'The days will be long but there will be a bit of craic'

PARTY STRATEGIES: They say it will be an election like no other, but for campaign teams it’ll be a familiar slog, writes KATHY…

PARTY STRATEGIES:They say it will be an election like no other, but for campaign teams it'll be a familiar slog, writes KATHY SHERIDAN

THE FLAG is raised; ladies and gentlemen, it’s . . . No. It’s definitely not showtime. More grim, feverish parish hall production.

“There won’t be any razzmatazz . . . There’s too much heartache out there to be flaunting paraphernalia in people’s faces,” says outgoing Senator Nicky McFadden, third-time Fine Gael candidate in Longford-Westmeath.

Micheál Martin said it would be a “different” kind of election. One way or another, he will get his wish, chortles a senior Fine Gael strategist. “Ah yes. He’s going to find it very different. He doesn’t know just how different.”

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In fact, it will be like no other election in the history of the State, according to Labour’s publicity director, Tony Heffernan.

“Go back to when Fianna Fáil was formed and the main contest has been between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Now for the first time, the most significant contest is between Fine Gael and Labour.

“Fine Gael started at 10 to 12 points ahead of the field, which hasn’t happened since the early 1920s,” adds the Fine Gaeler.

“It will be very much a from-the-ground-up kind of campaign, more acute, more concentrated,” says a senior Fianna Fáiler. “The number of candidates in each constituency will be key.”

At various party headquarters, for nearly a month, it will be all about 6.30am starts, sweaty 12- to 18-hour days, warp-speed rebuttal and a relatively new element – furious online activity.

In the “showtime” years, Fianna Fáil’s campaign home from home was the Treasury Building. That’s now occupied by Nama “ironically”, notes a wry FFer. This time, it’s the less bling Grattan House beside the party’s Mount Street headquarters.

PJ Mara is back to chair the election committee, while Tony Killeen is to be director of elections, on a team that will include: party general secretary Seán Dorgan; director of communications Pat McParland; Martin advisers Deirdre Gillane and Brian Murphy; and Peter MacDonagh, who though living abroad, has featured with Mara in the past two elections.

Fine Gael is back in Fitzwilliam Hall, rented out for the gig, with a team headed by Phil Hogan and his deputy director Frank Flannery. Also on the team will be general secretary Tom Curran; political director Mark Mortell; head of communications Fergal Purcell; chef de cabinet Mark Kennelly; and the party’s main adviser Andrew McDowell.

Labour is pleasantly billeted in Latin Hall, Golden Lane, in the same building as 4FM. There Ruairí Quinn will reign as national director of elections, and his team will include general secretary Ita McAuliffe; Eamon Gilmore’s chief adviser Mark Garrett; national organiser David Leach; policy director Colm O’Riordan, and publicity director Tony Heffernan.

“The days will be long but there will be a bit of craic and we’ll have PJ Mara to entertain us,” says a glass-half-full Fianna Fáiler.

Sadly, the Greens won’t even have a Mara to bring a little black humour to the occasion. Theirs will be “a fight to the “f****** death for the last seat in every constituency – probably with Fianna Fáil”, says a senior activist wearily. “We’ll get it tough even to get coverage.”

Blimey. How do you strategise for that? The oldest strategy in the book, apparently: “keep us in to keep them out.” “Them” being erstwhile partners Fianna Fáil. “For anyone voting Labour and/or Fine Gael, their TDs are absolutely safe and they’ll have a big majority. So we have to ask people, who do you want in opposition to hold a big Fine Gael-Labour majority to account – a conservative Fianna Fáil rump or Green TDs?  Look at all the areas with social issues such as civil partnerships, political reform, regulatory reform, the Planning Bill – developed and pushed through by the Greens. Without a Green voice, these important issues will not get mentioned, discussed.”

As if Fianna Fáil hadn’t enough problems. For them too, the next few weeks are about raw survival. But the plan is simple: accentuate the local, eliminate the national (ie, the Fianna Fáil brand – “veering towards KKK status”, sighed one entertaining FFer).

FF candidates sallying forth with close body armour in the form of popular county councillors will be reminding voter ingrates what they've "delivered" at local level. If voters refuse to play nice and ask big, confusing questions – Did Fianna Fáil blow the boom? Why can't we just burn the bondholders? – canvassers will delve into what Mary O'Rourke calls the Catechism, a 36-page canvassers' guide. But another, more subtle message is being tapped out, another version of "keep us in to keep them out". "Them" this time being Sinn Féin. Even sworn enemies of Fianna Fáil are prone to utterances such as: "We need a strong opposition so you don't want to see Fianna Fáil obliterated. [Pause.] Jaze, I never thought I'd say that."

The world may have turned on its axis since 2007 but the lesson of that election – when FF and Brian Cowen turned the political Titanicaround in the final days – has been scorched on the communal political memory.  Even in its darkest hour, the wily party is capable of planting little explosives. Last week, when Micheál Martin sweetly invited Labour and Fine Gael into several three-way debates, FF strategists sat back and chortled while Fine Gael jumped for the bait. "Now they're running around trying to pick up the pieces," says an FFer.

Fine Gael has its own problems. A popular parlour game in recent weeks has been “Where’s Enda?”

How do you strategise for that? The message for the doorsteps is that he is a good captain. Nicky McFadden tells people he is “certainly genuine, not an egotist who wants to be a film-star type who spends €15,000 a year on make-up and runs the country into the ground. It’s back to basics.”

Meanwhile, back in Longford-Westmeath, Mary O’Rourke’s “guys and gals”, abetted by her councillor son Aengus, have been “out standing up for a candidate who is honest and has integrity”, in the candidate’s own words.

Does she take direction from the national strategists ? “No,” she says, unsurprisingly. “We listen politely but we do conduct our own campaign. I stand on my own record. I never in my life took a penny or gave a penny.”

While her handlers are keen to stress her national role in fighting off the threats to the non-contributory old age pension, her campaign is close enough to HQ strategy, focusing on local connections and loyalties. “I know everyone and everyone knows me. I live in the same house I went into with Enda 50 years ago on the side of the road in Athlone. When they talk about arrogance, I really don’t know what they’re talking about . . . I do keep very close contact with my constituency. I shop locally for my groceries, I get my hair done locally, I buy my clothes locally, I go to church locally.”

At the other end of the constituency, one of her two running mates, outgoing TD Peter Kelly, is also relying on people being nice to a local lad. “There are people who say ‘No, Peter, we’re not voting for you or Fianna Fáil,’ but they’re civil and courteous. People know the councillors that are coming around with me and they know me and we’d have done representations for a lot of them. So far, for me, it’s mainly local issues.”

So far, he says, “it’s not as bad as people said it would be – at least in the rural areas I’ve done. Whatever the [national] strategy, mine is to call and see as many people as possible in their homes and give them a chance to talk to me one to one.”

Willie Penrose, the outgoing Labour TD in the same constituency, has noticed an increased tendency in his case to be “invited across the thresholds”.

Penrose’s “tried and trusted method” is to put his head down when the flag goes up and stick to the doorsteps. “I will not be interested in radio debates or any kind of debates, apart from the ones you’re going to have with people on the doors.

“You can give out about me being a big, thick, obstinate yoke, but once the election starts, I’m not interested in media.”

What about Twitter? Facebook? “The people on the doors – that’s my Facebook.”

But the fact is that all the parties are geared to the hilt with social media. According to one Fine Gaeler, its online team is “very large and working full-time and will be light years ahead of the others”.

Yesterday, 23-year-old Independent candidate Dylan Haskins launched his campaign in Dublin South East via Twitter. “I’ll be meeting people on the doorsteps too of course . . . But my generation lives online.”

It’s a long way from the early 1980s, when Labour’s Tony Heffernan recalls there was just one radio station and four newspapers, all conveniently within 200 yards of O’Connell Bridge, and the fax hadn’t even arrived. “Now there must be more than 40 radio stations and we have about 1,500 names on various media mailing lists.”

And “every single media outlet will be monitored,” says a Fianna Fáiler.