ALTHOUGH Irish elections often teeter on the brink of self-parody, the wonder is that this country has never gone all the way and produced anything to rival that great British contribution to democratic satire, the Monster Raving Looney Party.
In their 1980s and 1990s heyday, the Looneys – especially their leader Screaming Lord Sutch – were almost an institution on Britain’s election nights. Indeed, they arguably performed a civic duty at count declarations by ensuring that, at least while in their company, the more successful candidates could never take themselves too seriously.
Sutch had himself started out as a semi-serious candidate, in fact. In the 1960s, he campaigned for a lower voting age, commercial radio stations, and other things that in time came to pass. It was only later that he lurched dramatically left-field: a move presaged by the famous Monty Python election night sketch featuring the “Silly” and the “Sensible” parties.
Ireland has not been entirely lacking in this genre, however. There has at least been one notable contribution here to the politics of silliness, albeit a localised one, and it predated either Monty Python or Lord Sutch. It was a prank dreamed up 60 years ago in a pub in Listowel by, among others,
John B Keane. And short-lived as it was, it made quite an impression.
Despairing of Ireland’s own version of the two-party system, Keane and his friends created something called the “Independent Coulogeous Party”. Then they invented a candidate, Thomas Xavier Doodle, who would run for it in the 1951 general election.
Hence one of the campaign’s catchier slogans: “Use your noodle, vote for Doodle”.
My various dictionaries, the OED and Terry Dolan’s Hiberno-English included, are unanimous in their silence about what, if anything, “coulogeous” means. But it probably doesn’t matter much, because a flavour of what the party stood for is contained in its manifesto, which included promises to plough the rocks of Bawn, turn back the Shannon, erect a factory for shaving hairs off gooseberries and extend the vote to leprechauns.
The humour may have dated slightly over the years. For example, another pledge was to provide “free treatment for sick heads”. Which, with some amendment of the language, would not be out of place in the health section of a serious party manifesto today. (Poor Lord Sutch, by the way, suffered from clinical depression and took his own life in 1999).
But there was, typically, a serious undertone to John B Keane’s joke. Talking about the Doodle campaign many years later, he placed it in the context of the extreme “bitterness” of politics in Kerry at the time.
This was barely a generation after the Civil War, which had reached one of its lowest points in the massacre at Ballyseedy, not far from Listowel. In few parts of Ireland, or the Republic anyway, can feelings have run so deep. And as Keane said: “Bitterness is an awful weight to carry”.
So as well as being innocent fun, the Doodle candidacy was an attempt to remove some of the poison from the air. As such, it probably succeeded. There was – as far as I know – never any intention to carry the joke through as far as the ballot paper. The candidate was fictional, after all.
But this may have been just as well for the sensible parties, because at the height of their campaign, the Doodlers appear to have had a bigger support base than the MRLP ever boasted. The climax came with what was billed as a “monster meeting”, à la Daniel O’Connell, for which the handlers arranged to have their man to arrive in Listowel by train.
Wearing a large, patriarchal beard, a “claw-hammer coat of uncertain vintage”, a bowler hat, and other disguises, he duly addressed a crowd of 3,000. And if this wasn’t quite monstrous, it was impressive for a town of the size. Keane recalled that the night before, Fine Gael had attracted only 1,000 for its rally. Which was not a bad crowd either. But by way of perspective, the star speaker on that occasion was John A Costello, just then coming to the end of his first term as taoiseach.
I'VE BEENasked to mention a very sensible event being held in Dublin's Rotunda Buildings this coming Monday. It's a centenary celebration of a lecture given at the same venue by the great explorer Ernest Shackleton, who was making a final visit to the country of his birth.
The subject of the 1911 talk was his record-breaking attempt, two years earlier, to reach the South Pole. And speakers on Monday will cover some of the same ground, while also discussing the life of another Irish explorer, Dundalk-born Francis McClintock. As at the original lecture, there will be entertainment as well as education, including a piece of musical theatre – Where a single footprint lasts a thousand years written by Michael Holohan and performed by Donal O’Kelly.
The evening starts at 6.30pm. Tickets €10 are available from the Friends of the Rotunda, tel 01-8722377, or at friendsoftherotunda.ie and part of the proceeds will go to the hospital’s Clinical Research Fund. The show will be repeated on February 28th at the Drogheda Arts Centre.