What we can learn from Gavin Pepper.

Social media master with a broad popular message.

This might hurt.

If you're a "keen and experienced observer of the political scene" it's not going to be easy to accept that a taxi driver from Ballymun is the one who has actually figured things out.

On the other hand if you watch eight hour videos on YouTube about Neo Feudal Anarcho Capitalism - with network effects! and think that's what the voters of Kildare North are waiting for, well then you're probably OK. You're too far from reality to feel any pain. Carry on.

Gavin is a phenomenon. The most unlikely of people are recognising that and reaching out to him. There's a genuine reluctance by many on our side to see what Gavin has done or to be willing to learn from it. In some cases that's probably down to snobbery. We're not exactly knocking it out of the park when it comes to political nous and overlooking Gavin would be one more miss.

There are at least three extraordinary ways in which Gavin has shown the movement how to advance and what our next steps might be.

+ He has nailed social media in away no other politician in this country has. Not even close.

+ He has broadened the message beyond immigration in a way that has reached people no one else on our side even dreams of reaching

+ He has used social media to revolutionise the role of a Councillor and engage with the public on national issues.

Any one of those would have been an achievement. And he has done it all just relying on himself, two or three people around him and his gut instinct. A real raw political talent. And someone to learn from.

Bolsonaro, Zemmour, Milei, Pepper.

Two weeks before the election, in a cold and rainy car park, having just being kicked out of Artane Castle Shopping Centre after trying to canvass, Gavin and his team - his wife Lindsey, two of his kids and Val and her phone - took three minutes of pure creativity, a mixture of laughing and roaring at one another, to produce a one minute video in the rain. Seven Hundred Thousand views on Twitter alone.

https://x.com/gavpepper85/status/1858167856589939068

Someone came up and called Val a Fascist. Val politely said she wasn't. Four Hundred Thousand views on Twitter alone.

https://x.com/valerie70154568/status/1860595968351019138/

Just one more day on the campaign trail. Ten minutes altogether - a million views. Not every day was like that but during the campaign Val liked to get out at least two 50K view videos a day.

Of course it's personality. There's no one else in politics in Ireland at the moment capable of doing that. You can't manufacture that kind of candidate. You can't turn someone in to being able to do it. You've got to be the kind of personality that's made for it. But... there will be others, not to the forefront in politics at the moment, looking at Gavin and seeing the opening. For now though, he's doing what we've only seen being done in presidential campaigns abroad.

Friends in low places.

Gavin launched his campaign on a cold dark evening in the car park of the Holy Child Church in Whitehall. And who showed up only Kitty Holland. Who couldn't get enough of Gavin.

And then wrote a piece in the Irish Times that could only be described as a love letter, a billet doux.

‘Not far right, not anti-immigration’:

Like any teenager in love she asked everyone to ignore the bad that people saw in him, for Kitty and her audience that was the immigration stuff, and focus on the rest - the voice of the unheard, the volunteering with special needs children, the football coach, the highlighter of both needs in the community and the problems of individuals who were being ignored.

Back in Tara Street Kitty stood over her editor for 45 minutes and insisted not one word of her copy could be changed. The editors weren't even used to seeing her in the office.

In the Church car park she wanted to know if Gavin wasn't a bit of a socialist (Where be these enemies? Capulet! Montague!) He had a great comeback: that socialism was paid for by people like him who went out to work.

The point about Gavin is that when Kitty Holland wanted to lay aside the immigration piece there was a whole parallel and complementary side to Gavin's message for her to concentrate on.

This, having other strings to your bow, is how to reach a larger constituency. We don't need to be watering down the immigration message to connect with people - we need to have more, a lot more, to offer besides it. The way Gavin does.

This was our problem in the General Election. Apart from Gavin no one else had more to offer than just immigration and anti establishment vibes. When the actual question was who do you want running the country for five years. Not, as it was in the locals or the referendums, are you angry?

We didn't know what competition we were in.

It shouldn't be any surprise if other political actors are starting to reach out to Gavin. From all sides. All sides. All sorts of big hitters, the biggest names, have let it be known that they're taking an interest in this one man phenomenon. And they'll be getting rebuffed the same way Kitty was. But they recognise political talent.

No excuse for us missing what's right under our nose.

Gavin is showing us we need a broader multi strand message if we want to reach enough of the electorate for it to make a difference.

I can make you a Star

Councillors are Saints. The successful ones anyway. Day in day out helping people with major and some very minor problems. The windows need replacing. I've been kicked off the housing list. I can't get Jobseekers. There is a wall at the bottom of my garden... How can I put in for a grant. Endless. Expanding to fill all the time you've available. And if you can keep it up or, God help us, if you're the kind of person who enjoys doing this kind of thing then that's one more satisfied voter in the bag who might tell one of their friends.

There are about 900 Councillors around the country most of whom are that committed. Deep in the weeds of council and local government procedures and processes. The established ones have supporters and teams who are at it too. One vote at a time. One form at a time. Know the process. Chipping away.

And then along comes Gavin Pepper.

From the point of view of the individual looking for help Gavin offers a chance to get your case highlighted and attention paid to it in a way other councillors can't match. People from well outside Gavin's LEA are coming to him looking for a way around having to languish in the queue for Council attention.

And Gavin is happy to help all comers. He comes to you where you're living, he posts a video of the two of you taking about your housing need, your imminent eviction or your current personal dilemma. And like that you're much harder to ignore, much less likely to be overlooked.

Raising attention about someone’s plight is all that Gavin is looking to do. But… Inadvertently and almost unforeseen it's resulting in something else. Because of the reach he has, an individual's case becomes a stand in for the many many more in the same position up and down the country. He ends up putting a human face on a national political issue and it gets seen in every city and town and village. The housing problem is no longer an abstract one. It's this woman sitting in her front room talking to Gavin.

He's a Councillor but this kind of thing also makes him in to a national political figure, someone with a voice in the national discussion.

Gavin's the man who people look to for help and want to talk to, the personable communicator, you put that together with his social media reach and he's revolutionising what a Councillor can do.

He's more capable of making himself heard than some backbenchers.

There are ambitious Councillors around the country watching this. He's the first but he won't be the last.

Gavin's biggest challenge

The biggest challenge Gavin faces is one he's handled mightily to date and we can only pray he'll go on managing it successfully

He's got to stay being Gavin.

As might be expected there are many "experts" now ready to offer Gavin their advice or show him the ropes or help him fine tune his message. None of whom have had remotely the success he has had. The old hands are offering to show him all the tricks of the trade. But Gavin isn't about tricks. His authenticity is central to who he is.

There was one memorable hiccough so far (and he got over it by the next day). Gavin spoke at a special Dublin City Council meeting on misinformation. And half way through he forgot what he wanted to say. Delight from the online remnants of Antifa. And as mentioned he was right back on track the next day. But for that speech he had listened to advice from others about what he should say. He froze midspeech trying to check himself against the advice he'd been given. If he had just relied, as usual, on what he felt he wanted to say it would never have happened. It won't happen again.

It takes balls to trust yourself in the face of all the advice from the old hands. But he's got himself this far doing just that. Gavin is about trusting his gut and the feedback he gets from the couple of people who have been with him all along on this journey. Pray it continues.

Pay attention at the back

What's outlined above is just some of what Gavin has pulled off to date. Who knows what else he'll find to do in the next while but we can be sure he's going to find something, some new twist, some other way to rewrite the rules.

So what can the rest of us learn from what he's done so far.

Lesson One: Social Media

The social media platform he's created is vital to his success. He's found a way around RTE and the MSM. He's using it to give himself a national voice. The lesson though is that no one else on the populist side has the personality to do things the way Gavin has done them. The election campaign just gone is a demonstration that everyone else's plucky amateur efforts at social media were not fit for purpose. However well people thought they did their efforts were in a different category to what is actually required.

There are professionals who manage social media for a living. They know what they're doing. How much effort and money to devote to each platform, branding, sourcing high quality video, projecting a professional image, monitoring mentions, targeting spending on ads.

This is the kind of thing they do for about €400 a week.

1) A dedicated expert in graphic design and video editing to produce content tailored for each social media platform.

2) Keep posts frequent on each platform (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram).

3) Deliver a targeted Facebook/Insta ad campaign. Cost of running the ads (~€50/€100 a week) not covered.

4) Editing videos and photos at request. Video to be provided by independent videographer

5) Maintenance of website

6) Access to consultants, veterans of numerous election campaigns.

Would you rewire your own house, would you do your own plumbing or change a clutch yourself.

Gavin has shown what can be achieved with a platform. For everyone else, with less talent and natural flair, some sort of established long term professional or semi professional effort is required. Whether that's a contract with an agency or assembling experienced professionals within our own ranks. How it is funded, what messaging and content it promotes, are issues to be determined.

Lesson Two: Broader message.

Gavin has shown how vital it is to have other strands to the message apart from just being anti immigration or anti establishment. It’s the difference between protest politics and real politics.

The Greens have a focus but they also bang on about how it (allegedly) extends in to every other aspect of politics.

Fail to make that leap, fail to broaden the message and the results will continue look like they did last week. In a General Election what voters want is managers and people with ideas for sorting out day to day problems.

What should that wider message be. How do we engage on the issues like housing, health care and cost of living.

Or, to step back a level, how do we even develop policy. Through online discussion? Or through more formal dedicated forums whether online or in the real world? Do we need to be sitting around tables in discussion groups? Meeting in Hotel Conference Centres?

Or should answers be getting researched and developed through Policy Institutes and research bodies, funded or not?

The established parties have made it very hard for any party not already in the Dail to obtain political funding. In the name of fighting corruption the taxpayer funds the major parties in the Dail according to the vote they get and the law heavily restricts funding from any private sources. That deliberately makes it hard on newer, smaller parties.

But there are no such restrictions on the funding for political research bodies. In theory dedicated political research institutes can raise as much as they like from individuals.

And, for what it's worth, Gript found that individuals, as well disposed as they might be, don’t like to just donate money. But if you switch to a subscription model, where the supporter feels they're getting something no matter how small in return for their money, there's a much healthier revenue stream. Food for thought.

Lesson Three: Councillors can be national figures.

Finally we can learn from what Gavin has done with the role of a Councillor.

Your mileage may vary but one can identify at least five populist Councillors in Dublin. Gavin, Patrick Quinlan, Malachy, Glen Moore, Phil Sutcliffe, Linda deCourcy (Independent Ireland but she's the only one on this list trying to shut down mosques in her area.) There are 13 Independent Ireland Councillors around the country and 3 Aontu (or maybe not) together with others like ex SF Councillor Aidan Mullins in Laois.

Gavin has shown that any of them, if they have excellent social media, can take the concerns of individual constituents and turn them in to contributions to the national debate. It's now possible for a councillor to be a national politician. That's true for each of them on their own but if there are a few such Supercouncillors they’ll inevitably start to reinforce and re-echo one another. Plus they would have the support of and be a focus for the online community.

Gavin has shown us the power and the possibilities of a best in class social media effort. He's shown us the need to broaden out our message, still focus on immigration but also talk about things it impacts on like housing and health care. He's shown how in the social media age a Councillor can be a national figure. And then there's whatever new breakthroughs he'll discover in the new year. Hopefully we're ready to learn from the humble taxi driver from Ballymun.

“And when this cometh to pass, (lo, it will come,) then shall they know that a prophet hath been among them.”

Ezekiel 33:33