Brand of brothers

American companies are usually considered to be at the forefront of attempts to push the boundaries of possibility when it comes to branding things, but in Ireland, two parties - Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael - are true innovators. They have dispensed entirely with the thing a brand is usually attached to, says Nyder O'Leary, and have become all brand.

Wednesday night saw the last of the seventy-nine Leaders’ Debates, leaving the onlooker searching among the say-nothing soundbites for any significant moment. In short, there were none. However, the most telling moment was probably Mícheál Martin’s consistent attack of Gerry Adams in the Front Line’s 5-way effort. Martin is a skilled performer, albeit handicapped by his own arrogance, and he landed a superficially impressive blow or two on Adams (even if his best lines were generally clear examples of Here’s One I Prepared Earlier). As it’s now more or less universally accepted that debates should only be viewed as exercises in self-presentation, it should be noted that on those terms Martin gave a sharp and smart performance.

However, a visitor to Ireland, armed only with policy documents and a fifteen-minute precis of Irish politics, would have been nonplussed at Martin’s choice of target. Regardless of how well they do on polling day, Sinn Féin will not finish up in government. So why would the sitting party of government even bother with a sustained barrage against the man least likely to have any of his policies implemented, while making only the occasional jab at Enda Kenny (whose economic policies are, at best, no less far-fetched)? On the face of it, it was perverse.

The answer’s clear enough. Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil, the two self-styled republican parties, have some overlap in their voter bases. Fianna Fáil have clearly decided that many of the voters they have haemorraged to Fine Gael can’t be won back, and realise they’re quite possibly in a struggle with Sinn Féin to be the Dáil’s third-largest party. So far, so obvious.

It’s possible, at this point, that the aforementioned visitor might comment on the underlying grotesquery of the spectacle; in what was supposed to be - in theory, at least - a national debate about national policy, Mícheál Martin engaged in a protracted, entirely uninformative bout of party-based electioneering. This hasn’t been called out by any significant voice that I can see, perhaps because it’s such a common sight, and therefore considered to be just another example of How Politics Works.

To the archetypical Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael supporter, this sort of tactic probably seems entirely unremarkable and proper. It’s easy to forget that a member from the died-in-the-wool heritage, regardless which side they take in the FF/FG Civil War argument, sees their party as being fundamentally bound up with the foundation of the state. In other words, people like Martin and Kenny are convinced their party is just part of what Ireland is. That’s why they’re never shy of party-politicking in the national arena, as evidenced by Fine Gael’s abortive heave of last year, or Fianna Fáil’s mass minister resignation that snapped even the Green Party’s bubblegum patience. They don’t mind mixing party and national politics, because they don’t see any distinction between the two.

And yet that arrogance, and delusional self-importance, isn’t quite the full picture. Everything Mícheál Martin has done since he became leader of Fianna Fáil is nothing to do with politics at all; it is an attempt to reposition the Fianna Fáil brand in a marketplace where they have lost traction. His debate performance was an attempt to portray Fianna Fáil as the more wholesome outlet for Republicanism without the dangerous lefty rhetoric and dodgy past; Fairtrade Sinn Féin, if you like. The most useful analogue for Ireland’s leading parties is businesses in a marketplace, not institutions dedicated to public service.

Martin has, by turns, tried to cast Fianna Fáil as a party of reform, as wise heads who’ve seen the financial forces of hell unleashed and learned from their mistakes, and as a truculent no-shit opposition party who’ll hold the government to account. This isn’t anything to do with policy, it’s simply an exercise in product association. In that respect, Martin’s manouevrings are identical to Fine Gael’s extraordinarily vapid 5-Point Plan, or their completely arbitrary target to cut 30,000 public sector workers. These are designed to broadly link their product with the abstract ideal of a small-state business paradise, without saying exactly how to achieve it. Fine Gael don’t publish policy detail for exactly the same reason that Marks and Spencer don’t sell chocolate puddings by listing the ingredients; dissecting their economic policy is like pointing out that Red Bull doesn’t actually give you wings.

This notion of the party-as-brand is by no means unique to Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. Between ducking Martin’s jabs, Gerry Adams's repeated use of the word “Republicanism” (which frequently made no sense at all in context); wasn’t argument, it was an attempt to link Sinn Féin with a particular aspiration. You can trace the branding of politics, at least locally, to the emptiness of Tony Blair’s glossy creation of New Labour; before that, Margaret Thatcher turned to Saatchi and Saatchi to create a new brand identity for her new Conservative Party. All parties engage in a branding exercise to a greater or lesser extent.

The difference with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is just one of degree. They are parties whose fundamentals are framed entirely in terms of Civil War concerns that are no longer applicable to anything they see around them. The set of core principles, something you’d expect to be just there in any political grouping (if only by contrast, in the “this isn’t what Labour should be about” sense), is entirely absent from both parties. This is evidenced by the numerous times they have unfussily realigned themselves from centre-left to centre-right, or vice-versa, depending on whether the seats added up with the PDs or Labour at the time. Their “values” are adapted to their need to be market leaders. These parties don’t use branding as a tool for their advancement, like other parties. Rather, they’re composed of nothing but branding.

Ultimately, this ends up with leaders who believe their role to be shouting louder platitudes to people who already agree with them. The upper echelons of Ireland’s two largest parties have got there, naturally enough, by believing absolutely in the power of their brand. To a died-in-the-wool Fianna Fáiler (or Fine Gaeler, by the same token), be they footsoldier or prospective leader, the world is a better place if Fianna Fáil is in power simply because they are Fianna Fáil. What’s good for Fianna Fáil is good for Ireland by definition, so any amount of policy doublespeak or blatant electioneering becomes automatically justifiable. This leads to parties that can only ever drift with the prevailing orthodoxy - we certainly can’t expect them to challenge orthodoxies, because that isn’t the sort of thing a well-managed brand in a commercial environment does.

One of Stewart Lee’s most powerful lines comes at the end of his 90’s Comedian show: “A symbol is only as worthy of respect as the values of the people who appropriate it.” Ireland’s leading parties hold a precisely contrary view. Simply by attaching themselves to a symbol, any actions or decisions become automatically based on integrity and the national interest. It doesn’t matter how many times the party mutates its core principles, because those principles - whatever they may be at the time - are virtuous solely because the party holds them. We are then left with institutions composed of associations and belief. No plans, no beliefs, no policies beyond tabloid slogans; creatures of 5-point Plans and space-filling empty statements. They are bodies composed of rosettes, logos, the colour-coordinated graphics on a blank page, the hollow identity these things imply are all that really matters to them.

And after all the financial upheaval of the last four years, and for all the talk of change and reform, Ireland’s citizens find themselves being asked the same question as ever. So, which one do you prefer, then?