When the Social Democrats launched in July 2015, they were met positively by the media and the public at large. Perhaps it was simply the comparison with the relatively ill-fated launch of Renua just three months earlier, which saw the media largely unmoved and the public mocking both the science-fiction-styled launch in the Science Gallery as well as the party’s more conservative outlook, but the Social Democrats seemed to genuinely excite the country – at least as much as the action of any political party can. With three of the country’s most prolific independent TDs at the helm, and with the party promising to provide a “viable alternative” to the current political options – much was made of the fact that the party was both “pro-business” as well as socially progressive – they promised to field candidates “in every constituency” in the general election which, at that stage, was just seven months away.
This did not happen. Along with the three leaders, the party fielded 14 candidates, candidates that received praise, particularly from young liberals, for their variety in age and gender. Only the three leaders were elected, but the media didn’t seem to mind. Emphasising how the three leaders were all returned on the first count within their constituencies and received the highest number of votes of all their competitors, the Irish Times declared: “Social Democrats blossom as Renua withers.” That the three leaders were returned so definitively – with Stephen Donnelly of Wicklow and East Carlow receiving the second highest number of votes of all candidates in the country – helped back up the idea that, while other candidates weren’t elected, they had done well considering what the party itself stressed was a short turnaround time since the party’s launch and a lack of resources. The sense projected was that with more time, space to build name recognition and a more established structure supporting the party, these candidates, and more like them, would become successful candidates in future elections.
Of all these candidates, the one that seemed to receive the most attention was Gary Gannon. A counsellor for Dublin Central, Gannon’s own constituency, one of the last to be declared, received increasing media attention as candidates were eliminated and Gannon was in fierce contention for the final seat. As he fought for that seat, an outpouring of online support emerged for Gannon, notably from young students, as the hours ticked by. The race ultimately culminated with Gannon losing out to to Independent Maureen O’Sullivan on count 11 after a gripping race that had seen O’Sullivan herself go home accepting defeat before returning to celebrate her victory, more than 14 hours after boxes were first opened.
While this attention can be partly attributed to the fact that the constituency was one of the only ones left counting at that hour, or the fact that Gannon and O’Sullivan were overtaking one another at every count, it was Gannon himself that many were tuning in to see. As he states himself, Gannon was “a fella, a Trinity graduate with a working class accent brought up in Dublin. That seemed interesting”.
The sense projected was that with more time, space to build name recognition and a more established structure supporting the party, these candidates, and more like them, would become successful candidates in future elections.
Was he aware of this attention at the time? He claims not: “In an election, particularly a general election, you’re just so wrapped up in it. I didn’t realise until a couple of days later that that level of support was there. I didn’t know that I was on the telly, on RTÉ, and if you looked at Dublin Central they were talking about who this person is.” Gannon himself repeatedly stresses how the election was a “a really lovely experience”, especially compared to his local election campaign, despite the success of that campaign. However, for many watching, particularly young people and, even more particularly, students in Trinity – where Gannon himself studied after entering through the the Trinity Access Programme (TAP), a programme for which he now serves as an ambassador – Gannon’s loss was an upset. It was many of these who had thrown their weight behind Gannon during the campaign, “a lot of Trinity students coming along and kind of jumping in and asking if I’d like them to grab leaflets”.
While failing to secure a seat in the Dáíl, he states that, for weeks afterwards, he felt a sense of pride: “I wasn’t sad or I wasn’t angry or I didn’t feel like I lost after the election. I just felt a real privilege to be involved in it, and it was something that I really enjoyed.” And, while this pride remains today, along with the experience of “doing politics in a different kind of way”, greater perspective comes with time. He states that he ran because he felt he could make a difference, rather than having an innate desire to get elected. But then, once a few months had passed, “I actually realised ‘you know what, I really would have liked to have been elected’”. He elaborates: “Once certain debates were coming up in the Dáil or certain things were happening, I would have really liked to have been involved. I thought I could have made a contribution to that. And then I thought it was a lost opportunity.”
I first met Gannon at the formal announcement of his candidacy with the Social Democrats in September 2015 while interning with Donnelly. It was the party’s first announcement of candidates and the first manifestation of the party’s promise to field more than just its three leaders in the general election. One of just two of candidates in elected positions already, the event didn’t single him out but, even post-election, Gannon still seems to receive the most attention.
“I do think I got a lot of attention, more than other people, and I recognise that”, he says. But is he happy about it? “I think in the general election I didn’t associate myself enough with the people that were actually there. I was running in Dublin Central and I was associated with Dublin Central. But what I actually missed out on was the association with other people, the great candidates that we have.” He praises the “phenomenal” other candidates fielded around the country, like Glenna Lynch in Dublin Bay South – “a woman who is the definition of a patriot. She just likes her country and wants to make a contribution. She doesn’t need to go into politics but she’s not happy about how things are at the moment” – and Sarah Jane Hennelly in Limerick City, a mental health advocate currently working in refugee integration. He calls particular attention to Niall Ó Tuathail in Galway West, who he states “goes around Galway saying: ‘I want to be the minister for health.’ I actually wouldn’t have the backbone to actually do that, but I’m learning from Niall.”
“Political ambition is seen as a dirty word in this country”, he states, frustrated. “You know what, being ambitious is not a bad thing. It’s the reason why they’re ambitious.”
“Political ambition is seen as a dirty word in this country”, he states, frustrated. “You know what, being ambitious is not a bad thing. It’s the reason why they’re ambitious.” For Gannon, this sort of communication is what’s missing in Irish politics. “When I look at Irish politics at the moment, there’s a real race to say absolutely nothing. People don’t use their opinion on topics that are controversial, they try and avoid them and they kick them down the road. They create constitutional conventions.”
And maybe, to some extent, this sort of communication has been missing from the Social Democrats too. Stressing how difficult it is to set up a new political party – “building the party is a lot more difficult than contesting an election, because that’s fun and exciting” – Gannon acknowledges that the party can’t keep using its youth as an excuse. “I actually feel really bad that we haven’t been pushing them forward more. And it’s difficult, I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault, I just think we haven’t been creating those spaces. We haven’t been brazen enough to just stick people out there and show that we’re in the process of developing a really interesting movement, and here are good people that are associated with us.”
Looking back to the Social Democrats’s general election campaign, Gannon recalls that it was “really a work in progress. We tried to do something interesting, we wanted to be experimental”. Key to this was this idea of communicating, and trying to do so honesty: “We talked to share an opinion and actually stand over it, and I think a lot of people actually bought into that… People like the idea of someone just actually having an opinion and being able to hear them. People like to understand, actually: what is your politics grounded in?”
For Gannon, these politics are decidedly liberal. A prominent advocate for repealing the eighth amendment and its replacement with pro-choice legislation, for women’s equality and equal access to education for all, Gannon is vocal about his pride in living in a multicultural community, and repeats his party’s calls for an open democracy structured around long-term thinking, and not just the next election cycle.
You can argue that the opinions posited by the Social Democrat leaders were met positively by the electorate, but things have been less sunny as of late. In a headline-grabbing development, Donnelly, one of the party’s leaders, founding members and best-known faces, left the party at the end of September. Not offering up his specific reasons publically, but stating to supporters via email that “the situation had reached a point where it had become impossible to do the job I was elected for”, speculation abounded as to the party’s internal conflicts. Widely considered the party’s best speaker, as well as representing most clearly the party’s pro-business aspects, some supporters were left questioning if the party remained a “viable alternative” to the rest of Irish politics or if it would simply become another party on the left of the spectrum.
“We’re all pro-business”, Gannon interrupts, keen to emphasis that Donnelly’s loss doesn’t mark any fundamental shift in the party’s outlook. The loss of Donnelly, so far at least, does not seem to have marked any sort of watershed moment, with the rest of the party’s candidates firmly in place. “I think we’ve got two excellent TDs in Catherine and Róisín [Murphy and Shorthall, the party’s co-leaders], with really exceptional contributions to society. Stephen’s loss is huge. But, you know what, next week we have our national conference there’s over 350 people registered. There’s an abundance of wealth in the party… So we lost Stephen, but what remains are some genuinely exceptionally talented people.”
While Donnelly brought many things to the party, his ability to speak and debate were those most noticeable to any casual observer. “Stephen is a great guy. I think we should always be complementary of Stephen and his ability to communicate a message, and we should never discount that”, Gannon offers. Again, it’s the importance of opening a dialogue that Gannon returns to: “Stephen was very good at communicating a social democratic message that appealed and was pro-business. He decided to to take a different direction, and that’s fine, but that’s the challenge that needs to be picked up by some of the rest of us: can we communicate the message? Can we bring people on board like Stephen did?”
This ability to communicate a message has become increasingly vital not only for the Social Democrats, or Irish politicians generally, but in a global context. While you might try and view the success of the Social Democrats in comparison to the failure of Renua to get any candidates elected in the general election – and the overall, admittedly slight, victory of leftist parties in the general election – as a victory for the Irish “left”, the left is in complete crisis internationally. From June’s Brexit to Trump’s shocking and polarising victory in this month’s US presidential elections, the left has been plunged into a state of crisis with the looming threat of far-right parties across Europe continuing to grow. What can a left-leaning politician say in response to all of this?
Firstly, Gannon disagrees with my usage of the term “the left”. “I’m really interested in the spectrum. When I’m out knocking on people’s doors I can’t be saying ‘don’t worry, the left will set you free’. Now, I don’t think communities in Ireland or anywhere owe to much to ‘the left’, so to speak. What I think we need to look at is the idea of being progressive, in terms of trade unions, of the cost of education, opportunities. They’re not just something people think of when it comes to the left. We want to be progressive, and make a contribution. That’s what’s taken a thumping. I don’t think people in Britain with Brexit or America with Trump, I don’t think they’re going out there and saying ‘we’re right wing because we want to get Trump in.”
“Stephen was very good at communicating a social democratic message that appealed and was pro-business. That’s the challenge that needs to be picked up by some of the rest of us: can we communicate the message? Can we bring people on board like Stephen did?”
Instead, it comes down to attempting to understand why people are voting the way they are: “People are just really hurting. People have been devastated. And there has been a fight back. Can you imagine if you’re in a former mining heartland in Wales or anywhere in Britain and your traditional industries have been devastated and you watched the destruction of your NHS? You know that you’re going to be earning less than £19,000 a year, and then someone asks you to tick remain on a piece of paper? It’s a little bit insulting.”
“And then we go and accuse those communities, those same communities who have the greatest histories of standing against fascism? These were the people who went off and fought Hitler not too long ago, only their grandparents, and then we’re accusing them of being fascists? I think ourselves that are sort of cosmopolitan, I think we need to ask ourselves what are we asking these communities to suffer? And if we actually want to get back to a rational way of doing politics, we need to start taking people seriously again.”
The victory of Trump, “a man who literally bragged about sexual assault”, may be “unconscionable,” but it’s “something that we need to understand”. “We clearly can’t call them all racists and all misogynists, but they did vote for one. I’d like to understand that. I’d like to understand what that was about.”
The outcome of the US presidential election can be seen as a fight back against how the liberal media and politicians speak to and ultimately isolate the electorate, prompting a rethinking of how a progressive message can be spread in a way that influences the voters, instead of dominating screens but seemingly failing to convince. Throughout Trump’s campaign, the dismissal of Trump’s most vocal supporters as racists, fascists or, to borrow Hillary Clinton’s own phrasing, “deplorables”, seemed to only galvanise his supporter base who have perceived themselves as long looked down on and neglected by the liberal world order.
In the middle of this, about to be sandwiched between a Trump-led US and a post-Brexit UK, rests Ireland, a country that, while elections never seem to be high-stakes, is hardly immune to shifts in this global order. In a Europe where the right takes hold, it’s difficult to imagine Ireland’s political leaders displaying much backbone. “That’s where I think we need leadership. I think that’s what we’ve kind of been lacking, with the industrial relations issues that arose over the past month, it’s been absolutely lacking. Men or women who will stand up and say ‘I’ll take control of this’.”
“We’re very good at saying that we’re a progressive country without ever really looking at what that means. We don’t really look at our own reflection, so it’s very easy for us to say that they’re all racists in America or Britain”.
Much disgust has been expressed at An Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s friendly reception to Trump a day after his successful election, with Kenny offering, “on behalf of the Government and the people of Ireland”, “sincere congratulations” to the President-elect. While Gannon acknowledges the nature of politics – “we do rely on America for a lot of foreign direct investment, and we can’t just declare America a rogue state” – he calls for “a bit of common decency to the people that are hurting. Let’s call that out. There are people waking up across America, like muslims or LGBT youth, that are terrified. We shouldn’t close our eyes to that”.
Is there a direct risk of the rise of the right in Ireland? While Gannon seems confident that the people of Ireland would be against it – “when Pegida [a nationalist, anti-Islam and far-right political movement] tried to mobilise down on O’Connell St, it was working class people that got them off the street, quite literally” – he is less confident in the direction of Ireland’s political leadership: “I think we’ve already had the right in Ireland. We’ve had not so much right-wing, but conservative politics for the last 60 years. That’s hurting people.”
Again, a lack of understanding of ideologies along the spectrum is central to this, and recent political events in Ireland and abroad are symptomatic of it. While we may not see a rise of right-wing rhetoric “because we have a great tradition of telling people to get a grip of themselves”, that doesn’t mean that Ireland is, now, a particularly progressive country. “We choose to kind of close our eyes, and say, you know what, we’re a progressive country, but we’re not.”
Gannon’s own background in the inner city leads him to see “poverty that you have no idea exists”, a poverty that isn’t being addressed and was glossed over by Fine Gael’s own slogan, “Let’s Keep the Recovery”, during the general election campaign that saw them returned, just about, to government. Our parliament retains a notable lack of diversity, our direct provision system locks up migrants, we’ve only pledged to take 200 children from the migrant camp in Calais: “We’re very good at saying that we’re a progressive country without ever really looking at what that means. We don’t really look at our own reflection, so it’s very easy for us to say that they’re all racists in America or Britain, or against the migrants, but where are those kids over from Calais?… We choose to kind of close our eyes and say, you know what, we’re a progressive country. But we’re not. Ibrahim Halawa has been in an Egyptian prison for the last two, three years, and we’ve done nothing because, you know what, he’s not the right kind of Irish person.”
“It’s frustrating for me, and I don’t know where we go with that.”
With this sort of progress seemingly stalling – and even reversing – globally, we’ve seen young people explicitly and overwhelmingly vote in the opposite direction to older generations. However, as Gannon notes, these generations were the ones who made substantial progress campaigning on everything from LGBT rights to accessible healthcare. “This was before we were even born. What was done to those generations that they fall into this malaise?” This means that younger generations must ensure to keep those views as they age, to “have these views and make sure they carry forwards”. “We need to say ‘you know what, I can’t believe they voted for Trump’ and then make sure we’re voting for people, not only because they did local good or anything, but because they can actually introduce progressive legislation.”
While it has always been something of a battle for those who want to see progressive values flourish in Ireland, then, that battle may now become more difficult. The pitfalls to avoid are those that allowed Trump to flourish. “How are we communicating with people? Are we just standing there are telling people that’s wrong and you’re inherently evil if you believe otherwise? Because if we are, we’re going to fail.”
For Gannon, this is where the appeal of the Social Democrats lay over parties like Anti-Austerity Alliance, People Before Profit or Sinn Féin, even though he cites friends in them all: “I genuinely think they create outsiders and present the stage that there is absolutely nothing else. And we talk into this bubble where we’re only ever talking to people we agree with.”
“I’m going to take the hard road and actually say ‘I’m in this political party because I want to be in government. I want to be able to create legislation. I want to be learning, and I have an infinite amount of things to learn’, and that’s the challenge.”.
“We could have joined our little party and gone out there with a placard and told people how miserable their lives were. The easiest thing to do would be to walk about Dublin Central for the next 20 years as an independent saying “listen, things are terrible”. But, you know what, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to take the hard road and actually say ‘I’m in this political party because I want to be in government. I want to be able to create legislation. I want to be learning, and I have an infinite amount of things to learn’, and that’s the challenge. But, as a political party, we need to be blatant about the fact that we want to be in government.”
And what’s it like remaining not only a progressive politician, but to try and build a left-leaning party in the midst of all this? “We’re still standing, we’re still building.” He cites the appointment of Brian Sheehan, who served as co-director of the yes campaign in last year’s successful marriage equality referendum, to General Secretary of the party: “He’s a guy that knows how to build movements. And no other party has that.” With the success of the yes campaign ultimately down to the constant emphasis on starting conversations, Gannon’s emphasis on communication appears to be one valued by the party at large: “On our terms, we want to enact social democratic policies. I have no interest of just being the party that stands outside and tells people what they already know about their lives. We need to be ideas-focused, we need policy development, we need to tap into Ireland, the exceptional people that want to make contributions in this country.”
“We need to look at what we’re doing. We’re only a country of 4.8 million people. A bit of innovation would make things better.”
