Pull your backside off the chair and get yourself out the door for Martin McGuinness

WOULDN’T be voting for him,” says Derek to me in The Long Hall bar in Dublin, where we’re having a cheeky afternoon pint and discussing Martin McGuinness’s candidacy. I’m nodding away to him, focused more on attracting the barman’s attention to address an urgent gin shortage.
Derek’s die-hard Labour Party, going back to his grandad’s time. He’d vote for a slab of concrete if it had a Labour sticker on it, and since I have the same approach to Sinn Féin candidates, we rub along well enough.
“But still,” he continues, regretfully putting down his empty glass, “when you look at him, and you look at the other ones going for it, well, it’s like a giant among midgets.”
Little people is the preferred term (he’s Labour, he’s not politically correct and he’ll still be voting for Michael D come October — and sure he’s not the worst of them).
But, deep down, Derek knows the same thing we all do. Martin McGuinness is a cut above this election field, and that’s why the media are trying to do him.
Now Martin and I have had our differences. I find his inexplicable affection for Airtricity League soccer deeply troubling, and I was left seething at the Ard Fheis canteen a few years ago when he stuck me with the bill for his kebab and chips (I had quiche).
Right now, there’s something else more important: they’re coming after one of our own.
For the next few weeks they’re going to hammer Martin McGuinness in a way no candidate has ever been targeted in an election in this state. They’ll lie about him, they’ll blacken his name, they’ll go after his family, they’ll go after his friends.
Every candidate has a responsibility to answer honest, hard and fair questions from the media, from other candidates and, most importantly, from the punters.
But this is different. They’ll attack him and they’ll say it’s for all sorts of reasons but you know and I know (and they know but won’t admit it), it’s because they see something in Martin they don’t see in any other candidate: someone who won’t accept ‘business as usual’ in this beleaguered potato republic of ours.
That’s why it’ll be even worse than the job they tried to do in February on Gerry A because they’re that bit more afraid now. Nothing puts the wind up the great and the good of our little state like 17 Irish republicans walking into the Oireachtas.
So they’re on the attack. And some of them will do it enthusiastically, twisted with their own bitterness, orphans of colonialism always slightly ashamed of their country. Others will do it because their editor or producer is telling them to do it and they need the job.
We’ve people to deal with the media. Even now our press officers in Dublin are being harried out of whatever drunken coma many of them have been in since Stephen Cluxton put the ball over the crossbar on Sunday. They’ll do their job. Martin McGuinness, well, I think it’s safe to say he’ll do his bit.
And this, comrade of mine, brings me to you.
For the next few weeks you can sit at home and grumble about the media. You can yell at the telly when Frontline and Pat Kenny are on and shake your head in disgust at a headline in an Independent Newspapers rag. You can even go on the internet to tweet or blog your disgust (because we all know that’s a vote-winner), or you can drop down the pub and moan about it to the man behind the counter.
Or you can pull your backside off the chair and get yourself out the door.
Elections aren’t won by shouting at the telly or Joe Duffy on Liveline or writing in the letters pages. Not by us, anyway. We’ve not got a fair shake from them before this and we’re not going to get it now.
So we’ll fight elections the way we know: house by house, street by street and town by town, engaging and talking with people.
Hear them talking about Martin’s machine? That’s you, my friend, and the comrade next to you, and the housewife who drops off leaflets on her way to work, and the pensioner canvassing his housing estate, and the unemployed young fella putting up posters in the dead of night, and the small businessman putting €50 he doesn’t have towards posters.
Because when you’re asking yourself who’s going to put our side of the story, who’s going to speak up for our comrade, you don’t need to look any further than the mirror.
So talk to your friends. Knock on doors, drop leaflets and put up posters. Stand outside a shopping centre at a street stall and give your neighbour a lift to the polling station.
Because, comrade, in a few months down the line, when someone asks you where you were when they came after Martin McGuinness, what are you going to say?