January 6th 2016

The fall and fall of Fianna Fáil.

It was with a tinge of bemused nostalgia that I read of Benny Reid’s retirement as Honorary President of the Fianna Fáil Longford branch in the Longford Leader of January 8^th 2015. He remarked to Leader reporter Aisling Kiernan that “Micheál Martin has made a hames of the whole thing”. A grain of truth in this perhaps in the context of the overall fortunes of the once great army of the ‘Soldiers of Destiny’. Fianna Fail currently holds less than 14% of the entirety of seats in the compositions of Dail, Seanad and European Parliament. A long way since the halcyon days of 1977 when the party garnered more than 50%of the General Election vote.

As a Fianna Fáil activist in South Westmeath for over two decades I have some views on the decline of the party of which I was so proud a member for so long. Foremost among these has been the marked reluctance of successive senior members of the party to encourage youth and new ideas within the organisation. Entrenched FF members of Dail Eireann have routinely discouraged new talent and new ideas in the mistaken belief that this route of progress and development would somehow undermine their own sacrosanct positions. Now they are paying the price for this myopia. Fianna Fáil has faded into a pale simulacrum of what it was and could still be. There is no indication of either Phoenix or Phoenix Park on the horizon. In the last decade the membership of the party has declined from 55,000 to 15000 approx. This figure speaks volumes about the attractiveness of the party as it stands and the only way, sadly, is down.

As to the local situation, Mount Street has obviously embarked on a strategy of damage limitation. Party Headquarters obviously believes that the portrayal of young TD’s has some appeal and accounts for the wheeling out of Robert Troy as a young dynamic example of the Party.

At 34 he certainly is young but only one of two under the age of 40 while five FF Dail members are in their sixties. Allied with the gender quota factor this would explain the inclusion of Connie Gerety Quinn as the candidate for the Party in Longford. She is obviously very much younger than the other brace of aspirational ones. It is also certain that in her capacity as Manager of Co. Longford Citizens Information Service she is suitably qualified to give appropriate advice on most subjects to her prospective constituents. It would be the ultimate irony if Connie Gerety were to succeed in her ambition to join that merry band that makes up the membership of the 32^nd Dail.

As Asquith repeatedly said, when he had nothing to say, ‘wait and see'.