compensate for some of their traditional overspending, they attempted to remove the automatic medical card to which citizens over 70 years old had been entitled. It brought thousands of angry pensioners onto the streets in an impressive show of strength.
The sudden economic implosion left people shocked at first, then frightened, and eventually angry. An entire generation of people with little or no experience of hard times were suddenly faced with the personal financial consequences of a recession. The past decade and a half had been one of optimism, growth, rising living standards, and unfortunately, massive borrowing. The payback would be different from anything Ireland had ever experienced. But it would not be the first time that some had lived through hard times, including myself.
I had grown up in rural Ireland in the 1960s when emigration was the norm, and I graduated from university in the mid-70s to see many of my contemporaries forced to leave the country to get work. I worked as a trade union official through the 1980s and recall the trauma of regular job losses. On many occasions I had to bring news of redundancy to meetings of union members, and I spent many hours in factory canteens talking through crises with men and women in their 40s and 50s who thought they would never work again.
I therefore had some understanding of the apprehension that now swept through homes across the country and I was determined that, in critiquing the Government’s performance, the Labour Party should always offer hope, clear solutions and a way out of the crisis. The situation and outlook were indescribably bad, but I felt things would get worse if the public mood turned to despair.
I travelled the country, addressing Party meetings, visiting workplaces, community centres, and accompanying candidates in walkabouts through towns and villages. We listened and gathered as much detail as possible on what people were going through, what they could be facing ahead and what solutions might help. These tours had an election focus; first, the local and European elections, in the first half of 2009; then the second Lisbon Referendum, in the autumn of 2009; and from then on, the general election.
Labour’s rise in the opinion polls came in phases. Through the summer of 2008, the Red C polls were showing Labour around its traditional 10 per cent. By the end of the year, it had nudged up to 13/14 per cent. The big breakthrough came in a series of polls in 2009.
I spent Thursday 12 February campaigning with Councillor Aodhán Ó Ríordáin in his new electoral area in Dublin North Central, visiting a school in Clontarf, meeting a community group campaigning for better bus services in Marino, a GAA club in Donnycarney, and eventually attending a meeting above a pub in Fairview to officially launch Aodhán’s campaign for re-election to the City Council. Broadcaster Eamon Dunphy had agreed to perform the launch, and as we gathered around before making our speeches, I was called out to a phone call from Tony Heffernan. He informed me that the IPSOS/MRBI poll in the next day’s Irish Times would show Labour on 22 per cent, only four points behind Fianna Fáil, who had fallen to 26 per cent. I knew it was just one poll, but couldn’t help feeling that the tectonic plates of Irish politics were beginning to shift. Fianna Fáil had never been this low, nor Labour so high.
Two weeks later the good news continued. A Red C poll in the Sunday Business Post showed Labour on 22 per cent and Fianna Fáil down to 23 per cent. We were now facing into the local and European elections with the wind behind us. The question was, could we convert favourable opinion polls into votes and seats in the elections on 5 June.
Our biggest challenge related to candidates and organisation. Outside the big urban centres, Labour was not organised at all or only minimally in many constituencies. In many Local Electoral Areas we had no candidate and no prospect of a candidate. Something drastic had to be done about this. I recruited David Leach to co-ordinate the campaign and Mags Murphy, who had worked in local radio, and had a good knowledge of the Party and local media, to trawl the country, especially the northern half, head hunting possible candidates. She, together with regional organisers George Cummins in Munster and Brian McDowell in Leinster, came up with several new faces for the Party to consider.
We had just one Member in the European Parliament: Proinsias de Rossa in Dublin. I persuaded Proinsias to stand one last time and he reluctantly agreed. The previous summer I had consulted the members of the parliamentary party in the Munster constituency. None of the TDs wished to stand for Europe, so the choice came down to the senators.
Senator Alan Kelly appeared to me to be the best prospect. He was from Tipperary and looked like he would be the only candidate from that county. He also possessed a great campaigning energy. Even if he didn’t win, a run in the European elections would at least assist him in the general election. I floated the idea to him in a conversation in my office in Leinster House. He, shortly after, arranged a breakfast meeting in the Westbury Hotel between himself, his brother Declan who flew in that morning from New York, Mark Garrett and I. We talked through the pros and cons of his candidacy, and he eventually agreed to run, provided we held the selection convention before the summer break, which would give him most of the year to campaign. I agreed and the convention was arranged for Saturday 25 July in the Silver Springs Hotel, Cork.
Then, unexpectedly, another candidate stepped forward. Arthur Spring, a young businessman in Tralee and nephew of Dick, had been expected to stand in the local elections for Tralee Town Council and Kerry County Council but now announced that he wished to stand for Europe. Within the Party I was put under considerable pressure to drop Kelly in favour of Spring. The argument was that the Spring name would harvest more votes than an unknown Senator from Tipperary, whose name had never appeared on a ballot before. I was repeatedly pressed to postpone the convention until the autumn. I refused. I thought a selection contest would be a good start to the campaign. It was intensely fought. At one point I felt it was getting a bit too rough and I asked the Chairman of the Parliamentary Party, Jack Wall, to travel to Newcastle West to meet both men and to cool things down a bit. Jack reported back that I should stop worrying; the future of the Party was secure with such fine young candidates available, and to let them at it.
Saturday 25 July was sunny and warm in Cork, as the buses from Tralee, Killarney, Nenagh, and Thurles pulled up in front of the Silver Springs Hotel. I had travelled there earlier to meet privately with Arthur and Alan and seek agreement on what each would say after the convention so that Party unity in Munster would be assured. As Jack Wall had indicated, there was no cause for worry: the two had already met that morning and worked out everything themselves.
Kelly won the nomination, and ran one of the most thorough and energetic campaigns I have ever seen. It included a rap song and endorsements from many well-known figures, such as rugby legend Peter Clohessy.
I had great difficulty finding a European candidate for the Leinster constituency. None of the parliamentary party would stand. I pressed Willie Penrose, Dominic Hannigan, and Liz McManus in particular, but they would not agree. I also spoke, unsuccessfully, to a number of suitable high-profile figures. I was getting desperate when out of the blue I was approached at a business dinner in Dublin by somebody whom I had known since my student days. He wondered if I had considered running two candidates in Dublin, and mentioned that Nessa Childers, daughter of the late President Erskine Childers, and at the time a Green Party councillor, might be interested. I had already agreed a one-candidate strategy with Proinsias de Rossa and I was not going to go back on that. I wondered, though, if Nessa might fit the bill for Leinster.
The Childers family was from Wicklow. Nessa’s grandfather, Erskine Childers, whose yacht The Asgard had smuggled guns into Howth harbour in 1914, had later been arrested in Wicklow during the Civil War and was held in Wicklow Gaol before his execution in 1922. Nessa had been a member of the Labour Party up to 2004, when she had sought a nomination for the local elections in the Clonskeagh Local Electoral Area where she then lived. She was unexpectedly defeated for the nomination at the selection convention, and she took it badly. I was the Party’s National Director of Elections at the time and I offered to have her added as a candidate in some other electoral area, but she declined and left the Party to stand
