Date Published: 06-Apr-2011

My memory of one of the highpoints of the election campaign is of Micheal Martin leading a band of Fianna Fail people through the streets of Galway and of the enthusiasm generated by the mere fact that, at last, Fianna Fail people felt the party was fighting back.

They were in superb form. Maybe up to one hundred of them had gathered to welcome the new party leader. They strode down through the Eyre Square Shopping Centre, on down the main streets …… and you began to feel that, with a new leader, it might be a bit premature to write-off Fianna Fail just yet.

In that crowd, only the seriously deluded could have believed that Fianna Fail were not heading for an electoral reverse of major proportions ….. the loss of a seat in Galway (Frank Fahey’s) was well predicted, but very few believed that we might see a party reduced to 20 seats in the Dail.

However, despite the dire predictions, the coming together of a band of Fianna Fail people with a new leader, gave the Galway FF people a bit of a lift that went on for a few hours. In other words, the morale might be damaged, but Michael Martin was doing – perhaps unconciously! – what Enda Kenny had done for Fine Gael from 2002.

From 2002 Kenny went on the ‘rubber chicken circuit,’ night after night, bringing together hundreds of FG people in what might be called ‘town hall meetings.’ The idea was to get over the utter demoralisation which has been brought on by the 2002 General Election in which FG dropped to 32 Dail seats.

It was a time when there were widespread predictions that Fine Gael could not survive. Nationally, many media commentators poured scorn on what Kenny was at, but that endless series of rallies involving hundreds of party supporters was where Fine Gael laid the foundations of a bounce back in the 2009 Local Elections – contests which produced a number of their candidates for the 2011 General Election triumph.

Seven weeks out from the General Election and Micheal Martin was in action in the Dail last week rightly questioning Fine Gael and Labour on their rhetoric in the election campaign on ‘burning the bond holders.’ The honeymoon is still not over in the media for the new government ….. they got a relatively ‘easy ride’ in the media for the Michael Noonan line of two new ‘pillar banks.’

But nationally a number of political commentators are beginning to wonder when is Micheal Martin going to embark on the kind of rebuilding which Enda Kenny did? Where is the Micheal Martin who led the FF troops down the main street in Galway and, at least for a few hours, convinced them things might not be ‘that bad.’

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.