We haven’t gone away you know! FG gets its election ducks in a row
LEO Varadkar is so busy not planning an election that people are getting suspicious. The Taoiseach has been using all of his political smarts to claim a cut-and-run is the last thing on his mind.
However, Varadkar’s approach to the not unimportant issue of candidate selection has an air of ‘the early bird catches the worm’.
This was evidenced by Fine Gael’s declaration last week that it was the first party to select more than 300 candidates for the local elections, and 87% of the slates had now been completed.
This is of course ‘only’ the local elections, but should a general election you are not ‘planning’ accidentally happen, it’s handy if you have your council selections out of the way.
The declaration, in passing, that 30% of the council candidates were female was less impressive. The party was certainly quite proud of itself over this, but one supposes baby steps generally get the most applause.
Perhaps more significantly, the party was also first out of the blocks when it comes to selecting candidates for the general election that Leo tells us Fine Gael is not planning for.
The line-up for Dublin Bay South made for an interesting contrast with current perceptions of the state of the party. A wave of departures over the past year has seen Fine Gael acquire a curious air of detached decline.
RATHER like John McGahern’s rural Ireland in the 1950s, it spent much of 2023 looking like the sort of dying village where the sole desire among those who remain – be they young, old or the Ministers for Public Expenditure and Enterprise – is to emigrate to a better place.
Leo can snark all he wants about people fussing too much over the entirely normal state of affairs where a quarter of your army has bailed out before the battle.
However, when the political seas around you are teeming with small furry things heading in the opposite direction as fast as they can, people will talk.
It could be that Leo is right and Fine Gael is actually on the verge of reinvention. But if the level of competition to regain the lost seat(s) in the party heartland of Dublin Bay South is replicated across the country, Ireland’s new permanent party of government may be on the cusp of some form of renewal.
In Dublin Bay South, the mood was buoyant as a packed room of 200 delegates voted, under the benevolent gaze of Simon Harris.
The runners-up were more interesting than the winning James Geoghegan. The favourites to be the running mate of Geoghegan are two female councillors – Emma Blain and Punam Rane – who both moved into the constituency from adjoining constituencies.
Both are dream candidates for any party wanting to break through the gender glass ceiling and become, finally, representative of the new Ireland.
Blain, who is now the editor of the Church of Ireland Gazette, is a second-term councillor who has acquired sharp political elbows.
Rane, seen as a Leo protégée, is a successful businesswoman who meets all of the criteria of the Taoiseach’s desire for a more representative school of politics that got him into such trouble with Elon Musk.
The other name on everyone’s lips is that of former TD Kate O’Connell, with whom Leo has had a famously thorny relationship.
For now, HQ sources ruled out a dramatic late intervention, with one stating: ‘Hell will freeze over before Kate comes back.’
However, such strong opinions could soften significantly if whispers were to start about O’Connell running as an Independent or a Social Democrat.
That is not the end of the putative runners in a constituency whose dreaded Fine Gael ruling class believe should have taoisigh rather than mere councillors as candidates.
This belief means whispers still continue about a Leo ‘deadline day’-style transfer from Dublin West to, ahem, enable Fine Gael to get a clean run at the Fine Gael seat.
Ironically, as the Taoiseach now lives in the Portobello district, having moved from his old Dublin West home, he is actually now a resident of the south city.
Leo has consistently claimed he is not having bad thoughts and that Dublin West is closest to his political heart.
The party, though, is haunted by the presence of Ivana Bacik, who is essentially in possession of the Fine Gael seat.
Polling shows that Ivana is thriving – which is more than can be said for her party – with one figure warning: ‘Ivana on the polling is a certainty. She has cornered a significant FG women’s vote in a constituency where the other three TDs and our candidate-designate are male.’
Were Leo to decide to run, the poshest constituency in the country (sorry, Dublin Rathdown) would surely, with Ivana and Eamon Ryan running, be satisfied by an electoral field with three party leaders – not to mention a fourth putative one in Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan.
Though Dublin Bay South is special it is not alone in having an impressive slate of new and relatively new talent.
As Sinn Féin struggles to attract talent and Fianna Fáil appears intent on a candidate strategy of more of the same, it is perhaps time to start taking note that Fine Gael is attracting a swathe of new and potentially interesting candidates, most of whom are female.
In Dublin it has acquired sharp new candidates such as Lorraine Hall in Dun Laoghaire who, apart from having survived the delights of working for Alan Shatter, is a second cousin of Social Protection Minister Heather Humphreys.
As Fine Gael chases two seats in Dun Laoghaire, the constituency senior partner, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, will be becoming increasingly aware that Lorraine shares many of Heather’s traits.
In Fingal, after a term in the Seanad, Regina Doherty almost resembles a new candidate.
If Josepha Madigan runs for Europe the party has a younger identikit replacement in Maeve O’Connell, who is also a barrister.
Dublin Rathdown has terribly high standards.
GREEN Party leader Eamon Ryan may be intent in taking the Healy-Raes head-on in Kerry, but FG councillor Aoife Thornton is a more likely challenger in the Kerry Group of Death.
There is no shortage of hungry senators, such as the TikTok king Garret Ahearn in Tipperary, John Cummins in Waterford, and the lean and hungry Tim Lombard in Cork South-West (the Fine Gael rural equivalent of Dublin Bay South).
Then there’s the even hungrier Michael Carrigy in Longford-Westmeath, and Mary Seery Kearney, who may also be given Punam Rane as a running mate just to keep things interesting.
Eileen Lynch in Cork North-West will bring a welcome air of modernity to the Fine Gael ticket, while rising councillor Sharon Tolan will be an equally interesting running mate for Helen McEntee in Meath East.
In Cork East, former pop band member and successful businesswoman Sinéad Sheppard brings a new glamour to the previously dusty Fine Gael offering, while Thomasina Connell is the favourite in Laois.
There are still some deserts, such as Donegal and Carlow-Kilkenny, while the party will also struggle to replace Simon Coveney should he bolt towards Europe or the private sector.
But, as we noted earlier, for a party not planning an early election Fine Gael is certainly getting a lot of ducks lined up.
When it comes to the much feared 40% gender quota challenge, the party appears to be comfortably ahead of the game.
As to whether the new breed will see FG rise like a phoenix, well, that is at the mercy of the fates when the general election occurs in 2024… oops, 2025... probably!