Councillor Jackie Healy-Rae revealed, what this writer thought to be, an interesting data point on Morning Ireland yesterday, when he said that of the 14 potential presidential candidates who were due to make a pitch to Kerry County Council in a bid to secure support, he had only heard from two of them ahead of time.
Asked whether he had been “heavily canvassed” by potential candidates who wanted his vote ahead of yesterday’s meeting, he had this to say:
“No, Mary, I suppose during the week we got a list from Kerry County Council as to who had wrote into the council seeking permission to come and speak to us. That list was 10, grew to 16 and finished at 20. Out of that 20, I believe 14 have confirmed that they’re going to attend today. Out of that 14, only two have been in contact with me over the last number of weeks. Out of those two, one actually came to meet me with another council colleague of mine.
“So, no, to answer your question, no, not a lot of people out of the people who are coming before us today have actually made contact with me or other councillors on Kerry County Council,” he said.
Asked whether he was surprised about that, he responded that he was, adding that it seemed obvious to him that if you were serious about obtaining a nomination from any county council, you’d be on the phone to councillors to get to know them and let them know who you are.
“To be honest with you, Mary, out of the 14 people that have confirmed that they’re coming before us today, I know very little about them. I don’t know them. I don’t know anything about them. It would be extremely difficult for me as a councillor to intend on backing any of them to get onto a ballot paper without knowing anything about them.”
He added finally, and most pertinently for the purposes of this present article: “I don’t believe that a lot of them are serious, because if they were, they would be actively canvassing us, and I think that it’s actually disrespectful to councillors that for any potential person that’s coming looking for your support today, that they wouldn’t pick up the phone or come to meet you, because again, a five or six minute speech today at Kerry County Council with a few soundbites certainly won’t be enough to convince me to support many of these people.”
In this country, there’s – with good reason, it must be said – no end of talk about the lack of alternatives to the status quo, whether it be in politics, the media or elsewhere, especially when compared with the options other voters in the anglosphere have on the table: Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, Reform UK or Labour, and so on and so forth. It was out of such a recognition that Gript was born, backed by people who wanted to see a stifling consensus broken.
I feel of all of the staff on Gript’s roster, having come last and so being unable to claim credit for it, I can attribute its success in rewriting national conversations to bloody hard work, a quality that appears to be lacking when it comes to most other Irish breakout efforts.
To clarify, this isn’t to denigrate the hard work that unsuccessful independents and other candidates put in every time an election comes around, or to knock those who try without the necessary expertise. In a functioning democracy, there is a place for all of that. It’s also not to say that every alternative candidate or candidate puts in the same, lacklustre effort.
What it is to say, though, is don’t be surprised when those who show up, who “work the phones” and turn up on doorsteps – which isn’t literally required for the presidential election, but you get the point – outstrip those who don’t. A sense of entitlement doesn’t win elections, and while hard work isn’t the sole factor in winning them either, it’s certainly an indispensable one.
Many alternatives, in both politics and media, have successfully scented blood in the water, expressions of widespread dissatisfaction in polls and protests frequently revealing themselves, but are proving themselves to be clueless as to how to execute the hunt.
It isn’t overly complicated, as Jackie Healy-Rae alluded to earlier. Politics is the art of the personal. Phone calls and face-to-face meetings remain not only in-fashion, but enduringly successful when it comes to massaging the egos of would-be collaborators, or when it comes to appealing to would-be supporters.
While I don’t know who those two candidates were who approached Jackie Healy-Rae ahead of today’s meeting – and I am open to being wrong on this – I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s one of them who walks away with the local authority’s backing, and likely that of more. It’s the reality of politics, and those who’d succeed at it would do well to conform themselves to it, rather than posting or posturing that it be otherwise.