Now it’s Fianna Fáil’s turn to taste the media whip

Republicans are well used to media bigotry, distortion and downright lies, and the sustained attacks from those who want to keep the status quo, but the current general election campaign is showing that we are not the only ones to feel the boot of those who believe that they have a divine right to rule.
Fianna Fáil, too, the dominant party in the Southern state in terms of votes and seats, is very much not the dominant party in the media – but it’s worth looking at how the media attack them and for what reason.
The Irish Times has undertaken a sustained campaign of vilification which, in this election campaign, has amounted to hysteria.  Day after day, the issues that need resolution in the election – health, employment rights, standards of living, quality of live, housing and transport – have been relegated to make way for the dredging up of every possible basis for criticising the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and Fianna Fáil in particular.
Most republicans won’t be too upset by that, given Fianna Fáil’s pusillanimous role over the years in supporting British oppression in the North and its misuse of public money in the interests of the propertied and privileged.
But the Irish Times is not concerned about the issues that affect ordinary people, and it has shunned any serious examination of these, for example, the housing scandal.
Here we have a situation where €60 million has been gathered in lieu of the builders’ giving finished houses to the local authorities and this money has only swollen the local coffers with a minimal amount used for housing provision.
But even though the Times has reported the facts of this scandal, it has not examined it or used it as an issue to raise against Fianna Fáil.
The reason is that the Irish Times has no quarrel with the social and economic policies of Fianna Fáil: indeed, for the most part these are exactly the same policies that Fine Gael is advancing (with Labour support), and the last thing the Times wants to do is to raise issues that might cause problems for Fine Gael.
What the Times wants is for Labour to play its part in keeping Fianna Fáil, the party, out while keeping the Free State policies of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in play!
In this the Times has been strongly supported by the Independent group.
Why, then, are they so hysterical about getting Fianna Fáil out if they have no real problems with Fianna Fáil’s policies?
The answer lies in their fear that when push comes to shove there remains a definite if weak nationalist element in Fianna Fáil that might be willing to accept a large part of Sinn Féin’s agenda for change as the price of power.
This is why the Times has concentrated so much on Bertie Ahern’s supposed financial irregularities, just as they did in relation to Charlie Haughey before him.
Republicans will be sympathetic to any genuine criticism of public corruption, for it is contrary to everything that republicanism stands for, but that is NOT the driving force of the Times campaign.
And it has been a vicious campaign.
The Times drip-fed a series of illegally leaked pieces of information, allegation and innuendo from the Mahon Tribunal as part of this campaign, backed up by strident editorials and a campaign of manipulation that has even embarrassed Times’ journalists.
Such is the stature that is accorded to the ‘paper of record’ by inferiority complex suffering journalists elsewhere in the media that the rest joined in, spurred on no doubt by the fact that they all share the same prejudices.
But it was somewhat laughable to see how the Irish Independent treated its own poll during the weak when it reported that support for Fianna Fáil was nose-diving at the same time as it reported that 54% of the electorate favoured a government combination that included Fianna Fáil!
Of course, all this wild speculation about the Rainbow being ahead of the government parties and that therefore (sic) a Rainbow victory is assured are based on one simple delusion –  Sinn Féin is simply left out of the equation.  It’s as if we had a Dáil of only 156 TDs and not 166 as we do, and that Sinn Féin votes wouldn’t count.
Unfortunately for the media, Sinn Féin does have a consistent 10% of the vote even in opinion polls and probably higher in real life, and have a real prospect of more than doubling their seats.  This is a fact that makes a nonsense of all the confident predictions coming from the Blueshirt press.
Of course, they would prefer it if Sinn Féin could be ignored or if its votes could be taken away, but that is not on.
Ironically, the only establishment commentator to draw attention to this unwelcome (to them) fact has been the former Fine Gael TD, Ivan Yates.
Yates, of course, runs a bookmakers’s business, and in that line of work there’s no room for wishful thinking which is why he is so much more sanguine about FG’s chances than the rest of them.
The question being asked in RTÉ circles, however, is not how come nonsensical analyses are being put forward, but who allowed Yates to draw attention to a fact that RTÉ management would rather keep quiet about.