Be it ever so humble

The people in the Sinn Fein office noticed his growing radicalism, and at first approved, as if he was a Tabula Rasa on which they’d successfully imprinted their own weltanschaaung. Then they started to become a little uneasy, warning him that he would have to tone down the nationalist rhetoric, at least when he was campaigning in certain areas. At one meeting in Caomhin’s office, his host brought out a map of his constituency, pointed out where the working-class and middle-class areas were. He acted like he felt patronised, giving the air of someone who knew the city quite well, thank you, though many of the areas being pointed to had probably never seen his scrawny, pilose form. Caomhin, for his part, leaned over the table pointing at certain areas of the map, looking for all the world like a World War II General discussing plans for the invasion of Normandy. Seamus had yet to ask him what he had done when the Troubles were really troubling, but just at that moment he could sense a nostalgia for the days of heavy-duty paramilitary activity. Inner city areas were fine, lots of support there, take no prisoners. In the suburbs, however, he would have to use terms like “commitment to the peace process”, “inclusive settlement” and the like. And throw in a few vapid, non-committal words about improving the health and education services. People out in the suburbs may be able to spend quarter of a million on a house, but they still wanted the state to pick up the tab when they got ill, Caomhin reflected, ironically.
Seamus, for his part looked at the map and pondered that, though there might have been no barbed wire or security checkposts, people here were just as divided as they were in the North. He wasn’t sure who to blame, it could have been the government with their slavish devotion to the “Free Market”, it could have been urban planners, who boxed people into areas from which it would be almost impossible to escape the viscous circle of unemployment, drugs, and early pregnancy. Fuck, maybe right-wing economists were right and it was the poor’s own fucking fault they were poor. In his current state of mind, though, there could only be one culprit: The British. Didn’t they invent the class system, the ancient Anglo-Saxons with their wergild, the Norman families who’d owned the same massive estates for almost a thousand years? How could we destroy in a mere eighty years what it took them a lifetime to construct? Right here, right now, the logic was compelling. That democracy, their new chosen means to achieve power was also a bequest from the British remained an unspoken, unconsidered truth as they surveyed the map together.
“So this is where I hand my principals in at the reception”, Seamus said, pointing to the area where the old red-brick houses turned into semi-detacheds with garden gnomes in front.
“Principals are a burden for any politician to carry around”, said Caomhin, not making much of an effort not to sound pretentious. Seamus knew politics was a dirty game, and reflected that it was not so long ago that he was planning to only do the job for five years and then leg it to Asia. He’d once read something about Adolf Eichmann, who’d joined the Nazi party just to get a good, well-paying pensionable job and ending up organising the holocaust. Was the same thing happening to him? He’d read his Camus, like every other Arts student, and the idea that all values were arbitrary was one he couldn’t shake off completely. Perhaps he should go and buy a copy of the Telegraph. Before he did, he asked Caomhin when he thought the election campaign might actually start. He replied that the government would wait until the very end, so they would start campaigning months before, though officially it would only be about three weeks. That would give him roughly two months to prepare his speeches, cut his hair, get some nice suits. And tell his mother.
“So you haven’t taken that great leap yet?”, asked Caomhin, when the subject came up. Seamus, who to her was still James, just shook his head, tensely, as if the problem was a fly he could just shoo away.
“So why is she such a West Brit?”, Caomhin felt he’d reached a sufficient level of intimacy to ask.
Seamus took a deep breath, didn’t answer in the sense of conclusively resolving the issue, just offered the same speculations that he’d offered himself when he directed the same question inwardly.
“I guess I’d be a psychologist and not an aspiring politician if I could answer questions like that. It’s hard to say what occurrences, what genetic factors, make us the way we are. Hell, I wouldn’t be here unless... well, you know. The funny thing was, her dad was a Fianna Failer until he fell out with the local TD over some freakin’ inheritance, then he became a blueshirt.” He paused, would have taken a drag of a cigarette if he was a smoker, looked over and saw that Caomhin wanted him to keep going.
“I’m not sure if that’s the whole reason. She grew up in the 50’s and 60’s, when this country must have been a pretty bleak place. No contraception, the marriage bar, unemployment, emigration... it’s easy to see why she might have thought the grass was greener on the other side of the Irish Sea. Of course, the country’s changed, almost beyond recognition, but she hasn’t. It’s hard to change your view of the world, after you reach thirty...” He reflected that he was going to reach that milestone himself in a year or so.
Caomhin told him that the only reason that Ireland became so conservative was the famine, which he believed the English deliberately engineered. After that, people starting marrying later, sex outside marriage was forbidden, deference to church leaders grew exponentially. Before that, we were pretty free and easy, mixing elements of Christian belief with old pagan customs. Hey, the population was almost eight million before the famine. Seamus nodded, having read that theory already, but felt a little short-changed. He’d opened his heart on the subject of his family history, he wanted to know a little of Caomhin’s own past, how he got into all of this.
“Two words: Bloody Sunday.” He reflected quietly to himself on the atrocities of that day, as if no words could do them justice. Then he went on, “They were dark times alright. In the days and weeks that followed, people like myself were queuing up to join the movement. When I was asked why I wanted to join, I said it was so I could go across the border and kill the RUC and the British Army. That was the way I felt at the time.
“We used to meet down in a disused farmhouse in West Cork. The owner, who was pretty old even by then, claimed to have hidden Michael Collins in the same place. Who knows, he might have done. He had some guns that’d been there ever since the war of ‘22, said we were welcome to use them. Even if we could have gotten them ‘cross the border they probably would have been too rusty. I and most of the other lads wanted to go up north, but the leadership wanted to attack targets in Britain. When that started happening there was a backlash and everyone started to drift away. I got promoted fairly quickly after that, and for some reason they decided I would be the right person to import some explosives from Czechoslovakia.” He grew more reflective. “God, Prague was beautiful back then, not the tourist circus ‘tis now. I could have stayed there forever, but the more I talked to the people there, their struggles against the Hapsburgs and the Russians, the more I realised why I was there. I actually ended up staying there too long, as I met this girl, beautiful, beautiful creature she was. Back in those days westerners had to spend a certain amount of money every day, so didn’t I run out. I knew if I didn’t come back I’d draw suspicion on myself, so I wired the army leadership council for money. It turned out that the government were monitoring their bank accounts.”
Seamus gulped, seeing where this story was going.
“I got extradited to the UK first, so I needn’t tell you I knew what it’s like to take a beating from British thugs as well. Thankfully, they agreed to let me be tried in Ireland, so I spent five years in the Long Kesh. I did a lot of reading inside, of course, Gramsci, Althusser, Marcuse. They were heady times, when I came out everyone’s hair was dyed green and purple, safety pins in their noses. I thought I was on another planet. My parents never came to visit me. I haven’t spoken to them since.”
Seamus didn’t know how he could possibly respond to that tale of doomed romanticism, the first thing it occurred to him to ask was if he’d ever seen the girl again.
“Oh, Lord, for about ten or eleven years I couldn’t get anywhere near Czechoslovakia, I sent letters to all my contacts over there, they were all intercepted. Then the wall came down, I booked a ticket to Prague first chance I got. I went to the place where Tanja used to live, it had been knocked down and a luxury hotel was going up. I went to the restaurant where she used to work, it was being converted into a McDonalds. It seemed they’d swapped one form of imperialism for another”, he added, reverting briefly to political mode.
Seamus, who’d become more intrigued with the human interest aspect, asked if he ever caught up with her.
“I don’t even know if she’s dead or alive. To be honest, I don’t even know if she felt the same way she did about me as I did about her, I might have just built her up into something she wasn’t when I was in jail. I must’ve masturbated about her every night for five years. That’s a lot of dead sperm” He concluded, in a doomed attempt to lighten the mood.
Seamus could only ask if he’d reconciled with his family.
“I was at my father’s funeral two years ago. My mother shook hands with me, but that was all. So I know what the pain of being alienated from you’re family is like. I’ll understand if you back out of all this.”
Seamus was always infuriated when older people, especially his grandparents talked down to him, assuming they knew more than him simply because they’d been around longer. Yet here was someone who genuinely had seen it all, and could talk about it without even a hint of condescension. He moved to reassure Caomhin that he wasn’t going to back out. Caomhin, still emotional from having told that story, reached over and clasped his right hand in a tight embrace, told him he hoped he wouldn’t regret it. Though he never told anyone, he felt a tear drop onto his shoulder.

He wasn’t going home that much anymore, as his dog was getting older and didn’t really want to be taken for walks anymore, and soon their beloved fields would be gone. He thought of using his new-found political influence to try to stop this process, but knew that without help from the local community, who were more interested in the money the “development” would bring, there was no dice. In any case, the planning process was being increasingly centralised and taken out of the local government’s hands, which made him laugh bitterly when he heard unionists and their apologists in the south accused his party of being anti-democratic. Anyway, he knew that when he did come home, his mother would know he was there for something important.
His tactic was usually to make it look like something worse had happened, and where his personal mishaps were concerned, there was no limit to her gullibility. This time, though, it would be hard to think of something worse from her viewpoint.
He decided to telephone her first, tell her he had something to tell her. He still hadn’t gotten a mobile phone, though the people in the party were constantly pressing him to get one, certainly before the campaign started. He still wasn’t convinced that they didn’t cause brain cancer, though. So he went into a call shop, one of many which were springing up around the city. He called her, made the usual pleasantries, then told her he had something to tell her. He told her he’d rather tell her to her face, to which she responded “Why do keep manipulating me like this?” in a voice so shrill he had to hold the receiver away from his ear, and look furtively around to make sure no-one else could hear. He told her he was Okay, there was nothing to worry about, which he knew would only make her worry more.
When he got home there was no-one there, but the dog, who leapt up on top of him with the usual fervour. It wasn’t uncommon for the house to be empty, as the rest of the family had lives down here, a network of friends, activities that he had given up when he moved to the city. So he took the dog for a long walk, the sort she hadn’t been for since she was a pup. The dog sensed that he was being unusually affectionate towards her, rolling around on the grass, impervious to the dew and the possibility of horseshit as he was to the whole ecosystem deeper beneath his feet. Perhaps the dog was self-conscious enough to realise that she herself wasn’t long for the world and maybe she thought that this was one last long walk before she died. In any case she was appreciative and didn’t sense his tension.
It was spring and the nights were getting longer. When he got to beach people were starting to fish. He’d never had any time for blood sports, being a vegan and all, and had always grimaced when his father or people he used to work with on building sites when he was a student told him stories about the subject. Did fish feel pain? He’d once gotten into an argument on that subject in college, which somehow degenerated into an argument about how carrots reproduce. (Why was it always carrots, never turnips or asparagus? Because they were so phallic, he reasoned) Anyway, his interlocutor insisted that if you stuck a carrot into the ground, other carrots would spring forth from it, eventually forming the sort of bunch that you buy in the supermarket. He got a good laugh when everyone else told him that carrots eventually went to seed, that you ate the root of the carrot and the seed of the potato, but when he reflected on the story, he asked himself how could someone from a small town be so alienated from the land?
He would reproach people for fishing if he thought it would do any good, but he reflected that it was big factory farms that were fishing the sea dry and wrecking havoc with the natural balance, and not a few daytrippers with forlorn rods. He walked right along to a place that hardly anyone but he and his dog went, as the rocks were so jagged and the danger was so severe. He used to swim here naked, such was his confidence of not being intruded upon. Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the same urge that led people to sign up for 35-year mortgages when he came to this almost exclusive place. In the summer before he started college, he spent hazy afternoons reading Madame Bovary or Death in Venice , glittering, iridescent portals for the world he was going to enter. Then he’d go and swim naked, thinking, the way nineteen year olds who’ve read a few “great” books do, that he’d reached some sort of Nietzscean plateau where he could ignore conventional morals. By now his belief in the redemptive power of literature had waned, and nature alone was enough to draw him there.
When he got back the car was outside and he could hear the TV in the living room, but he waited for her to come and greet him. He made a cup of herbal tea and sat down to read that day’s Irish Times. An article caught his eye by a member of the Labour party claiming that Sinn Feins’ sudden reincarnation as a caring, altruistic party of the left was bogus and opportunistic. Almost instinctively, the counter-arguments started brewing in his head; that Labour were ossified dinosaurs who were completely out of tune with the needs of the modern electorate, and would probably go into coalition with Adolf Hitler for a brief taste of power. He clearly had more flair for politics than for personal relationships, though he had chosen to study English rather than History at postgraduate level. But then, he reflected ruefully, we don’t always make the decisions that are in our best interests, do we?
He heard the TV show his mother was watching break for advertisements, and her footsteps approach. She seemed in relatively good spirits as she greeted him, then asked him, with the stolid resignation of a teacher who’s been teaching the same texts for a generation, if he had any news. Clutching, rather than rubbing his dog’s neck, he looked up briefly from the paper and told her the truth, that he was standing in the next election for Sinn Fein, in a tone that was bland and apathetic. With obvious incredulity but deep disdain, she replied, in the shrill tones she reserved for the many people who’d got on the wrong side of her;
“You probably would do something like that, just to annoy me.” She walked back out to the living room, and Seamus (or “James”, as he was here) reflected that though it was too late to go back to the city, he should leave early in the morning. Or else stay out of her way by taking the dog for another long walk. The dog looked up at him, with the same unequivocal affection in her eyes, not knowing what a pawn she was in this dark, Quasi-Oedipal conflict.
The next morning was Sunday, and, as usual, his mother’s spirits were higher. When he got up, she was making breakfast, his sister and two of his brothers were sat round the table. The foul smell of frying eggs and sausages permeated the air the way it would in hell if there was a hell, sentimental gibberish resonated from the radio. Seamus sat down, poured some Soya milk over some muesli, picked up the sport section of one of the papers, and hoped to be left alone to read it in relative peace. His mother wasn’t going to allow this.
“D’y’know, everyone, James has finally got a job.”
His bother Darren, as close to being Seamus’ antithesis as it was possible for a brother of his to be, almost choked on his cornflakes. Darren had left college to become a carpenter and didn’t see eye to eye with Seamus on many things, particularly his being a slacker. His sister Joan looked took her head out of the lifestyle section and threw a quizzical look in Seamus’ direction. Before he could respond, his mother interjected with: “He’s going to stand for the Dail. For Sinn Fein.” She nodded her head when pronouncing those last two words, which was a quirk of hers.
There was shock, then laughter at such an outrageous proposition.
“Why did you tell her that?”, asked Joan. “Was it just to annoy her?”
Looking over at his mother, waiting for a response in her classically pugnacious, hands on hip style, Seamus tried to formulate an answer that would neither confirm nor deny his candidacy. “I was interested to see how she’d react alright. After all, she’s always telling me to get a job, she doesn’t seem to care what it involves doing.”
At this his mother’s mood took a negative swing. She breathed deeply, causing his siblings’ heads to cower as if anticipating a tropical storm. “If you think you can manipulate me that easily, you’ve got another thing coming. But if I find out that if you - or any of the rest of ye - have as much as voted for Sinn Fein, then by god, you’ll be banned from this house forever.” Her face, red like a rose but not nearly as sweet, she picked up some of the papers and stormed off into her bedroom.
“Can you go one day without making mum lose her temper?”, asked Joan.
He couldn’t tell her to her face that he probably wouldn’t be able to come down for a while, perhaps never again. He just mumbled something about her having some serious issues to resolve and then took refuge inside the newspaper. Feeling the tension almost too much to bear, he gave the dog some petting and let her follow him out the door, ‘till she realised he wasn’t taking her for a walk but going back to wherever it was he spent most of his time. He made a cursory valedictory gesture to his siblings, it was reciprocated in various degrees.
On the bus journey up his head was spinning in a way it hadn’t done since he was a teenager. He’d had confrontations with his family before, but never caused any wounds that time couldn’t heal. More recently, Darren had been threatened with eviction after extensive treks to the top of the Bacchanalian mount, as it were. Yet, like a volcano, her rage would always subside. This, though, was different. Not only his mother, but his grandparents as well, might disown him. He seriously thought of telling the people in the party that he wanted to resign, but knew that they had done so much for him that they would want something in return, returning to the old, idyllic life he’d had in the last years of the twentieth century now seemed impossible. In blood steeped so far... It wasn’t the right frame of mind to be in as he faced the image consultants who were to groom him for the electioneering process.
The first thing he did was go for a haircut. The women in the salon looked at his long, scraggly curls as some new and daring challenge, something they’d give to their most experienced staff. He had a habit of twisting his hair repetitively and ripping it out, particularly in times of angst, with the result that his hair length was a sort of barometer of his psychological state. Right now, there were bald patches emerging at the back, which he fought a losing battle to conceal, while in other parts his hair was twisted into platts that it would be impossible to separate. Looking at the hairdressers face in a mirror, he tried to look sympathetic, but the dread seemed to be equal on both sides of the scissors. She tentatively started running her fingers through the convoluted trichological nest that kept his cranium warm, wondering how he had ever got it into such a state. Perhaps it was paranoia, but he kept thinking he saw her turn to her colleagues and exchange looks of disdain, shaking their heads the way mechanics look at each other when they see gullible motorists bring in their cars. She seemed to be looking for a place to start, as if this were a chess game and not a primitive grooming ritual. It was hard to imagine a situation where two people could be so close physically and have such contempt for each other, she for letting him get his hair into such a state, he for her choosing what he considered a superfluous profession. Eventually she got his hair into some sort of order; he paid and thanked her with all the conviction of a prisoner thanking a state-appointed prison psychiatrist, and left for the party office, feeling violated and confused.

Thankfully for him, he was usually able to project an outward appearance of calm, as he was when he was greeted at the office by Cormac, who blinked a few times before recognising him. The haircut, and the tie he’d bought in a charity shop and tied round his neck, yet another Madeleine that brought back memories of groggy mornings getting ready for school, compounded the impression of good sense he strove to project. Cormac shook his hand and told him the consultants they’d hired were waiting inside. Seamus apologised for being too late, Cormac dismissed his worries, in that peculiarly Irish, ah-sure-it-doesn’t-matter way, and beckoned him inside.
The consultants were wearing armanis, hair slicked back, one of them had a carefully trimmed goatee beard. They both carried clipboards, a PDA rested on the table in front of them. Seamus never saw them use it, but it did look impressive. They greeted him with the words “So, you must be Seamus”, in a sort of nauseating Dublin 4 accent that always annoyed the fuck out of him, particularly the way they drew out both syllables in his name. He reflected on the bitter irony of people who’s mission it was to get Britain out of Ireland recruiting Irish people who tried to talk like English people, as he smiled tentatively and shook their hands. Cormac and Caomhin looked on, Seamus wasn’t really focusing on them, but he sensed that they could feel the same discomfort.
“Basically we’ve got two exercises today, yah. First we’re going to do a radio slash TV slash newspaper interview. Then, we’re going to take you on a virtual campaign trail, as it were, going door to door and meeting people from different perspectives, yah. So if you like, we can start with the interview right away. Time is money, y’know.” He tapped his watch and gave a slight self-congratulatory laugh. Seamus, who thought he couldn’t be surprised any more, shook his head and wondered if all this was for real. As they didn’t go away or metamorphosis into naked women, he assumed he wasn’t dreaming and beckoned them to start.
“Right, so we have with us here Seamus McIonnrachtaigh, candidate in Cork North Central for the Sinn Fein party. Hope I pronounced your name right, Seamus. It’s rather a mouthful. So, Seamus, have you ever been a member of the provisional IRA?”
“No, I Haven’t.”
“What about the Real IRA or the Continuity IRA?”
“No, Neither organisation.”
“Ever been involved in any vigilantism?”
“No, Can’t say I have.”
“Got a criminal record”
“No, thankfully.”
“So what’s nice, law-abiding young man like you doing standing for Sinn Fein?”
Seamus gulped at this question, but felt he could handle it.
“Sinn Fein are a democratic party committed to bringing about a socialist, 32-county Ireland by democratic means. We want this country’s prosperity to be shared among all it’s people, with decent health care, education and public transport for everyone. The focus on our alleged links with the IRA says more about the media’s bias than it does about us. No-one ever asks members of the Civil War parties how many of their members are also members of Opus Dei. No-one asks members of Fine Gael in the border counties if they’re members of the Orange order. It’s time the media in this country grew up and accepted that a large proportion of the population of this country are disillusioned with politics in this country and are turning to the only party that provides a progressive agenda, and that’s Sinn Fein.”
He glanced over at Caomhin, who appeared to approve. The consultant, though, didn’t feel he’d tested his ability under pressure to the full.
“I’m sensing a little paranoia here”, he responded. “Members of your party always seem to blame the media for your lack of support, but I think the fact is that such a small proportion of the electorate vote for you is that they know about your links with paramilitaries. You say people are turning to you, but you only got about four percent of the vote at the last election.”
“The latest opinion polls show that we’re likely to get double that in the forthcoming election. And, considering how conservative voters are in this country, that’s quite an accomplishment. If we continue at this rate, we could be holding the balance of power soon. The establishment parties will have to stop condemning us as hooligans and start negotiating with us.”
“That sounds rather like an ultimatum to me.”
“Oh, please, grow up. If the governments of Britain and the US accept that our party has got nothing do with any terrorist organisation, why can’t you?”
“Moving on, you say you want a socialist Ireland, so how do you feel about members of the executive in the North approving the use of private finance schemes to fund new schools and hospitals?”
This was a question Seamus had asked himself, and wasn’t able to give a satisfactory answer to. Caomhin looked on nervously as Seamus breathed deeply and said:
“I think that’s a matter for the executive members themselves. You’ve got to bear in mind that in the United Kingdom taxes are extremely low and it’s possible that there may be no other source of income available; I don't know, I’m not that familiar with the situation there. What I do know is that we are committed to providing decent public services here by increasing taxes on high-income earners and corporations to the European average.
“So you don’t approve of Private Finance?”
“I think I’ve made my position clear.”
“Right. So what’s your position on crime?”
Seamus knew where this was going, and replied, as tactfully as he could, “There’s definitely been an increase in violent crime in the last few years, and everybody seems to weigh in with their two cents about the causes. Many blame alcohol and drugs, and they may have a point. But we’ve got to look at other things, at the horrible inequality that the recent years of economic growth have caused. We’ve got to look at the educational system, and how it treats people who aren’t cut out for third level. We’ve got to look at people’s diets, and how they affect behaviour patterns. All these things ultimately make a difference.” “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, eh?”
Seamus bristled, both at the platitudinousness of that quote, and the association of him with New Labour. “I think if and when we get into government, we’ll have to make some tough decisions, we won’t be able to keep all our promises, we’ll have to make compromises. We may have to coalesce with people who’re much better at getting people to vote for them than they are at running the country. But we’ve got a lot of talented people working for us and we know that if we are elected, we’ll do all we can to make this a better country. For Everyone.”
“Seamus MacIonnractaigh, Thank You very much.”
Seamus breathed a heavy sigh of relief trying at first to run his fingers through his hair but finding only a spiky bristling epiderma where his thick curls used to run, while Caomhin looked on with pride at the smooth-talking homunculus he had created. The consultants had a few reservations, however.
“Right, Yah. Your ability to turn the subject round your viewpoint is like, really impressive, and we think that that interview would work really well on radio or for a magazine. But we think you need to work on your visual cues a little more. For example, you need to hold your head up more, and look people in the eye more. And raise your voice a little, maybe modulate it a bit more, yah. Oh, yeah, and we love that bone structure, we can really see the female voters going for that, but you’re a little... skinny. If you could work out some, or failing that, get some shoulder pads. We can work on all these things when we do our next exercise. So right, basically, yah, we’re going to stand on the opposite side of the door there, you’re going to knock on the door, persuade us to vote for Sinn Fein, yah?”
Seamus wanted to persuade them to go back to the gay bars in Temple Bar, but he gritted his teeth, told himself not to be homophobic, and played along.
The first persona that the second consultant, who up to now had been pretty quiet, adopted was that of a traditional anti-nationalist, not unlike his mother. Seamus didn’t know this before he knocked on the door and asked, “Dia is Muire Duit, I’m Seamus MacIonnracthaigh, standing for Sinn Fein in the next election. How would you feel about voting for us?”
“I don’t think I’ll be voting for a bunch of murderers like you”, was his terse response.
“Sinn Fein is committed to a peaceful resolution of this country’s problems. If you’d like to look at our manifesto...”
“I don’t think that’s going to be happening”, he said, and slammed the door.
Seamus thought part of the test was to try and keep going, so he intercepted the door with his foot. “You seem like a reasonably open minded person... if you could just...”
“As the only thing you people seem to understand is violence, I’m going to squeeze your foot in this fucking door until it bleeds. I’m giving you the chance to take it out, which is more of a chance than you’ve given all those innocent men and women.”
Seamus took his foot out of the door, the consultant said, “Right, next one”
He thought he knew what “being thrown in the deep end” meant now.
He knocked on the door again and on the other side found the first consultant doing a very bad impression of a someone from the Northside of Cork.
“Right, Bouy, how’s it hangin’?”
“Uh, Good, thanks. Tell me, are you registered to vote?”
“Course I am, bouy.”
“And who did you vote for last time?”
“Sinn Fein, bouy”
“And will you be voting for us again this time?”
“No, bouy, I think you’ve fucking sold out with this Good Friday agreement. It means we’ll never have a United Ireland unless it’s what the unionists want. What happened the spirit of 1916?”
“We still want a United Ireland. If our tactics have changed, it’s because the circumstances have changed. Bear in mind that there’ll be a nationalist majority in ten to twenty years...”
“Will you tell that to an old man in Belfast whose been waiting his whole life to be freed from those Proddy scumbags?”
“Well, if you don't vote for us who are you going to vote for?”
“I’m not votin’ for anyone. I think you’re all the fuckin’ same. Fuckin’ politicians.”
The door was slammed again. Seamus looked over at Caomhin, who remained impassive. The door knocked again. This time the second consultant was impersonating a female in a way that wouldn’t win any Oscars.
“Hi. I’m campaigning for Sinn Fein. Do you think you might be able to vote for us in the next election?”
“Oh... I don’t really know... Would you like to come in and have some tea?”
“Well, I’ve got a lot of places to see today... If you could just tell me what your regular voting preference is and why...”
“I’m what you might call a floating voter”, he replied, tossing his hair back.
“Well, here’s a copy of our manifesto remember I called to your door personally.
The door closed more gently this time. Caomhin clapped his hands and said, “Game Over.” The two consultants reentered the room, both shook Caomhins’ hand.
“That was pretty good for a first timer. It won’t always be as difficult out there, but there are a lot of weirdoes around, right. A few things to pick up on. Don’t waste too much time with the decides. Concentrate on the waverers. Time is money, yah. And, yah, never ask anyone if they’re registered to vote. It always sounds patronising. If someone says they’re not, you give them information on how they do. And of course, you know, never accept any sort of sexual advance. We figured you’d already have got that.”
“Just our little bit of fun, really”, the other consultant confessed.
“Um, yeah,” said the first. “We’ve got to say we’re generally pretty impressed. The one thing we’d say is to try to put on some weight and talk louder. Appear more alpha, yah. Oh, there’s one more thing we have to do. He took a screen from his briefcase and looked around for a place to hang it on the wall. He gave it to his colleague and then took out a fancy-looking new digital camera. “Some photos, for the campaign poster”, he explained. Seamus hadn’t looked at a mirror all day but imagined that the events of the last few days must have left him looking pretty frazzled. But, if the camera lied, maybe it didn’t tell the whole truth. There were six or eight cameras in Ireland during the famine, but no photographs in existence of the millions who starved. So it was a powerful implement the consultant had in his hands, and Seamus wasn’t thinking about the pixelation.
Acting strikingly like David Hemmings in Blow Up They got Seamus to strike a variety of poses, first whatever he was comfortable with, then “aloof”, “affable”, “serious”, “statesmanlike” “modest” and “a good listener”. They looked through them themselves on the viewfinder, then showed them to Seamus, asked him which one he preferred. The one where he had his head held high, his chin thrust forward (it must be “aloof”, he imagined), had that otherworldly, Che Guevara look, exactly what he was going for, funnily enough. It didn’t look like someone who was worried he’d never see his family again. But he knew the pain was showing, somewhere inside, behind the Mayan veil that would be draped on Telephone polls all over the city.
The consultants left, thanking everyone profusely, if not all that sincerely, for their time. Seamus didn’t think time had any inherent value, but smiled anyway. As soon as he knew they were out of earshot, Caomhin shook his head. “I don’t know why head office sends down those freaks. Mick Collins didn’t need no spin doctors nor no focus groups neither. But that was back when leaders led, rather than let public opinion lead them.” Seamus reflected on the irony that he himself was chosen for stylistic rather than substantial reasons, but didn’t want to make an issue of it, so just asked, “What’s it really like on the campaign trail?”
Caomhin scratched his beard and said; “It’s changing a lot. Up ‘till quite recently almost everyone voted for the party that their parents voted for, so generally we - and the other small parties - were flogging a dead horse. Now, people are moving form rural areas into cites, and they don't have the same attachment to family that they used to. But they still need something to be attached to, and that something can be nationhood, which is where we can appeal to people.”
“Don't Fianna Fail have something of a monopoly on that?”
“Fianna Fail.” He snarled those words with the bitterness of someone who regarded the taking of the oath to the Queen in 1927 as some sort of personal betrayal. “I don't know how they can present themselves as a nationalist party when they hitch our country’s future so ineluctably to the whims of American multinationals.” As Seamus had been brought up to despise the Soldiers of Destiny with the same virulence that he now hated McDonalds and Coca-Cola, Caomhin was preaching to the converted. Seamus was interested to know if this was something he could make an election issue of. Caomhin looked invidious.
“I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember the ‘80s, when unemployment was so high and everyone was emigrating, and everyone working, except the very rich were being taxed up to their sideburns. Most people who have a job now don't care where the money comes from as long as they don’t have to emigrate.”
Seamus remembered the 80’s alright, when a generation grew up for whom it seemed there were no jobs, and everyone scrambled over each other to get visas for the land of the free, while on the other side of the social ladder, yobbos joyrided or got hooked on smack. Back then, he thought it was tragic, being brought up in a consumer culture by parents who wanted nothing more for him than to be richer than they were. At the time, he blamed the church, and their obstruction of contraception which left Ireland with higher birth-rates than the rest of Europe. He hadn’t backtracked on that position, but now he saw that industrialisation of agriculture was part of the problem as well; consolidation of land into big, Texas-style ranches was forcing many onto emigration boats, just like after the famine, except this time they were being forced to leave by their own government, who’d never find their decision coming back to haunt them in the form of semtex explosions. Of course if they’d sent all those unemployed people back to the land to grow organic potatoes there’d never have been the Celtic Tiger economy, but then Seamus was no longer one to worship blindly at the altar of economic growth. If someone could spend a months wages for an Indian farmer on a dinner for two, did it really mean they had a higher quality of life, that the increased urban sprawl, the endless traffic jams and escalating violence were a price worth paying? He didn’t relate any of these musings to Caomhin, just asked: “Well, can we at least point out that their jobs are so insecure, just how tenuous this whole Celtic Tiger thing is?”
Caomhin’s smiled a little at his naiveté. “No-ones going to vote for someone who tells them they’re going to lose their jobs. That’s why we’re putting all the emphasis on health, education and public services.”
Seamus thought how ironic it was that New Labour’s saccharine tentacles had found their way into the Sinn Fein policy department, but thought it better left unsaid. He just asked, “What about the environment?”
“That too”, Caomhin replied, with a distinct lack of conviction. They could both sense the fatigue in the other, so when Seamus offered to let Caomhin ago he acquiesced, but first reminded him that he needed to go and get the nominations for his candidacy some time soon. Seamus promised to return and start work on it in the morning, Caomhin, rubbing both his eyes at once, said there wasn’t that much of a hurry, but tomorrow was as good a day as any. Just as he was leaving, Caomhin asked, “Oh, By the way, how’d it go with your family?” Seamus gulped and said he didn’t really want to talk about it right now., knowing that a seed had been planted in his brain that would bear fruits of angst before the night was out.