were quite forgettable) was having more of an impact than Labour’s ‘Jobs, Reform, Fairness’.
We began our formal campaign in the Gravity Bar at the Guinness Storehouse with our intention to renegotiate the terms of the Troika bailout. We repeated the ‘renegotiate’ message over several days, at press conferences, interviews and speeches, but it was having no impact. It seemed as if nobody (the press, especially) believed that the terms of the bailout could be renegotiated. Fianna Fáil accused us of misleading the public about the possibility of renegotiating, with Micheál Martin stating that ‘Labour was attempting to deliberately mislead voters about what changes to the IMF-EU bailout deal can be achieved.’
I met with my team on the morning of 3 February to run through things shortly before a scheduled press conference. Mark Garrett made it clear that our message on renegotiating the deal was not cutting through. Our finer points of reducing the interest rate, limiting privatisation and creating a space for jobs and growth were not being heard in the noisy electoral market place. It was clear we needed to simplify our message if it was to make an impact.
I summed up the situation for myself: the European Central Bank (ECB) was insisting that the bailout deal could not be renegotiated. But Labour would insist on renegotiation. A phrase came to me: Frankfurt’s way or Labour’s way. I used it for the first time at that press conference and repeated it a number of times for effect. It cut through alright. Just not quite in the way I had intended.
Often in politics, it is not what is said that matters, but what is heard. For instance, in 1969 Jack Lynch did not say, ‘We will not stand idly by’, but that’s what people thought they heard, meaning that he intended to send Irish troops over the border to protect nationalists in Belfast and Derry. So too with ‘Frankfurt’s Way or Labour’s Way’. It was heard not as the pledge to renegotiate that it was, but as an outright, Syriza-style rejection of the bailout, which it never was. Though in government, we succeeded in getting much of Labour’s way and renegotiating the interest rate, and limiting privatisation, and restoring the minimum wage, and extending the time frame for reducing the deficit, and stopping paying the Anglo promissory note, and much more besides, some were determined to cast it as falling short of this promise.
The high point of Labour’s poll ratings came in the summer of 2010 (33 per cent in September 2010 IPSOS/MRBI). I was on holiday in early August when I heard of one particularly good outcome for us and all I could think was, ‘How long will it last?’ I knew that when the electoral contest was at its peak, we would find it hard to compete with the financial resources of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin, and that unlike Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, we would not have the organisation and members on the ground to realise our vote potential.
And indeed, as predicted, by December, Labour’s rating had dropped to 25 per cent (IPSOS/MRBI), and falling further to 19 per cent a week before the election. The pattern was the same in the Red C series, though not as dramatic. This decline was despite Fianna Fáil’s drop from 24 per cent in September to 16 per cent in February (IPSOS/MRBI). The gains went to Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and Independents. Support for Independents rose from 11 per cent and 9 per cent in September to 17 per cent and 15 per cent in February in the respective IPSOS/MRBI and Red C surveys. Both of these polling organisations found that support for Sinn Féin shot up from 8 per cent and 10 per cent to 15 per cent and 16 per cent between September and December 2010, probably due to the Donegal South West by-election. Over all this time, Fine Gael continued to rise steadily and solidly from 24 per cent in the IPSOS/MRBI series in September to 37 per cent by 18 February.
What was causing this pattern? It seemed that, as long as it was theoretical, many people were happy to express support for Labour, but once the election was on the horizon (from December 2010) – coinciding, in this case, with the arrival of the Troika and the sense that solutions must be found immediately – voters began to reconsider their positions.
The arrival of the Troika was followed by a massive 6 billion euro budget adjustment. After Christmas, the Universal Social Charge began to hit pay packets. Anger gave way to fear in the public mood. Fine Gael played on the fear, and frightened many potential voters from supporting Labour, by hammering away at us on tax.
Furthermore, following our very high polls, the media, understandably and quite rightly, began to interrogate Labour more closely on policy issues, and to become more critical when it appeared to them that our responses were less than clear. Opponents made the most of this and (wrongly) began to allege that Labour had no policies. Some sections of the media, in my opinion, took editorial decisions that were aimed at stopping Labour’s gallop. The Irish Daily Mail, which in the early years of my leadership had regularly invited me to contribute to their paper, published an editorial headed, ‘Danger in the rise of Eamon Gilmore’, which warned of Labour’s record in government with that old chestnut that the Party was ‘in thrall to the trade unions’, and concluded that ‘Mr Gilmore has done his country some considerable service in opposition – and will continue to do so.
Having him and his colleagues at the Cabinet table would be a different matter altogether.’ The Sunday Independent continued its traditional hostility to the Labour Party and, on the Sunday before polling day, its front page cried out ‘Poll: Give us Enda without Gilmore’.
There were powerful forces in Irish society, some of them in the media, who simply did not want Labour in government, and most certainly not leading it. And unfortunately there were some too in the Labour Party who felt the office of the Taoiseach was a step above our station! Another reason for the shifting preferences was that Fine Gael’s job in the election was probably easier than ours. Voters who just wanted Fianna Fáil out of office and a change of government had to just make a one-step change to Fine Gael. Voting Labour required, in a sense, two steps.
Sitting across the aisle from me during Dáil votes was Mary Harney, who hails from the same County Galway parish as I do; she offered some insights of her own to me. She thought the Donegal South-West by-election did a lot of damage to Labour. It was certainly not the constituency we would have chosen for a by-election if we’d had a choice.
Pat ‘The Cope’ Gallagher was elected to the European Parliament in June 2009, and his Dáil seat had been vacant for almost a year and a half. The Government, having already lost two by-elections, to George Lee (Fine Gael) in Dublin South and Maureen O’Sullivan (Independent) in Dublin Central, did not want to risk another loss in what had always been a Fianna Fáil heartland. Sinn Féin saw their opportunity, and their young candidate Senator Pearse Doherty took a High Court case which forced the holding of the election. Armed with a high profile from the court case, Doherty always held the advantage. Labour had not had an elected public representative in the constituency since the highly respected Seamus Rodgers lost his county council seat in 1999. In the 2009 local elections, Joe Costello came to me with an idea for the Stranorlar electoral area, where Labour had no candidate (or party organisation). Would I consider Frank McBrearty Jr. in the local election?
The Morris Tribunal had found that Frank had been framed for a murder by certain Gardaí in Donegal. The State ended up settling Frank’s case and paid him very considerable compensation. The shocking and unfair treatment to which Frank and his family were subjected by some had been taken up some years earlier by Brendan Howlin, then the justice spokesperson for the Labour Party. Brendan ended up being hauled through the courts because he refused to divulge the source of information which, at the time, he gave, in confidence to the then Minister for Justice, John O’Donoghue.
I agreed to have Frank as the Labour Party candidate for Donegal County Council. He was elected, and was therefore the only elected Labour representative in Donegal South-West at the time of the by-election. He quickly asserted his claim to be our candidate. There was considerable resistance to his candidacy, but I stuck by him. He was a colourful and sometimes controversial candidate. I enjoyed his company during the campaign, and I warmed to his family. As expected, though, Doherty easily won for Sinn Féin. Frank polled 8 per cent, far better than Labour had secured in this constituency for a very long time, but it was well below our national poll rating. The result on 26 November punctured a big hole in Labour’s claim to become the largest party in the country and to lead the next government.
One of the