There’s one sure sign that a political party is in trouble: when they start denouncing those within its own ranks. If that’s the case, Fianna Fail are in trouble. Big trouble.
““It is depressing all right. Talking to people on the ground, it is bloody demoralising, to the guys we need to canvass for us”. That’s the view of one anonymous FF TD. The party is currently on 19%, which doesn’t sound bad, but for a party that ruled in the south nearly as long as the unionist party ruled in the north, it’s bad news.
Especially if it’s Fianna Fail royalty that’s doing the talking. Eamon O Cuiv, Dev’s grandson, who used to be a young fogey and is now becoming an ageing fogey. says the party founded by his granda is facing “demise” and that there’s “an absolute collapse in self-belief”.
“If we continue to poll at 18pc, this will see the demise of that Fianna Fail that people know. Fianna Fail will instead become a small niche party like the SDLP” he wrote in the Sindo a week ago. There’s a ferocious battle going on within Fianna Fail as to whether critics should keep their mouths shut, for the sake of the party; or whether they should speak out critically for the sake of the party”.
Here in the north, there’s a similar jumpiness within unionism. The pact formed by unionists in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, for example, is marked by the fact that the candidate is an Ulster Unionists (‘I’m not voting for a UU man’) and who is a deposed leader of the party (I’m not voting for a loser’). There may have been a pact between the parties and a bone may have been thrown to the UU dog in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, but it’s a bone that a lot of DUP people will find hard to bite on, let alone swallow. When a political party begins to sink, it may take a longish time or it may be more rapid. But there’s no doubt that two doomed parties will be on display in the coming Fermanagh/South Tyrone election: the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP.
They may point out the service they have done the state in the past but alas, eaten bread is soon forgotten. Alex Attwood was so excited about the presence of the SDLP candidate in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, he couldn’t remember his name; and the number of doors Arlene Foster will knock on, shoulder-to-shoulder with Tom Elliott, could be counted on the fingers of one foot. It’s hard not to believe that elements within the SDLP and the UU party arranged for these two spectacularly inarticulate men to be thrown to the electoral wolves.
Churchill summed it up best, when inducting a new young MP into the mysteries of the Commons. “There is your enemy, my boy” Churchill told the lad, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Surely you mean over there, sir?” the lad responded, pointing to the opposition benches. “No” Churchill told him. “They’re just the opposition. It’s on our side of the floor you’ll find the enemy”.
They say a picture paints a thousand words.Anybody in any doubt about the SDLP being in disarray only had to watch RTE coverage of the government 1916 commemoration in Dublin today.Alisdair was standing in Joan Burton’s pocket while Durkan was standing 2 fields away from the pair of them!
“Winds of change are blowing, old ways are going…”
Fianna Fáil continue to ignore the fact that there are alternatives to austerity policies. We have a lot to learn from some of our Scandinavian neighbours where exclusion and marginalization tend not to feature in social policies. There are powerful incentives to promote and maintain a harmonious work ethic. There is a strong emphasis on free education and retraining. There is a social contract where the state provides high quality services funded by fair and progressive taxation.
Unfortunately in this country civil war politics remain a fact of life. A cursory glance through some of the journals of record will provide sufficient evidence about the politics of partition. We regularly hear and read references about matters, “beyond the Pale,” “Up there,” the North and “Down here,” the South. Too much time is spent in Dáil Éireann fighting old battles. Regular attempts are being made to provide substitutes for ‘Amhrán na bhFiann’ and the 1916 Proclamation. Why? The Americans have no problem with their Declaration of Independence, the French with La Marseillaise, the Germans with Deutschland über alles or the British with God Save the Queen.
It is time to make politics work for the people in this country. While the sham battles are going on, the brightest and most able are leaving the country as fast as our money.
When Orson Welles was asked to describe the director he admired most he answered without hesitation: ‘I admire the old masters the most: by which I mean: John Ford, John Ford and John Ford’.
Perhaps not the most unhelpful way to trace the decline of the Fianna Fail party is through the lens of John Ford. For indeed, they had much in common.
For starters, whereas John Ford’s father started life in the West of Ireland and headed to the East of America the father of Fianna Faill, Eamon de Valera did the mirror opposite. Indeed, one could bypass the John Ford camera angle entirely by simply concentrating on the spelling there of ‘Eamon’.
Note the one ‘n’ which denoted the crucial absence of notes as in dough. In other w.,in its early days, the young party of De Valera like its founder wasn’t able to make n’s meet.
But of course, the middleaged, middlespread party eventually ended up under the direction of the ‘urban cowboy’ class, awash with muck, malavoguery, mohair and money.By which time the manifest clenched fist of Dev had been well and t. replaced by the devious backhander.of the constituency Anorak.
John Ford, who was given to signing his name in the original leprechaun Sean Aloysius O Fearna was not unacquainted with cowboy country on both sides of the Atlantic,. His vision had a range which could span the ocean from the cart-rutted boreens of Death Valley in ‘The Searchers’ to the tumbleweeds of Mayo in ‘The Quiet Man’.
Like Ford,the early Fianna Fail was a pioneer of location shooting (e.g., ‘Beal na mBlath’) and also, the long shot (‘Reunification of Ireland’, ‘Revival of Leprechaun’) in which their characters were framed against a background of a vast, harsh and rugged natural terrain.
Span is right; or in the case of Ford, it was the Spahn Movie Ranch where scenes of many of his most famous horse operas were shot by the poet of the prairie.. And indeed, the same Spahn location could well serve as a sobering metaphor for Fianna Fail on the wane, as distinct from the Wayne. What else is a metaphor? Even a sober one.
For when the movie makers moved out of that stark location of mountain terrain, boulder-strewn scenery and ramshackle Western township, those visionary founders of Fianna Fail likewise moved on to the cemetery on Boot Hill with full military honours, the playing of ‘Amrhan na bhFiann’ and the ceremonial wrapping up of the Tricolour.
Instead of rough hewn Gabby Hayes kind of aw-shucks cumann characters, bland, smooth talking snake-oil salesmen began to enroll, cut from the same Louis Copeland cloth as (gulp) Brian Hayes.
When it came down to casting for the cowboy fillums the difference between Fianna Faill in their black ten dollar hats and Fine Gael in their pure white stetsons boiled down in the end to the differ in, as it always does in the FSS, the price of a heifer. The brands were finally,interchangeable. The Lazy F.
Who, or rather what moved in to take their place in Arus Spahn were of course, the Desert Rats known as the Manson Gang. Whose signature tune achieved a notoriety which was as brief as it was tuneless: ‘Arise and Follow Charlie !’. It was there they plotted over many a pot-fuelled pow wow their most ghoulish horror movies based on land and headline grabbing.
If one were to make a movie of the current Fianna Fail cult membership it would not take too much studio nous to pick the obvious Squeaky Fromme here and the exact Tex Watson there.The one problem would be to assemble them long enough together in the one location. As they are currently engaged in a headless chicken game of ‘Helter Skelter’ with one deputy turning up in this studio and other would be sherrif featuring in that editorial office.
Curiously, Perkie’s inner B-movie extra had a talk-on part in a John Ford production (of sorts) for a later walk-on part in a Fianna Fail production (of out of sorts) some years later during the over-rated Sixties. Although he was both blissfully ignorant and unaware of the future connection at the time.
As follows: in the summer of 62 one spent a month in the house,/ teach of Bean Ui Fhearna, a distant relative of John Ford, an Atlantic distant relative. He was there to perfect his leprechaun, such as it was. An Spideal / Spiddal (for it was there !) was colonised for the same month by the Abbey Company of Permanent Actors, there on the same mission.
Which rather carbon-dates that particular curtain call in history: back then, the Free Southern Stateen believed in that kind of rainbow hunting for its National Theatre. Not any more. The Troll language of Hedda Gabler is more de rigeur these days than the leprechaun of Darby O Gill. Ibsen, a chara, rather than Gibson.
Fast foward five years to the summer of 67, when Perkie’s inner Presidential groupie stood on the portal of Arus an Uachtarain pressing the ding-dong in the company of four or five fellow college students.
Wordsworth wrote ‘five years have past, five summers with the length of five long winters’. And these words were fresh in the heads of one and one’s companions, all new graduates of the J. Collins Gem dictionary classes.
But it was the leprechaun words learned in the John Ford ancestral home which proved its worth in the home of the then Uachtaran. For Eamon De Valera (for it was he !) saw to it, even if his eyesight was failing at the time, that the conversation was conducted entirely through the tedium of the medium, as it’s known.now, but not back in those unenlightened times.
At one stage, Eamon Dev’s inner private secretary from an inner office called to say the phone was ringing. (Note the adherence to the one ‘n’). The ever polite Perkie was first to his feet, having had the advantage of being etiquette-trained in Warbeck Towers, to guide El Presidente into the inner sanctum.
On turning back to rejoin his colleagues, it was to see the last removable object from the vast presidential desk – note papers, pens, bric a brac – being stuffed into the pockets of opportunistic eyers after the main chance.
It resembled nothing so much as a classic scene from a John Ford movie, when a long lingering shot reveals four or five vultures picking the bones of an unlucky prospector in dem dar gold-free hills, clean. Absolutely clean.
Three of those four went on to become enthusiastic members of their local Fianna Faill Cummain..
The fourth went on to quizz An tUachtaran after he had emerged from his pre-mobile phone inner sanctum to explalin the significance of the ceremonial sword in the glass case on the wall of the egg-shaped office.
-Sin an claoimh a bhi ag George Washington agus a bhronn John F. Kennedy orm le linn a chuairte anseo, arsa Dev.
-That is the sword which belonged to George Washington and which John F. Kennedy gave to me as a gift during his visit here, said Dev.
Quick as a bowl flung from the hand of a Blarney road bowler, came this Corkonian retort:
-O, an ndurit tu gur bhronn George Washington an claiomh seo ort, A Uachtarain?
-Oh, did you say that George Washington gave you the sword as a guift, A Uachtarain?
Said fourth colleafue went on to actually stand for Fianna Fail in a bye-election. Alas, to no avail.
It was as far back then that Perkie’s inner diviner and looker into the seeds of time saw the writing on the wall for Fianna Fail.
The writing went as follows: The foot fall by Fianna Fail’s ballot boxes will reach a paltry low in the Centenary of Bolands’ Mills.So, it will.
The second part of that wall prophecy was indistinct except for the one word: ‘;dough’.
Killer last word, Perkie – take an encore…”dough”…A word to live by
Perkin Warbeck – you are brilliant. All of us see that and appreciate it.
One request – please continue with this style as above.
Upwards and onwards.
Go raibh maith agat.
GRMA, NorthMunsterman.
Deanfaidh me mo dhicheall, Esteemed Blogmeister-willing.
Normally I tend to give North Munster a rather wide berth, the Devil having taken his Bit from there, leaving only the Uvular R in its place.
But in your case, one’s inner uvular trill-seeker is happy to make a detour.
Beirrr bua !