From the Ashes a Fire Shall Awaken

The stage was set, the lights brightened and a lone figure emerged on to the platform. There was no entertainment before the oratory this time, informing us  that the mood would continue to be somber, sober and serious.  The day had passed quickly, with small groups of people moving from one busy hall to the next, each room holding a gathering discussing Education, or Small Business, or Party Policy. Not even the hoards of canvassers could deter the determined men and women, young and old in what they saw as their mission, as their duty. But while the people moved to a chorus of “grassroots”, “Renewal”, and “Change”, the most striking decisions this time were not made in any of the many workshops, they were made by the members in one of the biggest organizational changes in the Party’s history.

“One Member, One Vote” was the turning point of this Árd Fheis; it was what everything relied on and, in turn, what everything revolved around. The hall was packed with delegates from every corner of the country; north and south, to debate the issue that we could see empower the ordinary members and give them the role that they so desperately wanted and deserved. There were seventeen motions on debate and most proponents were extremely wary of what was to come. Their fears were quelled quickly and an audible buzz of excitement filled the room when the first of the motions and then all subsequent motions were passed by massive majorities, if not unanimously. Finally the members had a voice.

But what struck me most about that scene in the Shelbourne Hall was not the huge number of people there, we expected this to be a focal point, rather it was the actions of our leader. We had become accustomed to leaders sitting at top tables in debates, watching while votes took place and whispered conversations amongst the high and mighty beside them. This was different; while Micheál Martin sat at a top table, he did not lord it over those who had turned up. When voting took place, Micheál as a member raised his delegate pass and voted, not as a leader, but as a member, the same as any of the rest of us standing there. It was a simple gesture, but an important one.

As I said, the stage had been set, and we watched Robert Troy take to the stage, our faces untelling and skeptical if I am to be honest.  What we weren’t expecting was the speech we got, like a rally cry we soon found ourselves caught up in the hysteria, with the back-slapping and wooping that I feared this Árd Fheis could not bring. By the time Robert finished the mood had gone from somber to sheer excitement, would this be the beginning of our fight back?

And then he arrived and we all leapt to our feet as he moved through us to the podium, a member rather than a figurehead. When the applause finally subsided we got what we had come for. We got the apology we had so long hoped would come; we got the pro-Europe message we had feared was threatened; and most importantly we got the reassurance that we would not promote opposition for oppositions sake. With a level-headed and principled man at the helm we as a party had matured, had accepted our failings and were determined to move ahead and try to change how politics worked in this country. Something that we could not achieve without the apology we finally, publicly, espoused.

I was always told by the older members of the party, that Fianna Fáil performed best when pushed up against a wall. It was hard to see though, this time, how we could rally ourselves when we had not merely been pushed up against a wall but were rightly pushed straight through it. But we did, and it looks like this is not the end after all. The clouds are beginning to clear and light is once again coming through, albeit a very dim light still. Reporters and speculators had written Fianna Fáil off, they had said we were finished, but the RDS this weekend told a different story. It told a story of a party that had lost its was rather than declined; that had moved away from its members rather than its members moving away from it; and that was finally ready to offer an alternative.

If there was one thing I learned from this weekend it was that, you write Fianna Fáil off at your own peril. An organization that bears the similarity to a national movement rather than a single party will never truly disappear. Our numbers in the Dáil may be few and our resources may be  meek but inside each and every one of our hearts lies the spark that will ignite a thousand searing flames. To echo the words of Ted Kennedy, "the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Ar Aghaidh le Fianna Fáil

A Case of Convenient Amnesia

Lethargy seems to have crept into the current political arena at the present time. Now more than ever the status quo seems to have become engrained into the mindset of the Irish people, as we struggle to come to terms with what is going on in the country at the moment. As if this wasn’t bad enough, our Taoiseach, Enda the Seer, has not helped matters by confirming our own suspicions and proclaiming to the world at large that we are “Mad”. But his prophetic judgment seems to be a function largely based on hindsight, that is, he’s very good at rearing his head after an event and proclaiming, “I knew that was going to happen.” We’ve heard the same drivel before, we heard it immediately after the General Election when Enda and his merry men decided that the 5 point plan was only a mere election promise, a small token to show just what his party could do if elected, but which would safely be deposited to the pile marked “under consideration”, a sort of limbo well known to the Jim Hackers and Sir Humphrey’s of the world rather than our “esteemed” Dáil deputies.

The plan, which could more accurately be described as a working title rather than a major policy document, promised jobs, placed education at its very core, and promised to seek a reduction in Irelands debt. So far Jobbridge has become a means of getting highly qualified (yes you have to be highly qualified) persons to work for an extra €50 on top of their social welfare payment. This is nothing short of madness; instead of getting people back to work and off the live register the government are actually encouraging social welfare payments as an alternative to full-time employment. Of course, companies aren’t complaining, they’re receiving skilled graduates for €50 a week, a deal you’d expect to see in Lidl or Aldi rather than a government internship scheme.

Education also took a bit of a hammering, as Quinn-occhio started to distance himself from signing any USI pledge. Indeed, Quinn did such a marvelous job of forgetting that he signed the pledge that it took thousands of students marching in Dublin with cries of the hardships of full-time education to remind him that any such pledge had ever existed. But the bout of short-term memory loss subsided and Ruairí Quinn began to spout that oft quoted mantra of “we didn’t know the scale of the financial problems faced in this country”. Well Ruairí, despite your protestations, you did know when you signed that USI pledge (Yes you did sign it, we have pictures) the full scale of the countries problems, but you decided to court the electorate rather than be honest and upfront because lets face it, getting elected is much more important than letting the plebs on the street know what was actually going to happen. Gene Kerrigan’s tale of Irish local politics, entitled, “Never Make a Promise You Can’t Break” should be on the Leaving Cert English paper, just so the next generation knows exactly what they are up against.

As far as the promises of a reduction in the country’s debt is concerned it seems that Quinn’s memory loss has spread to his cabinet colleagues (maybe there’s something in the water). Before the election our Taoiseach elect stood like a prize pig beside Merkel and Sarkozy in Brussels while squealing on and on about the assurances he had received that Irelands debt would be looked at. God, that seems like a life time ago and can easily be forgotten about, well at least that’s what Enda Kenny seems to be hoping. Since that particular photo op, Enda has changed his game plan (yes he probably had something closely resembling a plan… of sorts at one stage), now he has gone from being the youthful rebel in the class to the atypical noddy, in that he seems to now sit at the front of the class nodding at everything Merkozy say, and probably wittering little nonsensical reassurance of “yes sir” and “right away sir”. And if that lap dog approach to international relations wasn’t terrifying enough, it seems that now Enda has no intention, never mind recollection, of looking for some write down in our debt. And this from the man who called us mad! Sigh

But maybe we are a bit mad, or more so not mad enough. As much as it galls me to say it, I found myself agreeing with Eamon Dunphy last week as he reminded us all of just how relaxed we are about what is happening to our country. For all our history of war and rebellion we have become a nation of pacifists. We seem to take news of a €100 household charge, the imminent Septic Tank charge and complete lack of coherent plan lying down. Yeats told us in September 1913 that romantic Ireland was dead and gone. I wonder what he would say in 2012, I would imagine his critique would be a lot more scathing.

Amnesia passes and when it does Enda Kenny and his cohorts better be ready because it’s not going to be a pretty sight. The art of magic is about slight of hand and misdirection, but even these tricks become nonchalant when examined closely and you see the coin that will appear from behind your ear cupped discretely between the magicians fingers. Poor Enda faces the same illusion shattering experience as the magician, although unlike the magician Enda’s attempts at misdirection so far have been mediocre to say the least. And when the collected cabinet amnesia disperses, so too will the country’s idolatry. And then my friends, the fun will begin…

A Write Off

 

It would be a mistake with Ireland’s history of Dáil majorities, to write off Fianna Fáil.

While it was always my belief that we should run a candidate for the presidency, it now seems more and more advantageous for us to perhaps keep our nose out of it. If we had run a candidate we would have been constantly battling against the press, who seem insistent on writing our party’s epitaph long before our illnesses have become fatal. The media themselves need to take a good hard look at themselves before they begin to criticise anyone else. What ever happened to responsible journalism that reported the news factually and didn’t start running with stories that oftentimes have no legs to begin with. The sensationalistic journalism that we are facing on a continual basis is oftentimes pandering to the masses rather than reporting anything of substance. Just this week in work I met a man who recently got rid of the television in his house. He believed that it was the best thing he has ever done because he can now pick and choose what news stories he reads rather than being told by someone at the RTE news desk what is most important. He said he had a smartphone that allowed him to get the news he wanted without the constant doom and gloom that the media seem to be forcing down our throats on an on-going basis. In a way I see where he is coming from, I myself followed the events in Libya from the reporters on the ground there that used twitter to update their followers on what was actually going on. The real-time updates and the human story behind some of the events were much more interesting and substantial than the reports from either the newspapers or RTE news. It seems that the media has become increasingly more focused on live events and the “story of the moment”, while at the same time losing some of the traditional skills that go hand in hand with journalism. Now, this is not true for some commentators, but there are some who seem to write the uttermost drivel and are commended for it, no-one seems able to question them anymore.

The media are very quick to write Fianna Fáil off, which in my opinion is a very stupid thing to do. Fianna Fáil has been massively successful in the post-election period at organising its grassroots through online media. On Facebook, Twitter and news websites our members are becoming more and more prevalent. There is a definite hunger out there from the grassroots to ensure that the party survives, and what better time to focus on that than now. Fianna Fáil always performs when under pressure, when our back is to the wall we tend to come back fighting twice as hard. Now, if only those at the top would take a breath and look down from their ivory towers to see the talent that we have. I was told a long time ago that Fianna Fáil was always very good at spotting talented people and then ensuring that they were kept in their box. But now is a time for that to change. We have people of incredible talent throughout our organisation that are willing to do whatever it takes to restore the name of our party. We have an incredible number of people who are out there every night of the week  working in their community, be it a local neighbourhood watch or helping out the local GAA team, what an incredible resource. Now is the time to rebuild, now is the time to stop fighting amongst ourselves and work to ensure that this great party survives to contest any elections that we’re put up against. Because at the end of it all; you don't develop courage by being happy every day. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

The Presidency

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.”

The Next Steps

Something I wrote just after the General Election:

It's been a tumultuous week for anyone involved in Fianna Fáil, aswell as disapointing and sickening.

We need to realise that the Party is more than the elected representatives, the party is more than any cabinet or individual member. Fianna Fáil is a movement that will not and cannot be allowed to be quenched. I will not say I am ashamed to be a member of Fianna Fáil, but what I will say is that i'm disgusted at how the party has been left to rot.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The leaders of our party have abandoned the ordinary members, the non-paid volunteers who are working behind the scenes everyday for this party; canvassing, packing envelopes and getting our message out there; and who strive to see its survival.

I'm not pretending to be the good samaritan or anything else but people need to realise just what this party stands for because I doubt anyone can answer that question. The time is coming when Fianna Fáil will have a chance to look at ourselves and where we are going and where we want to go, because the two are very different.

Who ever takes over this party needs to renew it to face a new world in which Europe and the wider world play a greater part than comely maidens. We all recognise the probleims which have plagued this party in the past and it's time to make a stand and demand these changes be made.

I welcome the leadership battle ensuing the party as a chance to regain a sense of what we stand for, to bring the party back to the membership and to run straight into the future.

Nay-sayers will say that we are dead and that we have nothing left. This isn't true. The party is there throughout the country, we have great candidates (where the conventions have been held) who will do good under the Fianna Fáil banner. To those thinking of jumping ship, think before you leap, that buoy in the water may not be as safe as the burning ship behind you may suggest.

Work for the future and ensure that your voice is heard, be the change you want and make sure you are listened to. Only by that process can we ensure our urvival through this storm.

Hold fast, the clouds are clearing for a brighter day and I for one want to be a part of that.

Hold fast....

Ar aghaidh le Fianna Fái

Soldiers of the Rearguard

Last week I was asked a question which I could not answer, it was; "What does Fianna Fáil stand for?"
And I could not answer it except for the obvious i.e. Republicanism, a 32 county Ireland etc...
Today proved to me that there are major flaws in Irish politics, especially in the current government.
Brian Cowen has refused to listen to the grassroots, and I, as a member of such, feel ignored, ashamed, and let down.

Fianna Fáil means a lot to me historically but it needs to examine what it stands for. I've started out to try and define what Fianna Fáil means to me and I suggest any members of the party reading this do the same. Fianna Fáil is more than Brian Cowen and everyone needs to realise this. We cannot, nor should we, toe the party line. Everyone has their own opinions and we should make them heard far and wide.

It's terrifying to think that if a General Election is called, that Fianna Fail will return the same old and out-dated politicians which currently plague our party. There is new blood in this party which is as passionate and outward looking as those who fill our benches were in the 60's and 70's. Brian O'Domhnaill, Sean Connick, James Carroll and Dara Calleary, to name but a few. It’s time that these people took on the responsibility of nurturing the party and cut ties with the decaying branches.

The Soldiers of the Rear-guard have been forgotten and those few sitting in the front benches are controlling the party, however, I think it’s time that those of us who believe in a bright future for Fianna Fáil make our voice heard. The Rear-guard need to be listened to and the stale branches at the front need to be cut off to allow the tree to bear fruit again.

Brian Cowen's position as leader may be gone but there is a huge youth movement within the party and Ógra that is willing to bring this party back to its roots. Fianna Fáil is by no means dead, it will rekindle itself and, if allowed, grow once again.

The Soldiers of the Rearguard are alive and kicking and looking forward to getting back in the game, let us have our say, let us have our chance and we will not disappoint. Fianna Fáil in its current state cannot continue, but the void can and will be filled. As Kevin Barry said, "The only message I have for anybody is hold on and stick to the Republic." and now more than ever we need that. We need to look at ourselves and decide what we stand for, then and only then can we rebuild this party....

Ar aghaidh le Fianna Fáil, ar agahidh le Ógra Fianna Fáil, agus ar aghaidh le todhchai tarraingteach....