Nostalgia: Jack Lynch’s slogan was ‘Let’s Back Jack’ and the voters of 1969 did

“Trek to the polls as all parties proclaim their supreme confidence,” ran the headline in the Evening Echo on election day, Wednesday, June 18, 1969.

The article beneath began: “As all three parties expressed their full confidence in the outcome, and mustered strong armies of electioneering helpers, Ireland’s voters went to the polls today: In the usual, slow trickle in the early part of the day, swelling in to a more continuous stream as evening approached.”

This newspaper often ran multiple editions over the course of a day, and the June 18 copy that survives in the archives is marked Special Edition’, so it was probably late, but that top line is so evergreen that an editor could have run it at any time, ‘supremely confident’ that they hadn’t much chance of being proven wrong. In fact, bar the “all three parties” mention, you could nearly run it even now, 55 years later.

The slow start to voting is still entirely predictable, but while the parties might have all claimed “supreme confidence”, the truth was more prosaic.

The outgoing taoiseach, Jack Lynch, had succeeded Seán Lemass in November 1966 and in a Dáil of 144, where 73 seats were needed for a majority, he presided over a 72-seat Fianna Fáil minority government.

‘Honest Jack’ wasn’t alone in facing in to his first election as leader, because Fine Gael’s Liam Cosgrave had succeeded James Dillon after the 1965 general election. The Labour Party’s Brendan Corish, on the other hand, was fighting his third election as leader.

The Cork taoiseach would prove to be Fianna Fáil’s strongest electoral asset, his calm, easy personality proving a hit with voters, and although his party had been in power since 1957, many agreed with its new slogan, ‘Let’s back Jack’.

Meanwhile, Fine Gael was suffering something of an identity crisis, one which even now sounds familiar: Its older, more conservative stalwarts were badly at odds with some of its younger, more progressive members.

Over in Labour, the likes of Noel Browne, Justin Keating, and Conor Cruise O’Brien seemed to believe their own, ‘‘The Seventies will be socialist’, slogan and overestimated their attractiveness to the electorate.

On Friday, June 20, the Evening Echo headline was, ‘Focus on eight outstanding areas’, as six constituencies had yet to declare a result, and two were facing recounts. Fianna Fáil was on 67 seats, Fine Gael 45, and Labour 16.

The following evening, we were reporting Fianna Fáil “home and dried”, with only a full recount in Laois Offaly outstanding. In the end, the 1970s would not be socialist, and Labour lost four seats, leaving it without a presence in Cork city.

Fine Gael gained three seats, but so, too, did its Civil War rival, giving Jack Lynch an overall majority of 75 seats.

By the Monday after the election, politics had been driven off the front page of the Evening Echo.

The Nixon White House was planning to bring home “at least 350,000 US troops” from Vietnam; and the case against Michael Philip Jagger (25) and Marianne Evelyn Dunbar (22), also known as Marianne Faithfull, for possession of cannabis at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, on May 28, 1969, had been adjourned.

Meanwhile, gardaí at Union Quay had completed investigations, “with the assistance of two youths”, in to the theft of Leaving Cert and Intermediate Cert examination papers from Christian Brothers College Cork and Coláiste Chríost Rí.

The main headline went to an unfortunately hardy perennial. A war in the Middle East, this time between Israel and Egypt, had, the previous day, claimed 23 lives. Israel is at war again today.