The Garret Fitzgerald roadshow - now booking for an extended run
The twenty-five foot high star came to life. From its dominating position behind the stage of the Sunset Club in Longford, outlined in red, white and two shades of green against a deep blue background, the star began a rhythmic blinking. The tiny lights embedded in the high blue ceiling added their own stardust imitations and for a few minutes it seemed as though Garret FitzGerald was about to finish his marathon constituency tour with all the taste, style and Panache of Richard Nixon. By: Gene Kerrigan.
On this, the last weekend of the tour that began in September and covered 44 constituencies over six months. FitzGerald made seven public appearances, met and spoke privately with nine separate groups or individuals, held two press conferences, was interviewed twice for RTE, attended a funeral and visited one convent, four hospitals and a bishop. The exercise covered three counties and lasted 54 hours, plus travelling from and to Dublin.
The giant star blinked one last time and was still, whoever had thrown the switch in the first place having been convinced that the light show didn't fit in with the prevailing mood of the tour. FitzGerald moved to the platform and explained when the standing ovation ended, that he was happy to be here this Saturday night in Longford for the last meeting of his constituency tour.
He'd been in Roscommon the night before and in Galway on Thursday. He explained to the audience that this was going to be their meeting. He would make a short speech and then the audience would make the running in the discussion.
This was a new Initiative in Irish politics, a real dialogue. 'And this wouldn't be the end of it. There was no reason why he couldn't get back to every constituency in the country at least twice in the next three years. By the time the meeting ended, ninety minutes later, the 400 people in the hall had had their enthusiasm aroused. As the crowd filed out an elderly man, a little unsteady on his feet, declared to anyone who would listen, that at last Fine Gael had a real leader .
"FINE GAEL is not a political party", Garret FitzGerald told a meeting of the Roscommon Constituency Executive at the end of his country-wide tour last month.
"It will be, but it isn't yet." The branches weren't registered, Executives were not meeting frequently enough or at all. Too many members were being shy about responding to the "£5 a brick" appeal for the new headquarters in Dublin. Things were going to have to change.
"We're not getting the information from the constituencies", FitzGerald complained. "Some of the names we've got on the books, the people are dead, or they stopped being branch secretaries ten years ago."
Twenty four hours later, in a corridor of the Annaly Hotel in Longford , there is an example of the results of disorganisation. Two women and a man are bombarding a party member with questions and accusations. One of the hundreds of letters sent out inviting party sympathisers to the meeting has been wrongly addressed. A coincidence of names has linked the names of a forty-five year old man to a fifteen year old girl on the same envelope. The postman has been scandalised. And a newspaper misprint has given. the complaining trio the wrong time and the wrong hotel for the meeting. There are hints that all of this was deliberate.
"I know what's going on", says the taller woman, "I know the track of the hatchet". She threatens to go to Pat Cooney out in the lobby and "put the knife into him." Then gleefully concludes, " Sure, what's the point. He's already had the knife put into him." All is not well in Fine Gael circles in Longford.
FitzGerald's greatest consolation is the Youth Movement. The young people are turning out in respectable numbers and staying behind to join up at the end of the meetings.
"You will elect your own youth officers, you will have your own meeting at the Ard Fheis in May, you will elect your own representatives to the National Executive."
He emphasises that by altering party structures to accommodate a youth movement he was ensuring that their voice would be listened to. He repeats this at the adult meetings, almost as a warning. "To create such a movement and then ignore the pressures it will generate would be foolish and would create cynicism among the young."
FitzGerald's trump card is a disarming honesty. As well as admitting the organisational mess he criticises the party's political deficiencies. No, we can't blame Fianna Fáil for that, we did the same thing when in government. Yes, we're short of policies. "We mustn't just be anti-Fianna Fáil " says a Roscommon Executive member, "we must get policies of our own." (The most recent educational policy dates from 1966). He asks questions of his audience, spells out possible answers and tells them it will be their job to evolve the policies.
One subject comes up so frequently that he cannot afford to ad lib. " Fine Gael for an Irish nationalism which embraces all traditions." He reels off the number of visits he has made to the North, the politicians of every hue to whom he has spoken.
"There's a rumour that Jack Lynch once spent a ten-day motoring holiday in the North at some point in the last thirty years. But I can't confirm it."
Such speeches, with reference too to the Fine Gael record on economic issues ("The party that abolished the Wealth Tax needn't tell us that we're the rich man's party"), are booster shots for a party that has been so heavily identified with anti-republicanism. The relief in the hall is palpable when the leader confirms by example that it's OK to knock the British and to aspire to unity.
FitzGerald's organisational changes and injections of confidence are designed to create Fine Gael as much as to reform it. He admits at meeting after meeting that he would be prepared again to coalesce with Labour, that there had been no significant differences with them in government.
But FitzGerald's attempts to pull the party towards an enlightened, and therefore effective, conservatism are not as well understood at the grassroots as he would like. A question and answer session at a meeting is more of a national version of a constituency clinic than it is a dialogue.
When the chairman of the public meeting in Roscommon explained the . presence of camera and lights as due to the fact that "Mike McCarthy and his crew are doing a report for PM", there was. a moment's hesitation. Then the crowd began to applaud every bit as enthusiastically as when FitzGerald spoke of the party's economic policies. They were applauding anything that looked like it might get them on to the First Team again.
Before leaving Galway at 10.15 on Friday morning FitzGerald took a six inch thick file of papers from the boot of the Peugeot. Within a couple of minutes of clearing the city limits he was unwrapping a tiny handheld dictating machine. The file contained letters, some going back as far as late October, which had' not yet been answered. Invitations, complaints, queries and advice from every nook and cranny in the country. Only some are important, but all must be answered. A glance through each paragraph to note the relevant points, a reply murmured into the machine and the letter is tucked up under his chin. The older ones receive a reply prefixed by an apology and explanation for the delay. Others are tucked down by the gear lever. "Not needing immediate attention". Above his head in the front passenger seat there's a lamp with a flexible lead. Darkness will not interfere with the demands of the democratic process.
FitzGerald's voice strays into the upper register when he wants to display bemusement, amusement or amazement. He combines all three in a "What do I do with this?" and a wave of a three page handwritten letter. He reads from it, a rambling, incoherent and pointless letter. Finally, after more expressions of wonder at the reasons why this kind of letter gets written, he thumbs the machine into life and says, "I received your letter, thank you very much, yours sincerely, etc." Ted Nealon rocks with laughter in the back seat, then leans forward and says "Ah, come on, Garret, you've got to give her more than that." FitzGerald sighs and shifts through the letter looking for something on which he can comment. He erases the first reply and picks points from the letter which he can "note with interest" and "give some thought to".
When a party leader visits the constituencies he comes demanding effort from the local members. Public meetings must be arranged and advertised and a percentage of the faithful turned out to attend. The rest of the time he spends in the area is given over to the local TDs and councillors. He is their property, to be used like a holy emblem that those in his proximity may benefit. If FitzGerald is to further his ambitions for the party, the party machinery must be allowed to use him to further its own ambitions. FitzGerald has no love for the process but he bows to it. Even to that most irrelevant, exploitative and obscene feature known as the hospital visit.
As he pulled into the drive of the first hospital on the schedule, FitzGerald's driver, Pat Magee, supposed that there wouldn't be any time for a rest that evening.
"No", sighed FitzGerald, "That's not built into the programme. One's supporters are quite pitiless in these matters", he added with a grin.
So the visit began and the local TD, a former nurse, showed off her catch to the hospital dignitaries. And as FitzGerald posed for pictures and then began the plod through the wards, the tea trolleys trundled on regardless, patients were discharged, a relative of a man who had suddenly been taken ill walked nervously from one end of the corridor to another, and a porter said that, yes, they get a lot of this kind of thing and it's a bloody nuisance.
By the time FitzGerald got around to visiting his fourth hospital, St. Joseph's, a home for geriatric patients in Longford, he was tired, suffering from a stomach upset and no longer able to put much enthusiasm into his jokes about the obligations of party leadership.
With Councillor Seamus Finnan, Senator Tom "The Fine-Gael-flag-flying-when-you -didn 't-have-a-TD-in-Longford" Kilbride, and Gerry L'Estrange, TD, in his wake, he visits first the Dayroom. Up to two dozen old people sit there, most of them oblivious to the blaring TV. Some look quizzically at the smiling man who offers them his hand. Occasionally there is recognition. FitzGerald holds his face muscles in a fixed smile and one can only wonder at the thoughts running around his head.
He moves to the first ward and L'Estrange greets the pale, drawn faces with, "Look who's come to see you!" When FitzGerald has shaken hands and moved on to the next room, talking to the sister in a tone and with the kind of questions the Queen of England uses when greeting celebrities at a film premiere, L'Estrange hangs behind to answer a man who has asked, "Who was that?" Every room in the corridor is visited, and every corridor in the hospital.
Only once did FitzGerald give a rational purpose to this aspect of the inanities of our great democratic process. Scheduled to meet Bishop Cathal Daly, a personal friend and political opponent, he escaped the attentions of local politicians and the press and turned the duty into a personal visit and a chance to relax.
But the inanities dominate. At the Convent of Mercy in Longford FitzGerald climbs from his car and asks Kilbride what exactly the nuns do, what is their Order. Two minutes later he is slumped in an armchair in a reception room dominated by a huge statue of Blessed Virgin and saying, "You do nursing as well as teaching, don't you?" Pale and visibly unwell, he rises several times as a series of nuns enter the room to shake his hand. After a few minutes of awkward crosstalk he sits at the top of the sixteen-foot long, brilliantly polished table at the centre of the room and manages to take some of the element of farce out of the situation by initiating an intelligent conversation about education.
Forty hours before, at an after meeting discussion in a back room of the Skeffington Arms in Galway, an earnest young Fine Gael supporter asked FitzGerald if this is not what it's all about. Getting. down to the hard slog of constituency work, doing it better than Fianna Fáil, gaining the loyalty of the voters. That's the only way you're going to get your overall majority.
"Yes", says FitzGerald, "you've got to do that. But what happens when you get the overall majority? Where are your policies?"
The discussion centres around FitzGerald and Michael D. Higgins, the Labour candidate who failed to win a seat in the election and with whom FitzGerald had crossed verbal swords earlier at the meeting. Higgins disagrees with the votemongering tactics necessary to win a seat, finds it distasteful and dishonest. Yet he had to do it. He mimes a TD arriving in the Dáil on Tuesday, emptying from his case a shoal of letters through which he will wade until Thursday. FitzGerald has only humourous fantasy solutions to the conflicting demands of national politics and constituency "politics". The vagaries of the Senate election process, too, come under scrutiny.
"When I first ran for the Senate I was given a rule of thumb". says FitzGerald. "Halve the number who say they'll vote for you - and take 20% off those whom you know will vote for you. I used both systems and it worked out at 65 votes. In the event I got 64."
"We lost a good man when Michael didn't make it to the Senate", says one of the group.
"Yes", FitzGerald agreed soberly, "it's an eccentric system".
"The trouble with Michael D. is that he's a poet, not an economist, not a statistician!" said FitzGerald, and the audience at the Political Discussion Society in UCG laughed and applauded.
Higgins worked up a fine sense of indignation against the gombeen men, past and present, and castigated the class system without once using the phrase. FitzGerald played his role as the hard-headed but enlightened and progressive supporter of the system, appreciative of his opponent's good intentions but impatient with his romanticism.
"We are not conservatives and we are not socialists", was his standard line in speaking to the youth groups. "We are formulating policies within those parameters - within those limits - in accordance with the basic ideals of Christianity. "
Somewhere in between. It's the FitzGerald ideal. On his party's record on repression he says that the problem was to find the right balance between security and civil rights. On unemployment it's a problem of finding the fulcrum which will balance the supply of and demand for labour. His statistician's mind seeks the average, the common denominator. On the national question he repeats at different meettings that when Ireland is playing England at Twickenham we all shout for the same side - even the DUP.
The search for the middle ground and the effort to drag Fine Gael in that direction not only produces some rather strange debating points - Twickenham! - but it carries the con tradiction that a party that is all things to all men is one that will have to gloss over a lot of issues. A few minutes after FitzGerald had told an audience in Roscommon that the class war structure in Ireland must be ended ("other countries brought it to an end years ago"), a questioner asked what Fine Gael proposed to do with the unions, "who have taken over this country." FitzGerald, undaunted, gave the standard middle-of-the-road answer. Unofficial strikes are the problem and Fine Gael would seek with the trade union leaders to find an answer, to cooperate in the national interest. The trade union leaders are afraid to negotiate with Fianna Fáil who might seek to control the unions, "but they trust us". Partisan point scoring aside, it was an accurate explanation of the current government/employer strategy in most modern industrial countries. Approach the unions with open arms rather than clenched fists. Disarm them with a bearhug instead of a punch. The questioner rose again, unsatisfied. "You had four and a half years to deal with the unions and you didn't do it". To this unequivocal class warrior FitzGerald concedes, "You have a fair point".
The statistician must be aware of the figures that show that the percentage of those who sign on the dole each week and get no payment is almost as high as the percentage of those getting pay related benefits. And that four-fifths of the unemployed are getting the absolute minimum payments. Yet, when the inevitable question about "dole handouts" is thrown up FitzGerald suggests that the maximum payment should be reduced by 1 0%. He decries the Irish distaste for informing because it allows "widespread abuse" of the social welfare system and, "Every time someone defrauds the dole system we, who are in the system and can't get out of it, have to pay."
In the back room of the Skeffington Arms a young woman told FitzGerald about Cosgrave's visit to Galway before the general election, of the theatre group which protested against represssion and of the beating they got from the Fine Gael crowd. FitzGerald deplored such behaviour and said that a bit of heckling improves the fun at a meeting.
"But why", the young woman asked, "do the kind of people who do that all seem to join Fine Gael?"
FitzGerald said that they don't, they're in all three parties. But that young woman's image of the party, an image tinted by the memory of blue shirts, an image deplored by a lot of the young people who have joined Fine Gael, is one which is clearly far from deplored by the union bashers and those who think in terms of "dole handouts".
Steering Fine Gael down the middle of the political road IS a difficult task when the wheels have a rightward bias. And the concessions which FitzGerald makes to the unashamed hardline right wing mirror the concessions which his liberal nature has had to make to the realities of attempting to preserve stability within his chosen parameters.