IT’S UP TO YOU NOW, TANAISTE
As party leaders refuse to back down, Frances Fitzgerald must now decide whether to sacrifice her position to prevent an election...
TÁNAISTE Frances Fitzgerald holds the Government’s fate in her hands this weekend – after the Taoiseach twice stopped short of saying he would refuse her resignation.
Ms Fitzgerald will spend the coming days knowing that if she quits she would spare the country an unwanted and divisive general election.
And while Leo Varadkar insisted last night that her departure would be unfair, he stopped short of adding that he would not allow it. Asked twice by RTÉ’s Sharon Ní Bheoláin whether he would accept her resignation, he declined on both
occasions to say he would stop her from going. Instead, he replied: ‘I really hope that doesn’t arise, and I won’t be seeking her resignation.’ Minutes later he again avoided saying whether he would refuse her resignation, if offered.
‘I don’t believe that’s going to arise’ he said. ‘She hasn’t offered her resignation and I am not going to seek her resignation.’
Ms Fitzgerald, who many expect to retire at the next election anyway, is acutely aware that should, she decide to step down now, the prospect of a snap Christmas election would be averted.
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin had earlier made clear: ‘The Tánaiste should step aside, in our view, and that would avoid a general election.’ And while the Taoiseach strongly defended his Tánaiste in a powerful performance on Six One News, at no point did he say explicitly that he would refuse her resignation if she decided that stepping down was the best thing for the country.
Instead, he repeatedly used grisly language to insist the public did not wish to see a ‘decapitation’ or ‘execution’ – even though, in most modern-day political retirements, no actual bloodshed is required.
Some Fine Gael TDs speculated that were Ms Fitzgerald to quit, she might, in return, be offered the chance to run for the party in the Presidential election next year.
Mr Martin and the Taoiseach met yesterday in an attempt to resolve the impasse. But the face-to-face encounter produced no immediate de-escalation of the crisis, only an agreement to meet again today.
‘It was a case of both men sizing each other up,’ said a senior Fianna Fáil figure. They could only agree that neither wanted an election. The Taoiseach then made his TV appeal for Fianna Fáil to back off, saying: ‘Let’s all calm down a bit.’
The prospect of an election sparked alarm among EU members, where the border is seen as the major stumbling on the Brexit talks. The bloc’s 27 leaders will meet again on December 14 and 15, just days ahead of a possible general election here.
‘The Irish issue is very worrying. The chances of sufficient progress in December were only 50-50. Now maybe less,’ an official handling Brexit talks from one of the other 27 EU states said yesterday.
Mr Varadkar said he doesn’t want an election but would aim for an early date if it becomes inevitable.
And he repeatedly pointed the finger of blame for the crisis at the Opposition parties, saying: ‘I’m not going to be rushing to the Park over the weekend to dissolve the Dáil... they will be the ones responsible if it happens.’
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin sought to assist the situation by all but pledging that one head would do. The party said it would not put a motion of no confidence in Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan based on the facts currently disclosed.
Last night senior Fianna Fáil sources indicated the same. ‘Sure, Charlie is the least of the troubles,’ the Irish Daily Mail was told.
Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin, Labour and the Social Democrats are all publicly pledged to vote no confidence in the Tánaiste, and Solidarity-PBP and the Greens are likely to follow suit. In all likelihood it would mean an immediate journey to the Áras by the Taoiseach to seek a dissolution of the Dáil.
Some were canvassing last night that if the Government left the motion of no confidence on the order paper – without substituting its own confidence motion – the Tánaiste would go, but the Government itself could ‘zombie on’.
Shane Ross of the Independent Alliance said: ‘We are appealing for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to step back from the brink to avoid a needless and costly general election.’ His colleague, junior minister John Halligan, claimed polls around the country showed 75-80% of people did not want an election, ‘and they certainly do not want one at Christmas’.
The man who hoped to lead his colleagues on a mission to North
‘A case of sizing each other up’ ‘Have to stop ball rolling down hill’
Korea added: ‘We’re trying to bring common sense into the debate.’
Mr Ross said: ‘A lot of ministers made mistakes. She made a mistake, to do with the email and how it was communicated. But her record on whistleblowers is pretty much impeccable.’ Kevin ‘Boxer’ Moran accused Sinn Féin of seeking to ‘court martial’ the Tánaiste.
‘This is wrong. We need to give the people leadership,’ he said.
His colleague Seán Canney said: ‘We have to stop the ball rolling down the hill.’
The Greens suggested the motions of no confidence could be postponed to January, but the Taoiseach dismissed such talk as ‘not realistic.’ A new Government in such a case could take ten weeks to put together and might only take office in March.’
The latest controversy began when Taoiseach told the Dáil, on November 15, that the Department of Justice had no prior knowledge that former Garda commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan’s legal team would attempt to undermine Sergeant Maurice McCabe at the O’Higgins Commission. He added the Tánaiste ‘told me that she had no hand, act or part in this decision and she was not aware of it until after the fact, around the time it entered the public domain’, in 2016. But on Monday, it emerged that the Tánaiste had received an email about the commissioner’s strategy a year earlier, in 2015.
The opposition has claimed Ms Fitzgerald, who was then justice minister, should have warned Garda chiefs not to take such an aggressive stance. However, Ms Fitzgerald said the email gave her legal advice not to interfere. The revelation forced the Taoiseach to correct the Dáil record.
Despite sparking a crisis, the Taoiseach made an emotive plea on behalf of Ms Fitzgerald yesterday evening. He said: ‘I don’t believe it is the wish of the country that there would be an execution before trial. I believe people, deep down, believe in fair play and that
we shouldn’t have kangaroo courts. But if we have to go to the polls, and I don’t want to go to the polls, I think we’d be better to have it done before Christmas.
‘If we have an election I can still attend the EU summit with the full executive and Constitutional powers of the office of Taoiseach on December 13-14 December.’
He said: ‘I don’t believe the decapitation of the Tánaiste, based on trumped-up charges is fair. Let’s all calm down a bit. Let’s pause for reflection. Let’s perhaps withdraw these motions, get on with the business of Government and parliament over the next couple of weeks, and allow the Charleton Tribunal, starting on January 8, to do the work that we set it up to do, which is to look into these matters.’
SOME months ago, when I was visiting friends in the North, the late Martin McGuinness came up in the conversation and we all agreed that the North’s former Sinn Féin leader is much missed. Setting aside the argument that it was McGuinness himself who prompted the current political vacuum there, it is an experienced fixer like him who is badly needed now to get the political show back on track.
Meanwhile, the conversation that day then turned to Martin McGuinness’s successor, Michelle O’Neill, a woman who here in the Republic had scarcely been heard of, but who to be fair had had a reasonable profile in Northern Ireland over the past few years.
‘All the same,’ said the other woman in our conversation, somewhat dismissively, ‘I know she’s been around a bit, but still, how on earth did that wee girl get the top job?’
Well, that ‘wee girl’ obviously had the imprimatur of Gerry Adams. If she didn’t she wouldn’t be where she is now. Even if every other Sinn Féin voice in the North had wanted Mrs O’Neill, without the nod from Gerry Adams it simply wouldn’t have happened. In Sinn Féin circles within Adams’s Six Counties, his word is law. As it is when it comes to Sinn Féin in the other 26.
Meaning, therefore, that in the light of Adams’s announcement last weekend, Mary Lou McDonald is now Sinn Féin’s president-elect (without an election) because she, too, has the approval of Gerry Adams.
And therein lies the rub for Sinn Féin in the Republic. In the North, it’s that Gerry Adams association that still pulls in the votes for the party come election time; the so-called old guard remaining misty-eyed over ‘the struggle’, revering Adams’s commitment to the party and the cause for Irish unity, still dining out on the stories of the past and passing them on, down the generations.
AND when it comes to the North, with voting largely still divided along sectarian/ religious lines, Mr Adams therefore remains as powerful a force as ever when it comes to the electorate.
In the Republic, however, where voting does not divide so simplistically, Sinn Féin under McDonald will now be striving to build its vote, to gobble up what remains of Labour, to tempt the more farleft voters its way, and to nibble away, of course, at Fianna Fáil.
And for many of those voters Sinn Féin is trying to attract, the Gerry Adams’s association has traditionally been toxic, his very name serving only to work against the party.
Which is why, when she takes over next year, one of McDonald’s most important tasks will be to show she is her own woman, to illustrate that Adams is not still whispering in her ear, and to demonstrate the Sinn Féin of the past is indeed, in Yeatsian terms, ‘dead and gone, it’s with O’Leary in the grave’.
That’s assuming, of course, that her elevation doesn’t hap- pen sooner. For yesterday, with all eyes focused on a possible election before Christmas, Sinn Féin announced that if a poll does happen then it will be McDonald, not Adams, who will lead the party to the polling stations.
What wasn’t said, however, but what cannot be discounted in the current volatile climate, is that while an election may well have all the appearance of a Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil battle for supremacy, a slugging-itout of the two traditional giants, perhaps such a turn of events might just work to Sinn Féin’s – and McDonald’s – advantage. With Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin at war, their difficulty now that the Adams toxicity has been removed could well be McDonald’s opportunity. Electoral gains that have been just beyond SF’s reach could now begin to drop into its lap.
Still, whether it’s an election now or in the future, the leaderelect still has her work cut out for her.
Yet it would be foolish to discount just how far Sinn Féin has come. And, indeed, how far the Mary Lou factor has already helped to carry them.
It’s worth noting that in the 2011 election that took Michael D Higgins to the Áras, Martin McGuinness secured only 13.7% of the first-preference vote. That was in 2011, the same year that Mary Lou, then a largely unknown political entity in terms of the general public, first took her seat in Dáil Éireann. (When you witness the dramatic rise in her presence and her profile, it’s hard to believe that she has only been a TD for six years.)
The rise of Sinn Féin has not been meteoric by any means,
but the party has been making steady electoral gains.
Despite the mood music of last weekend’s ard fheis – when speakers lauded their republican heroes, when former IRA member Martin Ferris joined Gerry Adams on the podium, and where the walls of the Dublin’s RDS were hung with images of the 1981 hunger strikers, the reality now is that Adams is yesterday’s man. After 34 years at the helm, it’s over.
And now it’s up to McDonald to lead Sinn Féin out of the shadows and, as the party would hope and predict, into government.
She has already contributed to some degree to that make-over, with that Mary Lou factor working well in terms of appealing to a wider network than the one comprised of traditional Sinn Féin voters. She is a straight talker, has a middle-class background, is a very able debater and comes, of course, devoid of terrorist baggage. And she has a sense of humour, not exactly a given when it comes to many Sinn Féin TDs.
Women, in particular, like her, respect her obvious ability, and like her talent for giving the more traditional male politicians a run for their money in the Dáil.
And while swathes of the electorate are still far from being cardcarrying members of Sinn Féin, there is still, among many, a tacit respect for how its deputy leader conducts herself.
As someone said to me recently: ‘I don’t think I’d vote for her at this stage but one thing’s for sure – you’d never pull the wool over Mary Lou McDonald’s eyes!’
Sinn Féin has 23 seats in Dáil Éireann. There are those who predicted they would take even more seats than that in last year’s election. That dream result, however, didn’t happen for the party. But it more than consolidated its base, and now with all eyes on the next election – be that next month or a year hence – it’s down to McDonald to lead the party to the next phase of its development.
She comes to the job with a good track record in the Dáil when it comes to tackling key issues of accountability and transparency.
McDonald asks the questions that ‘ordinary’ people want answered. Be it in the Dáil itself, in appearances on radio or television, or in her role on the Public Accounts Committee, she comes across as tough and demanding and as someone who wants to get to the nitty-gritty of the issue under discussion. She’s not a waffler and it stands to her.
This past week it has been McDonald, not Adams, fronting for Sinn Féin over the Frances Fitzgerald affair and demanding answers from the embattled Tánaiste and Taoiseach.
When Sinn Féin’s no-confidence vote was tabled on Thursday, it was Sinn Féin’s leader-elect who took to the airwaves on RTÉ’s News At One to explain the party’s position.
It is interesting to recall, too, that it was McDonald who warned Fitzgerald when the Nóirín O’Sullivan/Maurice McCabe situation was raging that, as justice minister, she needed to remove the then garda commissioner from office, saying that if she didn’t, O’Sullivan would drag her down too. How prescient!
The big game-changer for Sinn Féin, however, apart from the departure of Adams, is its change of tack in relation to entering coalition government.
Traditionally a no-no for the party – and something that Dublin Mid West TD and influential party strategist Eoin Ó Broin has always regarded as fundamental – the fact that this motion for change was carried at the Sinn Féin ard fheis last weekend opens up a whole new political landscape.
What it means, in simple, practical terms, is that those who may have wavered about voting for Sinn Féin because they knew their vote would never give them a voice at the Cabinet table no longer have to consider that.
If they were attracted to Sinn Féin but stuck with Fianna Fáil because of the potential power factor, well, now that vote is likely to go Sinn Féin’s way.
And Sinn Féin has decided that those are votes that it is no longer prepared to put on the long finger. The party wants them now.
NONETHELESS, it won’t be plain sailing for the Sinn Féin presidentelect. While the Sinn Féin party machine is impressive and terrifying in its effectiveness when it comes to the big picture, when it comes down to all the smaller frames – not everyone within the ranks is singing from exactly the same hymn sheet.
Extraordinarily smart and articulate as Ó Broin is, his uncompromisingly Marxist societal view does not sit easily with all.
Inevitably, there will be tensions ahead, with divergent views less likely to remain under the party radar if seats at the Cabinet table beckon after the next election. And then there is the North. There are those who argue that how Sinn Féin operates – North and South – is still hugely influenced by a particular West Belfast clique. And that for any Sinn Féin leader it is crucial that they cut the mustard in terms of their Northern credentials.
McDonald may not be from Northern Ireland but she has been heavily involved in negotiations there and at the end of the day the argument that she now appears to be the only contender for the Adams crown speaks for itself.
She is the anointed one. It has been signed off. Even by the party hard chaws in West Belfast. If it hadn’t been, she wouldn’t be the only potential leader left standing. She wouldn’t, in fact, be standing at all.
But she is, and if the country finds itself on an election footing in the coming days, then, as confirmed yesterday by Sinn Féin, it’s a definite case of cometh the hour, cometh the woman.
And whatever about the dynamics of the new order, whatever about the new Sinn Féin leader’s dealings with the electorate, with Michelle O’Neill in the North, with those within her party, and with those who oppose her from without, one thing’s for sure: as she leads Sinn Féin out of the shadows and onto a new political playing field, nobody will ever refer to its leader-elect Mary Lou McDonald as ‘that wee girl’.