The Trib (4 page)

The old management adage applies. If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always got. And, for Labour, Fine Gael and the Greens, that ain't enough.

If they keep doing what they've always done in the past year, they'll keep getting – post-election – what they've always got. Seats on the opposition benches.

20 January 2008

‘M
ister Haughey's on the phone, looking for Tom,' my assistant told me. ‘But Tom's not here. Will you talk to him?'

My heart did a bungee jump. Forget that cliché about hearts going into boots. Mine visited my extremities, then bounced back and hit my larynx. Not that Haughey was ever unpleasant to any of us. It was just that if he was ringing at 10 a.m., and looking for Tom Savage, then he had a problem unlikely to be solvable by me.

I figured the problem had to do with the Progressive Democrats. The new party was only a few weeks old at that point. But for a tiny newborn, it was creating one hell of a stir – mainly by inspired timing. A high-profile defection from a major political party would occupy the national attention for one week. Then there would be a lull, during which that party would convince itself that the departure wasn't a loss but a gain. At the same time, media and public would wonder if that was the end of it.

It never was. Just as the national pulse returned to normal, a press conference or photocall or mass meeting would be announced, and a high profiler from another big party would join the PDs. Even if you had no interest in politics, you were reached by the dramatic tension. If you had an interest in politics, you got sucked into the latest conspiracy theory. Charlie McCreevy or Seamus Brennan were definitely going to be the next movers from Fianna Fáil, you were told.

When McCreevy and Brennan's posteriors stayed glued to FF seats, the explanation was that their tenure was temporary and that they'd be departing in a matter of weeks. Theories abounded, and the PDs did what Mary Harney later defined as their great strength: in media terms, they punched way above their weight.

It figured, therefore, that Haughey's problem related to this ongoing scenario. It did. In a tense growl, he told me that Bobby Molloy would be walking from Fianna Fáil within hours, his defection neatly timed to ensure that Charlie Haughey would be door-stepped at the entrance to (if I remember rightly) the Burlington Hotel by a phalanx of journalists wanting to get his reaction to the latest runner from the ranks.

Haughey had wanted Tom Savage's advice on whether he should simply walk past the media or say something to them, and if he was going to say something, what he should say.

‘What's your own instinct?' I asked.

The question was asked, partly because only a half-witted consultant leaps into the breach, offering advice that's going to run counter to what the individual wants to do, before they've found out what exactly it is the individual wants to do. It was also playing for time. I hadn't been paying that much attention to the progress of the PDs.

Obviously reading from some notes, he monotoned his way through a litany of the proud history and present-day vibrancy of the Fianna Fáil party. (Whenever FF talk vibrancy, it's a dead giveaway. They're goosed and know it. Whenever Fine Gael talk about the need for a national debate, it's a version of the same thing. They want two other people to argue with each other and come to the FG point of view.) ‘No,' I said, suddenly certain. ‘No, you won't say that.'

‘I must send a strong message to the grassroots,' he responded.

‘Frig the grassroots,' I said. ‘The grassroots you always have with you. It's the waverers you have to reach today, and you're not going to reach them by making those kind of predictable threatened noises.'

With the infinite patience he could muster under pressure, he asked me what precisely I was recommending.

‘No speech,' I said. ‘No statement. You're going to arrive at the Burlo in high good humour. You're not going to rush past them. You're going to get out of the car as if it was a surprise birthday party. You're going to pick off individual journalists you know in the crowd and tease them unmercifully, by name. You're going to make the whole lot of them laugh and while they're laughing, you're going to wave and disappear into the hotel.'

‘I would never do that.'

‘Mr Haughey, you'll do whatever you decide. I'm just telling you what you should do.'

The conversation ended with a growl and a banged-down phone. A few hours later, my assistant slid an evening paper in front of me.

Big picture of the man, surrounded by microphone-holding journalists, with the caption ‘An ebullient Charlie Haughey outside the Burlington Hotel earlier today'. The impact of Molloy's move could never be glossed over, but Haughey had at least stiffened his own party by appearing to be unbothered by this, the latest episode in a brilliantly planned wave.

Now, the process is happening in reverse.

The latest negative is the letter from one of the four founders of the PDs, Paul Mackay, urging members of the party to tell HQ that they had to get out of government in order to revive their fortunes. Mackay will have infuriated a good portion of the PDs and interested another portion of them. It doesn't matter. He's not only barking up the wrong tree, he's barking up the wrong shrub.

The PDs were a necessary, indeed vital catalyst in Irish politics. Mary Harney gave us smog-free cities, the party deregulated some areas in serious need of deregulation, and tax was reformed. A lot done.

The reality behind the electoral meltdown and the rumours that one of their two TDs is now negotiating with Fianna Fáil with a view to conversion, is that Fianna Fáil subsumes small parties and gains a new sense of direction in the process.

Or put it another way: the PDs may no longer be necessary, because Fianna Fáil has learned how to be them.

16 May 2010

A
story in the news last week reminded me of an old friend. Before I get to that story, I'd like to tell you about him. Forgive me for being nostalgic, the pay-off is important. Brian and I were thirteen the first time we met. I wasn't impressed. He looked a bit of a shaper as he marched around the schoolyard, clicking the studded heels of his George Webbs, with his hands in the pockets of an oversized Eskimo anorak.

We fought – I can't remember why. It was one of those ‘hold-me-back' affairs, with a flurry of missed groin-kicks and the loser ending up in a headlock. Brian, as it turned out, was no hard-man: he was rubbish at fighting. It was something we had in common.

The scrap was a sort of pathetic, pubescent, bonding ritual. We became best friends, constantly messing about to disguise our terror at being weedy First Years, surrounded by giant, moody Older Lads. We slagged everything off – as all insecure thirteen-year-olds do to deflect attention from themselves. Clothes, hairstyles, even bikes were fair game.

Brian had a twenty-gear Asahi racer, while I had a crock of crap masquerading as a Chopper. He never let me forget it was crap – especially as it didn't have a crossbar.

‘It's a girl's bike.'

‘It's not. It's just ... streamlined. It's a streamlined Chopper.'

‘But it folds in half.'

‘It's a Chopper.'

‘It's a girl's bike and you're a girl.'

The bike was eventually ‘stolen'.

Our afternoons were spent listening to records or cycling around ‘scoping out the talent'. At night we'd slip through back gardens, avoiding fathers filling coal scuttles, to steal apples that we never ate. We whispered instructions to each other on a shared set of walkie-talkies. Their range was about twenty feet. There was no need for them: we could have spoken normally and still have heard each other.

Brian and I learned how to smoke together. We could only afford cheap tipped cigars. They were disgusting and tasted like burning doc leaves (I once smoked a doc leaf). I accidentally stubbed one out on my arm while swinging from a tree, making monkey noises to annoy the lawn bowlers at Moran Park. The scar lasted for a year. I told my mother that it was a result of two wasps stinging me on the same spot, one after the other. She didn't buy it.

Brian and I rode around Dún Laoghaire with our cigars clamped between our teeth, thinking we looked like Clint Eastwood. We didn't see ourselves as two short-arses playing at being adults from the safety of childhood.

We went to our first disco together, herky-jerk dancing like mad to Bad Manners to impress the girls. The more we ran on the spot, the more they liked it – so local stud, Macker, told us. What he didn't tell us was that he had spread the word among the girls that we were ‘special needs boys' from a care home.

‘We're ‘in' there,' I said, as one waved sympathetically at us. We ran faster on the spot to impress her even more.

Brian went on my first date with me. Not as my date, obviously – he came along to act as witness in the event that I ‘scored'. When you're fourteen, ‘scoring' is everything.

He cycled behind me to the venue, Sandycove train station.

‘What's that smell?' he shouted at the back of my head. ‘It's like oil and cat piss.'

‘Don't know what you're talking about,' I cycled faster, knowing full-well what the smell was. It was the contents of a bottle of my dad's Eclipsol hair tonic. We skidded into the lane overlooking the tracks.

‘What's up with your hair?' Brian was examining my forehead. A mixture of sweat and hair restorer was trickling down my nose.

‘I haven't washed it for a week,' I said, ‘and I used Ted's hair stuff. It helps to keep the bounce down.' Bouncy hair was for girls. My mother always said my freshly-washed hair reminded her of her own.

‘You've got my hair.'

‘No I don't.'

‘Yes you do.' My father ran the palm of his hand over his bald head. ‘Don't worry, you'll be like me some day. Then you won't have to worry about having bouncy hair and looking like ... Barry Manilow.' Bullseye.

Brian leaned his bike against the wall. ‘Go on, then.' I could hear him chuckling as I nervously approached my ‘girlfriend'.

‘What's that smell?' asked one of her friends. ‘It's like pee.'

‘Why's your hair greased up like that? Are you trying to look like Elvis?' I had hoped I looked like Elvis.

‘Did Elvis ever work as a toilet cleaner in a Pet Shop?'

‘Or an old folk's home?' Brian fell over his bike laughing.

I didn't score. The love affair ended soon afterwards.

The day Brian moved down the country was the bleakest of my young life. I couldn't tell him I was going to miss him. You didn't say that to your mates. We played ‘Baggy Trousers' on my Lloytron tape recorder over and over again as he unsuccessfully attempted to blow up his tree house with bangers. ‘I'm not leaving it for the next family,' he said, despite my protests. Looking back, he was scorching the earth of his childhood.