It was the CEO of FedEx who said that, “The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” I think this is why Fianna Fáil is in two minds over whether or not to run a presidential candidate. We’ve spent too long looking at the pros and cons of running a candidate, and not enough time arguing that by not running a candidate we would not be fulfilling our very raison d'etre. Too much has been said about the pointlessness of running a candidate because we may lose, the key word in many of these debates being ‘may’. We may lose, and we probably will, but by god we will have tried, and tried our hardest to make sure we get back into the Áras.
The fear of failure should never stop us from trying, because when we stop trying we too then cease to exist, we will have no reason to continue. That’s not saying that I don’t understand why people are wary of running a candidate. We have just come out of a General Election where we suffered immensely and are still shell-shocked from the result, but we have to move on. I for one am sick of the blame being laid upon our party by every other party in this country, sick of being told that the tough decisions are being made because of our mistakes. We should have a candidate and should speak in a unified voice, proclaiming that Fianna Fáil is far from dead, that we are not going to sit back and be Fine Gael’s fall guy anymore. If we don’t field a candidate then I believe we are just giving our critics more fuel to attack us with, and we will have more of the same opinion pieces in the papers cataloguing our downfall.
If we do not field a candidate we risk being excluded from the most important of debates in this country; What Ireland is and can be. How can the most important political party in Ireland not want to be part of that debate, how can we even contemplate remaining out of that debate, the simple answer is we cant. Not now, not ever. It seems that Irish people are embarrassed by optimism and passionate rhetoric; we saw that when Enda Kenny spoke alongside Obama, but now we have a chance to change that. Brendan Gleeson speaking about the Irish nation said we should look up and breathe the air. This can be applied to Fianna Fáil, as well, because I know I am sick of looking at the ground, sick of shouldering the shame of economic meltdown, it’s time for us to rise up and say NO. No, we won’t stay in the gutter where popular commentators have assigned us to; No, we won’t abandon our very reason for existing; No, we won’t stay silent in a debate where we have been so influential in the past. Let’s have the courage to try and maybe fail, maybe fail, again no guarantee that we will. If we don’t at least try it will be a thousand times worse than failing alone.
This debate is becoming one of Left versus Right, and there is the very real fear that we will be squeezed out of it and future political commentary. Our members want to see a spark from which they can light their candles in an attempt to keep this party’s fire burning. We can no longer hide from the media and hope that recovery will be instantaneous, because that is never going to happen. To echo Eamon De Valera, “We, of our time, have played our part in the perseverance, and we have pledged ourselves to the dead generations who have preserved intact for us this glorious heritage, that we, too, will strive to be faithful to the end, and pass on this tradition unblemished.”
