Voters must look to painful lessons learned

During the 2007 election campaign, a reference by me to Fianna Fáil campaign headquarters as "Meltdown Manor" so galvanised its occupants that they put a spread bet of €3,500 on Fianna Fáil to win 68 seats, the odds rising for every seat won after that. FF won 80. It was a stunning turnaround. The backroom guys scooped €49,000.

The trouble is that to this day, some deny they were ever in meltdown. It’s not just pointless but damaging. It airbrushes the role of strategists and others from the picture but more than that, it denies important truths about our own behaviour. In public, we rail against cronyism, corruption, complacency, the health system, housing, indifference to the poor and vulnerable. But in the privacy of the polling booth? We do what we deem necessary to our survival, just as politicians do.

In 2007, FF had been in a power for nearly 10 years. Unprecedented credit had flooded the country and a lot of people had partied. Yet health was still the big, hot-button issue for nearly half the electorate, with crime and the economy a long way back. Housing and the environment (at 13 per cent) were also-rans. How time flies.

In the Liberties at a love-in for Bertie Ahern, an elderly woman remarked that "the poor kids haven't a chance to get their own place. I can't understand why landlords can buy up places like they're doing around here, getting richer and richer renting them out to the kids, rather than the government building affordable housing." This was 13 years ago, in a housing boom.

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The taoiseach's personal finances were under scrutiny. A sensitive tribunal module due to kick off on a Monday was handily seen off by his Sunday rush to the Áras. His campaign was crowned by an address to Westminster's houses of parliament with developer Sean Dunne as a special guest.

Harnessing fear

How did voters respond to all this ? A few weeks before polling, about half said their vote would be influenced by the taoiseach’s finance issues. A few days before polling, just over a third were saying that. By election day, that number had halved. Factor in the 6 per cent who said they had voted for Fianna Fáil because of the taoiseach’s finance issues (yes, really) and that left just 10 per cent who were still bothered.

Bertie Ahern told laughing Irish Congress of Trade Unions delegates that he didn't know how people 'talking down the economy' did not 'commit suicide'

Intimations of a construction slowdown were seeping through. With a week to go, that fear was brilliantly harnessed by Fianna Fáil and turned around to stress the "big gamble with their jobs and homes" that "the novice", Enda Kenny, represented for voters. Nearly three in 10 people only made up their minds in the final week.

It was a combination of things. Brian Cowen's swashbuckling press conferences; Dunne's deployment as reassurance to a nervous construction sector; Eoghan Harris on RTÉ's mightiest soapbox, The Late Late Show, evangelising about Bertie; the decision by other high-profile columnists to come out for him; the perception that he won the leaders' debate. People heard what they wanted to hear.

So when voters got to the polling booth and made that whiplash turn, did they suddenly stop caring about health, payments to politicians and all that stuff? Days afterwards I asked Ivan Yates if voter altruism ever figured in elections. "Shock! Horror! People vote out of self-interest!" was the scornful reply. "Get real. Why not vote in accordance with human nature?"

Gut instinct

Bertie had connected to aspirational working-class people in a way that Enda Kenny had not, Yates reckoned. “They don’t want handouts, they want to do it for themselves. They want to be able to hold on to more of their hard-earned money ... The guys who get up at 6am are my heroes, out there doing real things for themselves, not people who dine out on 1970s college politics ...”

Weeks later, the taoiseach told laughing Irish Congress of Trade Unions delegates that he didn't know how people "talking down the economy" did not "commit suicide". Within the year, Brian Lenihan announced that Ireland's housing boom had come to a "shuddering end".

Change for the sake of change is what landed the world with Brexit and Donald Trump

What have we learned since? That politicians who “connect” are not necessarily the ones we need; that a voter’s “gut” instinct is only valid when backed up with questions such as “how precisely will you do that?”, “with whose backing in the Dáil?”, “how much?”, “show me how you worked that out”, “how realistic is that given the money available?” and “how would a no-deal Brexit/world market shock affect your plan?”; that for any party aspiring to power without a secure majority, a manifesto is just an aspiration not a pledge and that for a small party, this is trebly true; that it’s easy to shower abuse and promises from the terraces, far riskier to run on to the field and be accountable.

We have learned that we should never cling to nurse for fear of something worse but that change for the sake of change is what landed the world with Brexit and Donald Trump; that there are no guarantees; and that in the end, whatever their politics, a voter's trust can only be reposed in a party's good faith, sense of justice, intelligence, energy, negotiating ability and long view because in the real world, there are no guarantees.

Is there a politician alive who is prepared to say that out loud mid-campaign?