The More You’re Praised, the More Anxious You Should Become
May 31st, 2007 by Donagh
We are always giving out about RTE. The State of Us was dire, Fair City risible, and Killinascully is a vacuous black hole of a comedy which wouldn’t even make a crazy old lady laugh.
But what about RTE’s election coverage? It was supposed to be the most extensive coverage ever. The RTE TV studio was a thoroughly modern looking giant bauble of navy blue plastic which almost pulsated with regular reports. The addicts were satisfied with the up-to-minute news from the count centres. I thought the radio coverage on Friday and over the weekend was very good. If RTE Radio had a fault it was that it relied on the partisan commentator and Fianna Fail hoodwinker Noel Whelan far too much.
Last night though RTE Radio 1 aired a great documentary, which provided a very insightful view of the recent election. You may have heard of ‘Patricia, Mary and Mary-Lou Too’, as it was mentioned on Morning Ireland yesterday. It’s got a lot of attention because it reveals just how pissed off Mary Fitzpatrick, the Fianna Fail candidate who failed to get elected in Dublin North Central is with Bertie and Cyprian Brady. In the heel of the hunt Cyprian got only 939 first preference votes compared to Mary’s 1725. Yet Cyprian was finally elected after the ninth count having gained a substantial number of Bertie’s transfers.
‘Bertie shafted her’, said those in Mary’s camp on the day of the count. The reason they said, was the 4am letter sent from St. Luke’s, Bertie’s constituency office, on the morning of the count.
The canvasser for Mary reads out the letter, which was sent to 30,000 houses between 4 am and 7am on the morning of the election as a reaction to Mary Fitzpatrick’s flyer asking for a first preference vote. It states, via some mangled grammer, that Fianna Fail strategy dictates that they urge voters to vote number 1 for Bertie, number 2 for Cyprian and 3 for Mary.
Mary bitterly complains that there is a big difference between a flyer, which she only sent around houses in her area and which is the same as her other campaign material, and a letter from the Taoiseach sent to the entire constituency.
Cyprian said that when she sent out the flyer she had set in motion a train that she couldn’t stop.
However, there is a lot more to the documentary. Following around Mary-Lou McDonald provides an interesting view of the Sinn Fein campaign.
At one point when talking about the three female candidates vying for votes in his old constituency, Nicky Keogh - who lost out to Mary Fitzpatrick’s father by 90 votes in 2002 - says Mary-Lou was the best looking of the lot. What a charmer. This, by the way, was to avoid the question about why he decided not to stand in the constituency despite getting so close last time.
Patricia McKenna, discussing the perils of canvassing in an area with lots of non-national residents says: “Some of the non-nationals look very Irish and I’ve noticed that when you come up to them you can see it in their eyes, their eyes look very confused. So when I say ‘are you voting in the election?’ (in a loud voice) they go ‘[garbled nonsense words which are supposed to be an impression of what she thinks Polish sounds like]’….they start speaking in Polish!’.
At a Fianna Fail election rally, the narrator describes the smell as the Fianna Fail faithful pushes to get close to Bertie as he moves towards the podium: “there was a mixture of last nights booze and expensive aftershaveâ€.
Towards the end of the documentary Mary Fitzpatrick reflects: “I never thought they were the legion of Mary….but I never expected them to shaft me.”
But perhaps the most evocative part was at the end. Earlier in the count, the documentary maker is not allowed to talk to Mary Lou when its obvious that her votes are well down on what they’d expected.
However, at 12:25 am, Nicky and the rest of the Cabra men have disappeared. Gerry Adams, who came into the count with Mary Lou followed by a brace of photographers, is long gone.
Mary Lou is now standing alone and there is no one to stop the documentary maker approaching her. She asks Mary-Lou simply, “what will you do now?”
Mary -Lou replies, “I haven’t made up my mind. I’ll probably just head off….”
Patricia Mary and Mary-Lou Too
To download the podcast of the show click this link to listen to it in your newsreader or get it from iTunes.
Interesting that Cyprian Brady, whose brother Royston famously had Bertie turn on him in dramatic and effective fashion, should be so well in with the Taoiseach now. Ahern is as tough and as nasty a bastard as his mentor Haughey ever was - a personality no less than Michael McDowell will testify to this.
A friend of mine who organised the erection of O’Rahilly memorial on Henry St a couple of years back - he is a great-grandson of The O’Rahilly - told me a hilarious story of how Shane Cullen, the artist who produced the memorial and a Nordie friend of his but the fear of God in Cyprian in the latter’s office when the young FFer pushed his pen a bit too far in the administrative process.
On the subject of dodgy dealings, isn’t canvassing on the day of an election illegal? And do the makers of this documentary have substantive proof that might be passed on to the relevant authorities (for all the good that that will do)?
Apparently Cyprian has spent the last 20 years as Berties ‘runner’ in Drumcondra. Its having people willing to post so many letters at that hour of the morning that amazes me. In terms of malpractice its a trifling matter and no one is bothered to pursuit it.
Funny story that about Cyprian and the fearful artist Cullen. It seems there is more to this, in terms of backroom dealings and Fianna Fail nastiness than I originally thought.
According to Wednesday over at Irish Election, who implicitly trusts the source of the story, Mary’s Da, Dermot Fitzpatrick ‘threatened to invoke his right (under party rules) as a sitting TD to be automatically re-selected unless his daughter was put on the ticket. So there was never any support for her candidacy at HQ and the question wasn’t whether they were going to “shaft†her, but how.’
Leave them to it, I say.