I was ‘Rabbitte-lite’ and even ‘the greyest of grey men’. A radio vox pop revealed no surge of popular enthusiasm, but did feature some people who had never heard of me.
Bertie Ahern welcomed me as the fourth Labour leader whom he would have to put through his hands, after having seen off the other three. As it turned out, I would soon be seeing him off. He was gone in just over six months, and I would go on to put three Fianna Fáil Leaders through mine instead.
Every leader has a vision and ambitions for their party. At the heart of mine was my sense that Labour itself had always lacked ambition. Only when Dick Spring lifted its sights in the late eighties and early nineties did Labour achieve significant electoral success with the election of Mary Robinson as President in 1990, and the so-called Spring Tide in 1992. The merger of Democratic Left and Labour in 1998 was intended to create a critical mass and a strengthened centre-left party capable of greater electoral success, but it had not yet achieved its potential. From the outset, I stated that my objective was to win close to thirty seats at the next general election. Both inside and outside the Party this was considered an unrealistic target, and some colleagues cautioned that I was making myself a hostage to fortune. But I was determined to set the Party’s sights beyond the usual twenty seats and 10 per cent of the vote.
To achieve this, I knew the Party would have to change dramatically, and there was not much time for it to do so, since the local and European elections were set for mid-2009. I had little more than eighteen months to find new and younger candidates, and to lay the foundations for a successful general election. Before that, my first Party Conference as Leader was set for mid-November, leaving me just two months to prepare for it. Unusually, it would not be televised: the Party had already held a one-day conference before the general election and this had taken up our broadcast entitlement for the year 2007.
Three days before the start of the conference, my mother, Celia, died. She had developed Alzheimer’s disease and her health had been in decline for the previous five or six years. During this time, I had the primary responsibility for her care, as my only brother, John, lives in the United States, and our step-father, Tommy Keane, had died in 2004. Though it meant I was constantly on the road between my own home in Shankill and hers in Caltra between 2002 and 2006, I managed, with help from wonderful neighbours and carers, especially Margaret Carney, to enable my mother to stay living in her own home for a long time: something I know she wanted. Caring for her over those years was probably the most personally rewarding work I have ever done, and it allowed me, in some sense, to repay her for the sacrifices she had made to give me the opportunities I’ve had in life.
I went from the funeral in Co. Galway to Wexford to deliver my first Leader’s speech, on Saturday, 17 November. With little time to prepare or rehearse, I was going straight onto the stage without even a chance to judge the mood of the Conference. I was emotionally very raw, and as I waited backstage I worried that I might not get through my opening words of thanks and appreciation to delegates for their sympathy and to all those who had travelled to Caltra. Somehow I managed it, and went on to deal with some of the key matters facing us as a Party. I told delegates that Labour, which had ‘led so much change in the country, must now have the courage to change itself. At every level of our organisation we need to do better,’ I declared, and the Conference accepted my motion to establish a ‘21st Century Commission’ to bring about the transformation that I felt was so urgently needed for the Party.
Over the following year, to my satisfaction, the Commission, chaired by accountant Greg Sparks, came forward with a wide range of proposals for a major overhaul of the structures and governance of the Party. Most importantly, we dealt with the out-moded way candidates were selected.
I remember before the 2004 local elections going to a mid-sized town to chair the Labour Party selection convention. There were just six members in the room. At the start of the meeting, the oldest man present stood up and declared, ‘I am the Labour man in this town!’ In effect, he was nominating himself. He had contested every local election unsuccessfully for nearly three decades, leaving Labour without a councillor to represent the people or the Party all those years. Despite my efforts at cajoling, no other candidate came forward, so ‘the Labour man’ was selected. And of course, to form, he went on to lose once again. In the course of discussions later in the meeting, I identified among the members an articulate young woman who I thought would have made a great candidate. When I asked her afterwards why she wouldn’t go forward, she confirmed my suspicions, saying that she was interested but, as she put it, ‘Sure, I couldn’t do that to him.’
Her attitude reflects the culture of decency among Labour members: reluctant to be ruthless, and respectful of service, experience and age. And while I admired it, I realised that traditional selection conventions in many constituencies were just not fit for purpose. They were not capable of bringing forward new candidates, or a candidate with some prospect of being elected! Good candidates are critical to electoral success, because in the Irish electoral system voters often express preferences for individual candidates, irrespective of party affiliation. The Commission recommended a new method, whereby the Party would interview prospective candidates; put a short-list before the selection convention, and let the local members then make the ultimate choice. This was a critical step in enabling us to bring on a new generation of candidates for the 2011 General Election.
All the Commission’s reforms would have to be approved by the Party Conference, which was planned for the end of November in Kilkenny. But after I got back from attending the US Democratic Party Convention in Denver, it became clear that the deadline would not be met. We decided to put the reforms to a subsequent Conference in Mullingar in early 2009, and to turn Kilkenny into a Conference concentrating on the economy, which by then had started to nosedive.
Ireland had become, in July 2008, the first Eurozone country to go into recession. Unemployment had increased by 80,000 in just one year. The Fianna Fáil/Green Government had brought forward the Budget to October and had introduced many unpopular cuts, including to the medical cards for over-70s. The latter had brought tens of thousands of pensioners onto the streets in protest and prefaced the difficult times that lay ahead for the country.
The Kilkenny Conference was my first televised Leader’s speech. It was very important that I do it well. I had been Leader for a year, and had, it was widely agreed, made good progress. I was making an impact in the Dáil, and the Party organisation was responding well to my reforms. However, there was still no major improvement in Party support. In fact, on the Saturday morning of my conference speech, my advisors, Mark Garrett and Colm O’Reardon, called to my hotel room to tell me there was bad news: a poll in a Sunday newspaper the next day was going to show a drop in Labour support.
We had to plough on regardless. Colm and my policy advisor, Jean O’Mahony, had worked with me to draft the speech. We decided it should be hopeful and optimistic, outlining solutions to the country’s growing problems, rather than just slamming the Government for everything. Barack Obama had just been elected President of the United States, so it was almost inevitable that some echoes of his rhetoric would find their way into the speech. I liked his now-iconic slogan, ‘Yes, we can’, which had been translated from Caesar Chavez’s ‘Sí, se puede’ among Obama’s Hispanic-American supporters. I thought about an Irish version: ‘Is féidir linn’. As in, ‘Is féidir linn daoine a chur ar ais ag obair. Is féidir linn gnóanna a mhéadú agus séirbhísí a leasú. Is féidir linn an tír a chur ar ais ar a cosa. Sea, is féidir linne freisin.’ Obama himself would later use the Irish version when he spoke in College Green during his visit in May 2011!
‘Is féidir linn’ was not the only slogan to make its debut in Kilkenny. Just before I went into the hall, my team told me that the members of Labour Youth intended to hold up posters declaring ‘Gilmore for Taoiseach’. And indeed they did.
The speech was a success. Mark Hennessy described it in the Irish Times as ‘a masterclass; the best that he has ever given and, probably, one of the finest orations given
