Gazing into the crystal-ball as Dail relocates to Donegal

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

I was in Glenties in West Donegal this week for the MacGill Summer School. It’s 34 years on the go but despite its reputation as “Leinster House on Sea” it was my first visit to the school, which was founded – and is still run – by former RTE head of news Joe Mulholland.

And in many ways, it has become the bookend of the political year; it starts just as soon as the political term ends in the Dáil, and many of the ‘speakers’ who stand at the podium of the Highland Hotel are the selfsame people who were gracing the benches of Dáil Eireann only a week before.

If Joe were a designer by profession he would certainly not be a minimalist or a fan of clean lines.

The programme is chock-a-block for the entire week, with three or four heavy-duty sessions each day. The titles of each session look like they come straight out of the clues of the Crosaire crossword in The Irish Times.

“At the Core of Decades of Inadequate Governance and Crises is Our Political Process?” was the title of one of the sessions on Monday.

Now put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Those speakers who were not politicians were predominantly insiders and in-the-bubble people. And the audience were predominantly grey-haired, political anoraks and insiders. And I’d be included in several of those categories.

I bumped into people from the Irish Times circulation department who had come here to highlight our paid digital subscription service. But it was a turas in aisce because just about everybody they bumped into already subscribed. That’s the kind of audience it is.

So slightly establishment and orthodox; maybe not enough voices from the margins or from smaller political groupings on the left, or who are independent and contrarian.

That said, the far-left is as orthodox as their centre-right opponents – it’s just that it’s a different orthodoxy with their one dating back to 1953.

The overall theme was a look ahead to 2016, which involved a lot of crystal-ball gazing. Inevitably, the politicians resorted to type and we had in effect the first volleys of next year’s general election.

The political strategist Frank Flannery is always good for hopping the ball and he duly obliged on Monday with a number of colourful observations.

He proposed that Fine Gael and Labour fight the election on a joint platform. His reasoning was that if they pushed a shared message of stability it would help their causes.

He also disclosed that neither party liked each other but were effective in government. It was like a “bad marriage” that had somehow survived for 80 years.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.