How in God's name did it all come to this?

Fianna Fáil members feel cornered, and fear their party will not survive as a major power in Irish life, writes THOMAS McCARTHY, the poet and longtime chronicler of the Soldiers of Destiny

WE HAVE REACHED the year of undoing: not a year of triumph like 1932 or 1977 but a year of despair like 1948 or 1973. So my cousin tells me as we walk the country miles between Cappoquin, a Fenian town of poets, and Lismore, a Redmondite town since 1641.

The days will be longer by the time the election takes place; there will be more warmth in the sunlight, more warmth to make the well-kneaded dough of loyalty rise from 14 per cent to 20 or maybe 30 per cent. The GAA season will be well on the way, more hurling to oil the machinery of men who buy hurleys in bulk, men who transport junior and under-14 teams. There will be a rumbling of life beneath the turf of every county board, the rumbling of Fianna Fáil coming into its season.

Daniel Corkery was the first to spot this trend at a match in Thurles all those years ago: “There are certain things,” he’d said, rapping the young Seán Ó Faoláin on the knuckles, “certain things more important than imagination.”

Not many people behind the wheel of a Hiace van will have taken kindly to Fintan O’Toole’s fine essay in Tuesday’s Irish Times, nor to his expression “an atavistic instinct for power”. Indeed, the only response of my west Waterford cousin might be: “Who are these atavists, and where’s their electoral area?”

My cousin dropped out of school at 15, but he has always managed to find work somehow; a bit of gardening at a big house, van driving, fitful estuary fishing, a few years installing suspended ceilings and four years of “serious” work, painting in London, where he saved to buy a bit of land and build a bit of a house.

It is 40 years since I walked these roads with my cousin, chatting on one summer’s evening with Councillor Ahern of Knockalara, with Ned Lonergan and John Fraher of Cappoquin, waiting for Jackie Fahy, then a newly appointed minister of state, to arrive. Arrive for what, I don’t remember. But it was important that he arrived. He did, but an hour late because he got involved in a ferocious argument with a man from the Nire Valley – as my cousin, a few years later, got into a terrible fist fight at Lawlors Hotel in Dungarvan on a certain night in February 1975, the day Charles Haughey was recalled to the Fianna Fáil front bench as spokesman on health.

A year after that, January 1976, I had just persuaded the Ulster poet John Montague to supervise our poetry workshop, gratis, at University College Cork, far from the hinterland of the party. But not far enough: my mother was on the phone, pleading with me to attend a party youth conference at the Burlington Hotel in Dublin: “Will you go, like a good boy, just once, just to get the cumann off my back?”

For her peace of mind I went. It was a swish affair, I remember, with Seamus Brennan as master of the universe. A year later I was writing pretentiously to my mother that “the party has lost its soul. Without Dev there’s a slide into corporate being”.

Later that year, after a poetry reading in Skibbereen, I met an old man, a veteran of many national boards, who told me about the night de Valera slipped a piece of paper into his hand: it was a motion he wanted the 18-year-old delegate to propose, asking all members elected to public office to renounce their oath of allegiance to the Knights of St Columbanus. An interesting motion, our subtle Dev.

That Christmas of 1979 I got another phone call from Cappoquin, this time expressing national-HQ concerns about the financial state of the party at constituency level. “Don’t ring me any more,” I said to John Fraher. “I’m really gone, gone. Do you understand? I’m gone.” By then my mother had died. I was a free man.

I was then a penniless young poet, drunk on books. I am now a penniless adult and marvelling at the torrents of water that have flowed under the Bridge of Sighs that is the Soldiers of Destiny. Now backs are against the wall and several members of last year’s team are refusing to leave the dressingroom. How in God’s name did it all come to this?

The middle class may selfishly forget, but they’ve had good years under Fianna Fáil. Think of the serene and prosperous quiet of the late Lemass era, or even those first years under Bertie’s plastering team. Although those years could now be seen as a gift bequeathed to the nation by Dick Spring and Ruairí Quinn.

Those were the years, aeons each of nearly 16 years in power, when a second grand layer of society was grafted on to the working class and small proprietors who celebrated Dev. This grand layer was a super-Dub layer, denizens of Gonzaga and Blackrock and their wider white-collar circle who endured the political embarrassment of Fine Gael educators at University College Dublin in order to get a start on the professional ladder.

This Fianna Fáil layer of quite elegant persons, indeed dapper dressers, produced ministers and gifted writers such as Maeve Brennan and Máire Mhac an tSaoí: hardly a van driver in sight, apart from one or two hired white vans.

Whether Fianna Fáil survives as a major power in Irish life may depend on whether this class of person also survives. The rural proletariat and petty proprietor need to cohere around the political ambitions of these lustrous children. This type of Fianna Fáiler has rarely been imagined in literature, though Colm Tóibín captures the essence of it in The Heather Blazing.

The most sanguine representative of this type is encountered by Deborah Kerr’s Bridie Quilty in the character of the art-gallery director in Frank Launder’s 1946 film I See a Dark Stranger. You should watch this film. It offers a rare glimpse of Ireland settled.

THERE ARE CERTAINconversations one can have only with people who have been through the wars. Wouldn't it be lovely to walk the roads with the late John Healy, collector of small dreams, or with John Waters's father as he is remembered in Jiving at the Crossroads?

There are certain truths about Ireland that only the wounded or the betrayed can talk about. There is a certain familial conversation one would like to have with Micheál Martin, for example – our latter-day Dessie O’Malley who wouldn’t “bust up” the party. Like a character in the last chapters of a work of fiction, he discovered that the honourable have few friends.

As I walk with my cousin beneath the bare trees of the Lismore road we agree that one way of looking at the world has been undone. The ordinary Fianna Fáil viewpoint is not so much a political philosophy as a world view born of certain social origins and frustrated private hopes. For a large number of men and women membership of the party was always a second-chance education. Every political party must cohere around a set of social and financial interests, but it can’t go on if it propagates an unsustainable world view. Sometimes a viewpoint so lovely that it could be set to music can become an embarrassment over time.

It’s not so much the orchestra as the audience that falls apart. Once more a feeling is abroad, a feeling acutely sensed by the would-be Fianna Fáil canvasser, that the people believe they can no longer fund this second-chance experiment. During the current canvass, my cousin says, it will be a matter of honour to thank the people for the funds so far.

We remember the last time a group of decent people tried to deal with the party: they did so by leaving and founding the Progressive Democrats. At that time almost every Fianna Fáiler with a golf handicap or a university degree fled from the oncoming embrace of Charles Haughey. It was a traumatic cleansing. Unfortunately, it was mainly the clean part that left. Though Haughey, it has to be admitted, had his moments, including that Aosdána moment prompted by our Malraux, Anthony Cronin.

In 1985 Haughey opined, “We seem to be in the middle of an economic nightmare, with everything falling apart. The general air of helplessness and demoralisation arises principally from a widespread feeling among the people that there is no one in charge.”

Nowadays the party sense of being cornered is acute, cornered by circumstances, by history, by an economic catastrophe. The ordinary party members feel like a band of failed Irregulars: the roads behind them are strewn with derailed trains and burning creameries. For a country the size of Ireland 444,000 unemployed is unimaginable national destruction.

Perhaps Nama, our new Congested Districts Board, will save us – Nama and an ICMSA bank and an Impact bank or an ITGWU bank. New, honourable institutions cry out to be created. Now is the moment.

Here in the city, in the cafes, galleries and libraries, I have conversations in whispers with waiters, doormen, attendants, the last retainers of the old regime who are English-speaking. These are strange conversations. They’ve gone on for more than two years, quiet conversations about Fianna Fáil, about what they think, what I think. These people speak as if they feared being overheard: there is so much anger out there that it is dangerous not to be enraged. No hope is allowed to stand upright. Phrases like “might get better”, “nobody with a good word”, “happened everywhere” are dropped casually like small tips or loose change. These people clam up when a suit appears in the foyer or at the door.

Like my cousin walking the road between Cappoquin and Lismore, these people long for a quiet conversation with some of the other accused. We are all in the dock. The trial starts soon.

'PLEASE GOD,we'll have a change soon," I whispered to one doorman the other day. He didn't like that: it was too disloyal. But I wasn't whispering about Fianna Fáil: I was muttering about Ireland, the Ireland that came to life in the aftermath of the Civil War. It is the only Ireland we have: we will never have an Ireland elsewhere.

Now the people are waiting for a new political annunciation. As de Valera said, preparing to exit in the bleak year of 1958, “I am in no way despondent about the future of our country. I believe our sun is but risen, when others are setting.”

Like my cousin, we are straining our eyes to see over the frost-bitten last days of this bitter era. Somewhere a new cohort of national leadership is being formed. For our new deeply conservative era it will be less of Mary Robinson and more of Ernest Blythe, less of the poet Michael D and more of the provident Thomas Johnson. We are all straining our eyes, on the Lismore road and all the other roads of Ireland, for the first glimmers of hope.

Thomas McCarthy is the author of several volumes of poetry, two novels and a memoir. The eminent American writer August Kleinzahler has written of him that “no other poet, living or dead, has succeeded in engaging the political as poetic matter as McCarthy manages in his poems about Fianna Fáil”