The days when Garret went shopping for folders

Date Published: {J}

I blame it all on Seamus Brennan. The time was when someone could pontificate on the possible winners and losers in an election and one man’s guess in a crowd in a pub, was as good as another.

But then, along came opinion polling – largely introduced by Seamus Brennan as FF General Secretary – and it changed everything.

Now the bookies, the political parties, and every newspaper under the sun is conducting them and coming up with ‘scientific’ answers to the election. Why, The News of the World, which would be known for ‘dirty old vicar’ stories but hardly as a leader in political commentary, even did one a few weeks ago.

There was a time when you could look at tea leaves, throw a fistful of bones in the air, talk to a number of political hacks in a pub, and come up with an answer.

God be with the days in 1977 when the then Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave called an election . . . and then asked for an opinion poll. The results predicted a disaster, and he promptly ordered that the poll be buried and carried on with the campaign, and to the inevitable defeat.

Garret FitzGerald was Minister for Foreign Affairs in that Fine Gael-Labour coalition and, when the election was called, he remembers that he had to go out across the street to buy a few folders for scripts for the opening of the election campaign.

He, and others in Cabinet, did not realise, or had forgotten that, once the election was called, the civil servants surrounding them essentially withdrew from any possible links to the election. So, he had to head for Easons for the election folders!

I recall one Fine Gael event which was held in Seapoint and which was addressed by Dr FitzGerald as the Minister for Foreign Affairs. There wasn’t a copy of the script – and he promptly sat down at an enormous old manual typewriter, put in maybe five sheets of carbon paper, and hammered out the speech for us waiting reporters! No better man than Garret to do his own typing!

He’s still at it today with his Irish Times column, though I presume he has moved on to a computer.

Those were the days when Minister Justin Keating reported that he canvassed two streets and felt that he got a reasonable response from the voters. In the election he was surprised to lose his seat . . . and get no votes on those two streets!

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.