Being a high-profile Independent gets you on TV with Pat Kenny, but doesn’t give you an easy ride. ‘Ming’ talks emigration, personal attacks and fitting stuff in.
Forget the idea of a week being a long time in politics; if you’re standing for election in the current national poll, a lot can be fitted into 24 hours.
For election veteran, current Mayor of Roscommon and Independent candidate for Roscommon and South Leitrim, Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan the last Monday evening of his election campaign was spent sitting in Studio 2 at RTÉ’s Dublin headquarters being grilled and patronised by Pat Kenny as part of a live broadcast of The Frontline.
By the same time the following day, he’d seen himself appear on the homepage of American news channel CNBC, get a mention on the front of India’s biggest paper and had briefly been the fourth highest trending subject on Twitter worldwide.
He’d fitted in a five-mile run and had knocked on doors in Castlerea, although nowhere near as many as he’d have liked. He’d conducted radio and press interviews then, long after it had got dark, and as Enda, Micheal and Eamon took part in the last leaders’ debate in the same RTÉ studios Ming had occupied a day earlier, he was stood at the back of a crowd of 150 people who had gathered in the backroom of the Commercial Hotel in Ballinamore for an open meeting about the local implications of selling off the Quinn Group to a foreign buyer.
Not the most glamorous meeting, but an important one nonetheless, and one that Ming felt he should attend – even if it meant another late night.
With the tick of the clock that counts down to Friday’s election day getting louder and louder, sleep had become a major inconvenience.
At least if you’re part of an established political party you have lots of organisational might to hold you up and give you the occasional poke if you doze off exhausted (with the honourable exception of Éamon Ó Cuív at the Fianna Fáil policy launch, when the party apparatchik in charge of the Pro Plus couldn’t get to the snoozing Minister in time).
It’s a good job that we have adrenaline in our system, because without adrenaline I wouldn’t be able to keep going.
While there’s an upside to being an Independent candidate, in that you’re free of the demands of a political party, there’s the downside that, apart from a couple of dozen canvassers (if you’re lucky), you’re pretty much on your own.
At the end of the day – at the end of an invariably long day – it’s really all about you, and it’s you the people want to talk to and hear from.
“It’s a good job that we have adrenaline in our system, because without adrenaline I wouldn’t be able to keep going,” he says over a cup of tea after the long meeting.
“I was advised by an established candidate in 1997 that whatever the result of the election, I’d hit a wall after the election and collapse.
“I know that’ll be the case after this election because I’m going to bed at 2.30am after campaigning, then getting up at 7.30am the next morning to do the same for the last six weeks and bit by bit it does wear you down.
“Six days a week I run five miles in the morning. Mentally and physiologically it’s essential. Before The Frontline programme, I stopped canvassing at 4.30pm went for a run, had a hot bath and then headed for RTÉ in Dublin prepared. Not like Brian Cowen who got up half cut and did an interview with the world. Now we don’t want that.
“It takes its toll, though. I caught sight of myself on The Frontline and I look like I’d aged ten years since campaigning began.”
Upfront
Ming had spoken briefly at the end of the Ballinamore meeting to pledge his support for those seeking a solution to the Quinn problem that involved saving jobs and money. He’d admitted that he’d come quite late to the issue and that he’d learnt a lot from the meeting. It was unusual to hear a politician being so upfront about not having all the answers to hand.
Also at the meeting were incumbent Fine Gael TD, the affable and hard-working Frank Feighan who had been at all the many previous meetings relating to the subject, plus Sinn Féin’s Martin Kenny who spoke passionately in support of the people present, a number of whom either worked for Quinn or who were connected with the company in some way.
Afterwards, Ming spoke with both of his fellow candidates and it was striking how good humoured the exchanges between the men were. “I can see why you’re following Ming,” said Feighan in the hotel’s front lounge after the meeting.
“He’s getting a lot of interest, understandably. He’s much more interesting than me. I’m dull, like porridge.” It was a strange comment but in the context of talking about a political adversary it was a gracious thing to say.
There is clearly no love lost between Ming and Fianna Fáil’s candidate for the Roscommon-South Leitrim constituency, however.
“Independent candidates often get attacked for being single issue candidates,” Ming says, “but I’ve got views and ideas across a wide range of issues.
“The great irony of it is that in County Roscommon and South Leitrim at the moment it’s Fianna Fáil who are the one issue party, and their one issue is ‘Get Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan at all costs’.
“I’m the only thing they’ve spoken about throughout the election campaign. We are on our knees with people leaving in their droves, and it’s fairly obvious why they’re focussing on me – it’s because it takes the focus away from them and their record.
“They don’t want attention put on the disaster and the calamity that they brought up the Irish nation, and the genocidal emigration that has gone on generation after generation.
“It’s more convenient to talk about my personal habits than to talk about that. But I feel that the people here are a lot smarter than they’re being given credit for and they’ll see through what’s going on.”
Doors
As far as knocking on doors goes, Ming has had to accept that he can only do so much, especially since he’s had the media constantly knocking on his door.
“I haven’t actually been doing as much door to door as I’d have liked to,” he admits. “I’ve been dealing with the media and with the constant phone calls – I had 115 just today, and I’ve no secretary – but I have been knocking on doors for the last six weeks. It can get a little bit tedious after a while, but it’s interesting as well.
“I know it’s a cliché but you do actually get to hear what’s going on, what people are annoyed about, what they’re expecting, and you get a lot of good ideas.
“This time for the first time I’ve had massive support from people canvassing with me. On one day in Carrick-upon-Shannon I had 27 people canvassing with me and we did the houses of 7,500 people in the space of one day.
“Up until now I’ve canvassed on my own, which is practical when you’re running in a local election. This is my sixth election, from the time when I ran in 1997 in Galway West. I didn’t do any knocking on doors and any of the traditional canvassing because I didn’t have the people to do it. So what I used as my main tool to get noticed and to get my message out was calling myself Ming. It worked as a good media hook, and then once the media were interested I was able to put my ideas out there.
“They weren’t very well honed then, and I’m not saying they’re perfect now, but they certainly worked and this general election it had to be done this way. And they’ve now been dubbed the Mingsters.
“Now certainly should be the time for Independents – I think it would be an excellent thing. There’s a blank canvass with nobody currently elected, so there’s scope to reshape the political landscape.”
We were all wrong, we were all bad, we were all guilty and it was our job to prove that was not the case. I think it would have been a far better idea if they’d listened to what our ideas were.
Ming’s appearance on The Frontline was not the most satisfying experience the current Mayor of Roscommon has faced during his current campaign.
“Going by The Frontline programme we were all wrong, we were all bad, we were all guilty and it was our job to prove that was not the case. I think it would have been a far better idea if they’d listened to what our ideas were. Instead, I had to spend the whole night defending why I was running as an Independent.
“It’s irrelevant why I’m an Independent. What’s relevant is, do I have good ideas, do I have solutions and do I have the drive and sincerity to follow through on it?
“I found something very interesting about the audience on the show. If the international community that we’re now so worried about were watching, they’d have been interested to see that when a caller rang into the show and said that the Irish people were stupid, they got a rapturous round of applause.
“We’re not stupid, and we can’t be thinking in that way.”
As an Independent candidate, Ming is a strong believer in the case for having Independents in the Dáil. He points out that there are definite benefits of not being beholden to party policy and voting according to the party whip.
“When you have policies constructed by the party, you may have a little bit of input but it’ll probably mean that you don’t know an awful lot about those policies, other than how to spew them out verbatim,” he says.
“You don’t know all the thinking behind how those ideas were put together and the full reasoning behind every decision. Anything I talk about comes from personal experience, from personally researching something and then I annunciating my own views.”
One of those issues which is a pressing one for many young people in Ireland today, and relates to the many more who are no longer part of Irish society. In 2011, we are leaving in our droves. It’s an issue that Ming has personal experience of.
“Between my family and my wife’s family there are 20 of us. Out of the 20, 19 had to emigrate and that’s not an unusual thing,” Ming says.
“People across mainland Europe – in Germany, Denmark, Belgium – don’t generally have to say goodbye to their children for generations. Why do we have to put up with that? It’s because we have a failed political system and politicians that have failed us miserably.
That cycle has gone on for too long, and if it’s not stopped we’re finished for a very long time.
“If it doesn’t happen in Germany or Denmark, it shouldn’t have to happen here. Unless, of course, you want to come to the conclusion that we’re thick or stupid, and I don’t believe we are. But until we stand up and say ‘Stop, no more, this cannot happen to another generation, then we are a little bit stupid for letting it happen.
“On a personal level I have two young kids and I don’t want to see that happen to them. If they want to go to England or Australia to broaden their horizons for a while, or even permanently, then so be it – but only because they want to, not because they have to.
“They should not be forced to flee Ireland to earn a crust. That cycle has gone on for too long, and if it’s not stopped we’re finished for a very long time.”
So if he can see the problem, what would he do, if elected, to sort things out?
Focussing intensely on the recording device on the table in front of him he grabs the opportunity to put across one of his plans in a way that he didn’t feel he’d been able to on The Frontline.
“My contribution will be to provide ideas for how job creation can take place,” he says. “The ideas I have are relevant to Roscommon and South Leitrim, but they’d work across great swathes of the country and they relate to the agri-food sector and the tourism sector.
Parochial
“I’m not being parochial by focussing locally, it’s just that these are the areas that I know in some depth. In this area in 2010 we consumed €9 million worth of fruit and veg and yet we produced virtually none of it despite being surrounded by fertile land. Not even 5%.
“Ditto the case with draught beer and stout, we consumed €14.5million and produced virtually none locally. We should be producing our own food and drink where possible, leaving money in our local economy. Across Ireland we should have markets set up providing local producers with access to the community in every town with 1,000 or more people in it.
“Where tourism’s concerned, we may not be able to compete with the likes of Galway, but if we can have one third of what Galway gets, we’d have an extra €90million in the economy. We’ve got great hotels, but we’ve also got empty houses everywhere that could be rented out as great holiday lettings where visitors could experience the real Ireland, which, if my first idea is taken on board, would include the chance to drink local beer and eat locally produced food.”
By the time he’d given his policy it was approaching 1am – time to call it a day and time to head back through the country roads back to Castlerea. By the weekend it’ll all be over. Well, at least the canvassing part of things.
If he gets elected, that’s when the real work begins.
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