GAVAN REILLY: Albert was right: it’s all about the little things

A CAMPAIGN launch, a cabinet minister, and a contrarian captain of industry. I mean, who could have seen it coming?

It’s certainly not the opening gambit that Fine Gael would have wanted, having to deal with a trade union movement in uproar and the nation’s teachers - who, I can attest, are Very Online People and talk to each other a lot - struggling to stifle their annoyance.

That’s three campaigns now in which FG has controlled the timing of the election yet managed to start on the back foot. In 2020, off the back of the ‘commemorating the Black and Tans’ controversy, there was the grave injury suffered by a homeless man in a tent beside the Grand Canal, in the shadow of a poster from the Minister for Housing. In 2016 it was the debacle about ‘fiscal space’ in which the underlying sums of the FG manifesto were found to have frailties. That was the ‘keep the recovery going’ election. Time flies, eh?

But it’s a reminder of how campaigns always develop their own dynamics, and how difficult it is to try and run a campaign entirely to one’s own agenda.

I really don’t envy the party communications people and press officers, desperately trying to arrange events so that their party can run a positive campaign and keep to its own affairs – and then have the whole week’s worth of scheduling and media grid management thrown out by having to fight fires that arise somewhere else along the trail.

But that’s their jobs – part of the reason ministers and senior political figures are surrounded by so many special advisors and spin doctors is partly to be able to see around corners, and to be able to roll with the punches as they’re thrown. The measure of Fine Gael’s team of PR handlers will be whether we’re still remembering Michael O’Leary’s jibe about teachers, three weeks from now.