FOR the people on the couches elections trigger a sort of mean blood lust. Familiar enough. You watch the bullfight for the possibility of blood, the motor racing for the chance of seeing a crash, the gymnastics for the falls from the narrow beam and, best of all, watching elections for the drawn faces of the losers.
From the time Sean O'Rourke cranked up the wireless and John Bowman and Brian Farrell stepped uneasily into the centre of the studio looking like the wax museum replicas of old Eurovision presenters, we had only one thing on our minds. Send on the losers.
Losers. Bless their haunted souls. Losers. Ah, the pale drawn features, stiff upper lips, the dwindling popularity, the defiant concession speeches. Losers. The people who are always left standing up when the music stops. Losers. The alchemists who dissolve politics into disaster.
Saturday was draft day for the class of 97. Walk towards the darkness then Niamh, Joan, Paddy, et al. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again and you'll be promising stuff and waving manifestos.
Beautiful losers. By and large they went gracefully "accepting the verdict of democracy" and giving the impression that they were going to a better place. They remember their PR training right till the end. "We're going out," they said, "we may be some time." Too beautiful. Hardly anybody loses ugly anymore. Nobody stands on a chair in a smoky hall and curses the ingrate hoors from the west of the county, nobody vows, never to go to another constituency funeral until the dirt has been, trampled down on the last of the treacherous double dealers that got the grants. Three cheers and future surpluses then for Toddy O'Sullivan who went down jabbing the accusing finger at the scurvy curs in Independent Newspapers.
"I'm calling on Dick Spring, as a friend," said Toddy, eyes watery, "to do a service to the party and to the country and give his side of the story, to clear the air as regards Independent Newspapers. It didn't just happen that the Labour Party came under this attack." Paddy Harte, the long serving Donegal TD, departed the stage dishing it out sweet and dishing it out sour. "I'd say to my wife," said Paddy "that the politics is over. She's getting her husband back 36 years later and a little the worse for wear maybe. I'd say to the establishment too that when I earned promotion, they never gave it to me. They reaped the whirlwind today." Losers are compulsive viewing.
Pulp reality. If you can't have two horses yourself, there is no greater pleasure than seeing your neighbour's horse die.
Ray Burke knows. Ray Burke was the first to be elected on Saturday afternoon, giving broadcasters plenty of opportunity to remind him of a quote from an election past, when he was asked his view of the sufferings of the Progressive Democrats. "Couldn't happen to nicer people," Ray had chortled in his big bluff way.
Indeed. Fast forward and cut to one of the nicest of the nice. In democracy they say you never know who the messenger will be. For Michael McDowell the messenger was, well, Joe Duffy, trailing him around the RDS like a vulture with lame oneliners. Heh heh. "He's just walking up and down saying `there are no tragedies in a democracy, no tragedies in a democracy'. It's his mantra," chirped Joe over the early morning wireless. "He doesn't look as sad as Pat Upton does though." There is no more dignified way for a Rottweiler to be put to sleep than to have Joe Duffy trail him for a day, chirping jokey colour pieces out to the populace and announcing that the Rottwieler doesn't look as sad as Pat Upton. Surely it's how the Rottweiler would have wished it.
"Michael is a fighter," said the supportive PD talking head in the studio. "Doesn't matter if he's a fighter when the votes are on the other side of the box," cackled Charlie McCreevy, fresh from a grim reapers convention.
Losers are great gas. The Progressive Democrats had the exquisite misfortune, perfect for losers, to be flavour of the month in the wrong month. As they left Helen Keogh behind in the trenches early on, Mary Harney, Mairin Quill, Liz O'Donnell and the Rottweiler were all clinging on.
Telly brought us news of them in slow drips. Mary Harney left wondering what way Sinn Fein transfers would treat her went close to the brink of the losers pit.
TV is selective. We only get to see the bigtime losers, the losers whose fate is bound up with the fate of the country, the defining losers of the era. Lots of hard Labour faces trooping past then, but we don't get to glimpse the charismatic Maria McCool of Dublin North West whose 13 votes (beaten out by spoils, Maria) could mark the dowdy start of a mass movement.
We never got to see if a shiver ran down the blessed spine of Angela Keaveney, Christian Solidarity Party (Dublin North) as the returning officer called out the words "Keaveney, Angela, Six ... Six ... Six.
We got big guns, the newly decommissioned big guns. "We've done so much work for Dublin West," said Joan Burton. Go on Joan, enjoy it. On election day, if you're not blowing your own trumpet, there just isn't any music on the dark side of the street.