World of Politics with Harry McGee

Dick Walsh was a celebrated political journalist who worked for the Irish Times. He wrote a book about Fianna Fáil in the 1990s which wasn’t the best book ever published about the party – but it had a fantastic opening.

He recalled an incident from his youth in his native Co Clare. He was speaking to a man who told him his family had been loyal Fianna Fáil supporters since the “old days”.

“What do you mean, since the Civil War?” asked Walsh.

“Not at all,” said the old man. “We have follied Fianna Fáil since 1798.”

For a younger generation now the notion of civil war politics is history, an antiquarian curio like a rotary phone or a tape recorder.

What’s curious, however, is that the hegemony of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael lasted so long in Irish society – practically for 70 years.

There was a by-election in Dublin West in 1982, with a lot of candidates. Between them Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael got almost 90 per cent of the vote.

And that was Dublin, not rural northwest Cork.

In the early 1980s, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were pulling in over 80 per cent of all votes between them.

In 1981, Fianna Fáil got 46 percent compared to 36 for Fine Gael. The following year both parties got 85 per cent of the vote between them in the first of the two general elections. In the second, they go slightly less.

There then followed a long period where Fianna Fáil’s overall vote slipped back a little, but Fine Gael’s slipped back quite a lot.

In 1987 Fine Gael dropped beneath 30 percent while Fianna Fáil remained in the mid-40s. When Albert Reynolds became Taoiseach in 1991 he fell out badly with the Progressive Democrats and ran a flat and mediocre campaign in November 1992.

For the first time Fianna Fáil support dipped below 40 per cent. For Fine Gael it was worse. They were now down in the mid-20s – Labour, under leader Dick Spring, got its highest ever vote until then in that 1992 election with 19.3 percent support. It was called the Spring Tide.

I know it’s a bit of a stats blizzard but bear with me. For the next decade and a half, Fianna Fáil seemed to be immune from the winds of change.

Under Bertie Ahern the party got 39 per cent in the 1997 election and then climbed back into the 40s in 2002 and 2007. It was the first time that it had done that in 20 years.

Fine Gael rallied a bit too, climbing to 27.3 per cent in 2007 under Enda Kenny.

And then everything changed.

Pictured: End of the road…this Fianna Fáil election poster from the era of Bertie Ahern ended up in a skip in Brackernagh, Ballinasloe. Photo: Gerry Stronge.