Top Issue 1-2024

16 June 2011

Resize: A A A Print

Disturbing the political peace

THINGS ARE DIFFICULT in the flat at the moment. Last week, while complaining about Fine Gael’s plans to bring in water charges, Roisín expressed bitter regret at having given Fine Gael a second preference.
Her excuse, once I had picked my jaw up from the floor, is that she wanted Fianna Fáil out and there’s hardly a great selection of candidates in Cork South-West (Roisín keeps her vote at home) after she’d given Paul Hayes the necessary. Giving Labour the nod is out as her family has that small farmer suspicion of the Labour Party as being a little suspicious, ‘not being quite right’.
We had a bit of an argument about it and as she stormed out I shook my head in disgust. To think that wee girl’s daddy was so die-hard Fianna Fáil he once punched his cousin at a wedding for giving a Fine Gael candidate a fifth-preference in the ‘87 general election. During the exchange of vows. For his own sake, I’m glad he’s dead.
But the talk about her vote got me thinking – no elections for at least three years! Jesus Christ, what will we do with ourselves? Assuming the governments in Westminster and Leinster House go the full term, there won’t be another election on this island until the local and Europeans in 2014 (the Presidential election is different).
What’s Sinn Féin Director of Elections Brian Tumilty going to do? We’ll have to put him in cold storage or loan him out to the Obama campaign for a couple of years or he’ll go mad, curled into a little ball in the Newry office reciting transfer patterns from the 1984 European Parliament election, backwards like that lad in Rain Man.
Sure, there might be a referendum but that’s like drinking non-alcoholic beer: it tastes and looks the same but it doesn’t have the same effect and you’re left wondering what the point of it was afterwards.
Think about what our wee party has accomplished.
In the last 12 months we’ve fought a Westminster election in the North, a general election in the South, and Assembly and local elections in the North as well as a by-election last week. Four large-scale election campaigns in a little over a year. The last 12 months have been like a crack cocaine binge for election addicts like myself.
And now, as well as an increased mandate and a slew of elected representatives, we’ll have to let the memories keep us warm until the next election when I can wander down the road with a ladder and some clippers to tidy up the lampposts.
Oh, the memories . . .
» The look on SDLP big-wig Alasdair McDonnell’s face when Conor Maskey told him to be civil and mind his language during the Assembly election results was topped only a short time later by Barry McElduff reminding the BBC’s Noel Thompson to “Keep ‘er lit!”
» A semi-hysterical phone call from a Cork count centre to tell me that not only was Jonathan O’Brien was going to make it but Sandra was looking good too
» Michael Colreavy emerging to be Leitrim’s sole representative in the Dáil.
» Watching Dessie Ellis on the telly being lifted onto the shoulders of comrades who’d worked for more than a decade to make it happen. Fermanagh/South Tyrone last year and The Four.
» The Sunday Independent predicting Gerry Adams wouldn’t get elected in Louth just five days before he topped the poll.

Think on this too. There are no SDLP MLAs in Fermanagh or Antrim. Of the 18 Assembly seats for Fermanagh, Tyrone and south Derry, we hold nine. Forget about a nationalist majority, we’re on the cusp of a republican majority west of the Bann! We’ve MLAs in all the Antrim constituencies after Oliver McMullan’s breakthrough.
And another wee success to take particular pride in: Deputy Mary Lou McDonald, Deputy Sandra McLellan and Senator Kathryn Reilly. Isn’t that just the way? You wait eight decades for another republican woman to get into the Oireachtas and then three of them come along at the same time.
It’s not all good, of course. Johnny Brady had the bad luck to hit the crossbar in Wicklow and Johnny McGibbons missed out in Upper Bann by a freakish wave of transfers. And, yes, Conall McDevitt (the smarmiest politician in Ireland?) got re-elected.
And there’s Blueshirts everywhere – a plague wandering across our land infecting our fine, simple people with their fanatical message of hate against the low-paid or the unionised or the vulnerable. What is support for carers next to the moral imperative of ensuring the bankers they went to UCD with are taken care of?
So we’ve a job to do to get rid of them but some people are already thinking of the next election. Elections and statistics expert Adrian Kavanagh in NUI Maynooth has calculated that a swing of less than two per cent to Sinn Féin would see us in line to make gains in eight constituencies (Cavan/Monaghan, Dublin Mid-West, Wicklow, Carlow/Kilkenny, Galway West, Waterford, Longford/Westmeath and Cork South-Central). That’d be a good start.
To finish, some words of advice to the present generation of elected republican activists from one who, like most of you, knows what it’s like to lose an election: “The election of a socialist to any public body . . . is only valuable insofar as it is the return of a disturber of the political peace.”
Maith thú, James Connolly.

Follow us on Facebook

An Phoblacht on Twitter

An Phoblacht Podcast

An Phoblacht podcast advert2

Uncomfortable Conversations 

uncomfortable Conversations book2

An initiative for dialogue 

for reconciliation 

— — — — — — —

Contributions from key figures in the churches, academia and wider civic society as well as senior republican figures

GUE-NGL Latest Edition ad

An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland