With loyalty like this, it’ll be a tough gig, Micheál

ONE of the reasons that so many Fianna Fáilers, in particular, felt so aggrieved to have been overlooked for Cabinet posts is because they reckoned their omission was a poor reward for their ‘loyalty’.

You might have thought that publicly whingeing and criticising your leader, and highlighting rivalries, ill will and division within your party, was a funny way to exhibit the sort of loyalty you felt deserved rewarding. But then, in the past week, we have learned that there’s ‘loyalty’ and there’s ‘political loyalty’, and they are two horses of entirely different colours.

‘Loyalty’ means standing by a person or an institution – your family, your spouse, your colleagues, your boss – through thick and thin. It means never betraying a negative thought about them to an outsider, whatever you might privately feel.

It means having their back, even if they let you down, because their strength, status and success is also yours. It means putting up, shutting up and never letting the side down.

‘Political loyalty’, on the other hand, is merely a strategy to ensure your own advancement to privilege and power.

It is a tactic, like any other in the armoury of an ambitious politician, to be deployed for maximum advantage, but promptly decommissioned when it is no longer effective.

Barry Cowen was one of those politicians apparently rewarded for his ‘loyalty’ to the party when he was made Minister for Agriculture, to the fierce disgruntlement of those others who felt entitled to the job. But true loyalty to his party and his leader, in the layman’s sense, would have entailed fessing up about that drink-driving conviction long before it leaked out.

As a seasoned politician, he’d have known that any such revelation emerging after his appointment would have been a major blow to Micheál Martin’s credibility and judgment.

Genuine loyalty would have meant risking his promotional prospects for the good of his party. But because ‘political loyalty’ means looking after number one, Cowen kept his mouth shut, took the job and let the slurry hit the fan with a vengeance in his party’s very first week in power.

Norma Foley is another loyal Fianna Fáiler, the daughter of TD Denis Foley, who first cut her teeth in local politics in her early 20s. Again, she was one of those appointees whose elevation caused disquiet in her party because she’s a first-time TD. Since Micheál Martin had so few baubles to hand out this time, it was inevitable that certain people and certain areas would feel overlooked, and he attempted to calm the outcry over the West’s omission by insisting ministers were appointed for the good of the country, not their constituencies.

A loyal general would have backed him up on that, to help calm the row, but not Norma. Since her ‘political loyalty’ was to herself alone, promptly fuelled the flames by reassuring her constituents, in an interview with her local paper, that she’d be putting Kerry first – the exact opposite of the message her leader desperately needed her to convey just then.

AND it was Dara Calleary’s loyalty that his outraged supporters trumpeted when they protested the ‘appalling’ slight of his being given the Chief Whip’s job and not the ministerial portfolio he deserved. His exclusion from the Cabinet, and his very vocal dismay over the paltry nature of the post he got, became the single biggest story of the new administration’s first days.

According to one unnamed TD from the West, ‘he should have told Martin to f*** off and caused a mutiny’, which is quite a neat summation of the nature and purpose of ‘political loyalty’: its only function is to benefit you, not to benefit the party generally.

And if it doesn’t pay off as you’d hoped, feel free to take a wrecking ball to everyone else’s prospects and ambitions. ‘Loyalty’ is gracious, tactful and enthusiastic even if unrewarded: ‘political loyalty’ is sour, divisive and resentful if someone doesn’t get their way.

And Cowen, Foley and Calleary, let’s remember, are among the Taoiseach’s chosen ones. They were preferred over the dozens of others who were found wanting for one reason or another. So if this is the pick of the bunch, we can only wish him luck in managing the rest over the next two years…