No Ordinary Fool

Having had my say on Friday morning, I had not planned to comment further here on these local and European elections. A vote for a change of government is no longer good enough to be muddling along with. Therefore, to spend time analysing the results and trying to derive significance from them became futile by definition. This country needs systemic change in the form of a brand new Constitution and a whole new way of seeing society. Nothing that will result from the past few days is likely to bring us seriously down that road. As a result, I had planned to save my declining grey matter for use on something more worthwhile.

However, it was then that I noticed something that I never imagined would be possible in these elections. Ultimately, it may prove to be a forlorn candle in the wind. Even then, it gives me far greater cause for optimism than any other result from this weekend ever could.

You see, one astonishing and totally unforeseen outcome did emerge from the widely-predicted shoeing that Fianna Fail received. It happened in Dublin Central – the impregnable stronghold of the this past decade’s most remarkable politician – Bertie Ahern.

Prepare to be Sickened

I call him the “most remarkable”, even though I have long held him up as the political poster boy for everything that I cannot abide in this country. However, no politician in my memory has ever pulled off his feat of being so strongly and so consistently identified as being a “man of the people”, whilst giving so many ordinary, hard-working people the rogering of their lives. Here are a few examples of the latter:

• The cynical creation of those lengthy and horrendously expensive tribunals of inquiry (that he then shamelessly decried when the heat was turned onto him);
• His naked personal ambition in trying to get the expensive but entirely unneeded BertieBowl built;
• The creation of all these soulless Dublin commuter belts that have destroyed people’s quality of life for generations to come;
• The devising of the grossly ridiculous benchmarking pay deal for the public sector; and
• The entirely dubious deal struck with the religious communities that pushed most of the cost of making reparations for the child abuse that these communities perpetrated onto the taxpayer.

Such terrible squandering of the best economic years that this State has ever known may yet even bankrupt it. However, none of this has suddenly just come to light. Therefore, to have been elected three times as Taoiseach is nothing short of extraordinary. For anyone to appreciate so finely just how much punishment the Irish people will soak up without repercussion takes real cunning and the sort of solidly brass neck that would make even Beverly Cooper-Flynn (a “class act”, remember?) green with envy.

So, what is the point of all this reminiscing about the past horribly wasted decade?

The Pukes of St. Luke’s

Well, Dublin Central is home to what has been dubbed the Drumcondra Mafia – essentially, a bunch of Bertie Ahern’s closest confidants who have ruthlessly run the local Fianna Fail operation with an iron fist over the past few decades.

Mary Fitzpatrick, daughter of a former Fianna Fail TD for the area, felt the full force of this fist in the last general election. Already a local councillor, she was running as one of three Fianna Fail candidates in the constituency. However, the third candidate was Cyprian Brady, who had been running Ahern’s constituency office until then.

Fearful that “their man” was struggling as the campaign went into its final week, the Ahern Machine dropped any pretence of unbiased electioneering on behalf of all the party’s candidates and publicly threw their enormous weight behind Brady alone. Notoriously, Brady then creeped into the Dáil on transfers having polled the lowest ever number of first preferences for an elected deputy in the history of the State. Fitzpatrick was left spitting feathers, despite having received almost twice the number of first preference votes that Brady had.

In the same election, Bertie Ahern achieved a personal best with 36.8% of first preference votes. In total, Fianna Fail had a whopping 44.5% of the local first preference votes. A stronghold indeed.

Now, all of this background is important in order to establish how formidable the Ahern Machine really is for anyone who may not otherwise appreciate fully the significance of what has just unfolded in the constituency.

One Hell of a Beating

First of all, there was the by-election for the late Tony Gregory’s Dáil seat. After a reportedly heated local selection meeting, Ahern’s 71-year old brother Maurice was comfortably chosen as the Fianna Fail candidate. Fitzpatrick was once more the candidate to miss out. The decision was taken by 64 votes to 17, demonstrating as well as anything can just how much the Ahern Machine dominates the local organisation.

Now, while a healthy degree of apprehension must always be retained when it comes to the capabilities of the Drumcondra Mafia, anyone familiar with life on the ground in this constituency still had good reason to be optimistic in terms of Fianna Fail not winning this by-election.

There were several reasons for this. It is arguably the most left-wing constituency in the country and this has always provided a counterweight to the Ahern Machine. People here are genuinely angry with Fianna Fail. Finally, it was an iconic left-wing figure whose seat had sadly become available and many were determined that his seat would not go to a conservative candidate. When summed together, it made a Fianna Fail success here pretty unlikely, even if only the supremely confident could take that outcome for granted.

In the end, though, the Drumcondra Mafia was not only beaten. It was tarred, feathered, hung, drawn, and quartered. From the aforementioned 44.5% in 2007, Bertie Ahern and his cronies were slashed to ribbons in these elections and left with a scant 12.3% of first preferences. Simply put, dyed-in-the-wool Fianna Fail voters had turned their backs on the powerful Ahern Machine in their thousands, leaving the party floundering uselessly in fifth place.

This was a truly astonishing outcome, representing less than half of Fianna Fail’s national result in the local elections of 25% of first preferences. To put that in even greater context, that local election result was actually the party’s worst electoral performance ever. Even in the face of the George Lee tsunami in Dublin South, the party still achieved a relatively respectable 17.8% with a hopelessly inexperienced candidate. In surgical terms, this rejection of Bertie Ahern and all that he represents was the equivalent of amputating a gangrene-riddled limb.

However, this is only half of the story. Something even more astounding occurred, which is what motivated me to write this article. It turned what was already an unprecedented and unlikely outcome into one that may be seen in the years to come as the first metaphorical shots being fired in a popular demand for genuine and deep-rooted change.

To Restore My Confidence

Maurice Ahern was also running to hold onto his seat as a local councillor in the Cabra-Glasnevin ward. Once more, his running mate was the aforementioned Fitzpatrick. Ahern received just 8.4% of the vote. Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick topped the poll with 18.1%. Now, Ahern’s performance may have just been down from 9.6% in 2004. However, Fitzpatrick’s was up from 10.2% at a time when Fianna Fail was rightly being rejected left, right, and centre by the electorate. Moreover, despite having polled an impressive 34.2% as a party in the ward, the transfers from the other two candidates did not go to Ahern in anything like sufficient numbers. As a result, he failed to be re-elected!

Now, perhaps this outcome reflects, in part, Fitzpatrick’s work as a local representative over the past five years. However, no one with an appreciation of politics in the locality will see this poetic justice as being anything other than a collective, unanticipated, and utterly magnificent two-fingered salute from ordinary people to the malignant presence of the Ahern Machine in the area. For Fitzpatrick to have achieved this remarkable result, while Ahern lost his seat, turned a painful kick in the electoral groin into a memorable work of art.

Sometimes, even our puny form of representative democracy can be a beautiful thing to behold.

What to Make of Green Shoots?

Now, the Drumcondra Mafia’s arrogance may well be too deeply ingrained in their DNA, their disgusting delusion that what is in their self-interest is what is in the people’s interest may be embedded too far into their bone marrow for them to go now and to go quietly. However, nothing else in this election has suggested the hunger and the thirst for an end to cronyism and shadiness in Irish politics than this remarkable rupture between Bertie Ahern and the people who have been his rock-solid powerbase until now. Nothing else.

All oak trees grow from humble acorns. If only such a tree can now grow from what has just sprouted out of the parched earth here.

Update (8 June)

Bertie Ahern famously once branded Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party as a “failed person” with a “failed ideology”. The latter was an eloquent and perennial thorn in Ahern’s side, who could infuriate the Taoiseach in a way that no one else ever quite could. Therefore, in what will come as a further kick in the teeth to Ahern, Higgins was elected to the third European parlimentary seat for Dublin overnight, at a time when the constitutency was reduced from four to three seats. Failure, pot, and kettle.

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I am indebted to the excellent resource that is http://electionsireland.org for the historical statistical data contained within this article and to http://www.rte.ie for this weekend’s election results. I also gleaned the factual information about Fianna Fail’s local selection convention from http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com.