Credit to Eamon Gilmore, he’s taking a back to basics, no frills approach to reform of the Labour party. Recognising the party’s traditional difficulty in translating sympathy or support into actual votes, he has called upon the organisation to get more hands on and show a bit more muster on the ground where it matters.
Realising that no amount of hand-wringing or high flown rhetoric can compensate for good old fashioned graft, addressing the Labour executive in Waterford last weekend, he called upon all public representatives to spend at least two hours a week on constituency work and ideally pounding the pavements.
Fianna Fáil election poster from 1954
Problem for Mr. Gilmore he’s just about eighty years too late. Fianna Fáil have been doing this since the foundation of the party and have been long famed for constituency apparatus, getting the vote out, looking after the base etc etc. No less so in modern times. I’d say I spend two hours a day, never mind a week on constituency work and I’m not even a public rep.
Ironically the very model Gilmore wants the Labour party to copy is that of An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern’s St. Lukes constituency office where a solid, consistent and professional approach to local representative matters has delivered the Taoiseach surplus after surplus in successive elections since he first entered the Dáil.
Local activity, putting in the leg work, delivering for the people all year round is what wins elections. Fianna Fáil are at 36% in today’s Sunday Business Post/Red C poll. A welcome jump of 4% on the last one but these things are overplayed. I remember there were all sorts of polls in the run up to election 07 and I saw Sean Dorgan (FF General Secretary) on RTE one night unfazed by any of them. He pointed out that his calculations were based on per-constituency, local level analyses where FF candidates were out working the ground, rather than worrying about latest Irish Times opinion figures. As the Taoiseach himself would say, there’s only one poll that counts. Well the next one of those is June 2009. And Fianna Fáil will be counted.