down to the appropriate shoes.
Lads and lassies who move at pace while still managing to convince people at their front door that they are the only ones on their street worth talking to.
Political loyalists who have been doing this since God was a girl and whose listening skills are equalled only by their gut instincts.
They were the ones who, when asked in the last week about Sinn Féin’s collective face plant, didn’t get as excited as the media did.
“But they were fucked long before Brian Stanley,” these wise old souls said. “We could see it on the ground.
“Voters who, a few years ago, were telling us they were going to vote Shinner to punish us, six or nine months ago started saying something very different. Not stupid, voters.
“They looked at that €300,000 affordable house promise and said ‘you know what? Nah’. And Eoin Ó Broin went from being everybody’s favourite guy to poke government on housing to a lecturer with a thesis they didn’t want to have to learn.”
The canvassers also say that although Labour isn’t exactly shooting up the opinion polls, old Labour voters are now to be found who forgive the government/austerity years and are likely to turn up at the polling stations.
Ask the canvassers about the Social Democrats and they say Holly Cairns is grand but the party itself is shapeless and unthreatening.
Ask them about the Greens and their mouths turn down at the corners.
Canvassing will be more important to Fine Gael than to any other party, this time around.
This, for FG, is the ‘stranger election’. The ‘who are you, again?’ election.
Partly because so many prominent Fine Gaelers are opting out this time, an arguably unprecedented proportion of their candidates — more than 40% — is made up of newbies.
Those newbies are not inexperienced — many boast groundwork as councillors — but have limited face recognition.
Hence the predictable presence, in posters, mainstream/social media, and on the grounds of Simon Harris.
Nothing to do with vanity. Everything to do with association: “Jo Bloggs, the local candidate, is one of Simon Harris’s team.”
Weirdly, though, going into this election, it’s the opposition who are on the back foot. Popular commentary will predict that Mary Lou will turn it all around in one of the leader debates.
She won’t. She couldn’t.
Despite having prepared more party leaders for such debates than anybody else, I have to honestly state that no leader debate has ever been proven to turn a general election around.
All this one (or two) will do is heap extra pressure on Mary Lou. That pressure will be real.
Although Fine Gael has a semi-religious belief that Garrett Fitzgerald represented the intellectual Everest of the party, Harris, with his eidetic memory, and constant questioning of a circle of advisers from the very young to the old, represents more of a leaders' debate threat than Garret ever did.
Then the Fianna Fáil leader has done more debates than you’ve had hot dinners and loves them.
Against those two, Mary Lou’s chances lie squarely between slim and none.
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