It’s simple, Simon... you must start listening to us

BEING the youngest Taoiseach in the country’s history isn’t going to be enough. Having almost half a million followers on social media isn’t going to be enough. Being ruthlessly determined to secure the top job, and nimble enough to outflank potential rivals, isn’t going to be enough. Those are just boasts, not attributes, they’re optics, not achievements, and they count for nothing once the deal is done.

It’s been no secret for some time that Simon Harris wanted to be the next Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach. He can’t claim to be an accidental Taoiseach, with an unsought role thrust upon him, or a reluctant leader taking the reins at a time of crisis in the national interest. He’s been chasing this big beast of a job for some time and now, like a cartoon dog who’s finally caught the car, he’d better know what exactly he’s going to do with it, and fast.

Honeymoon

Honeymoon periods are strictly for blushing novices and, if you’ll forgive me another cartoon metaphor, Simon Harris is the ever-ready, over-eager Pepé Le Pew. And he cannot say that he doesn’t know what needs to be done. There’s nothing like a catastrophic hammering at the polls to concentrate political minds on the need to embrace ‘core values’ and connect with their traditional roots. Thanking party members for ‘the honour of my life’ after Sunday’s coronation, the new leader of his party said: ‘This is a moment for Fine Gael to reset.’

That, of course, is a very different message from the one coming from his party a couple of weeks ago. Then, it was the Irish people who needed to be reset ‘on a pathway of liberalism, tolerance and modernity’, according to Leo Varadkar, by voting Yes/Yes to the family and care referendums. Otherwise, we were warned, we would be taking a ‘backward step’ into traditionalism, intolerance and, therefore by definition, conservatism.

And God between us and all conservatives, for who could possibly want to be numbered among that sorry band of bigoted, crawthumping, antediluvian fossils clinging to their outdated beliefs in medieval concepts like ‘marriage’, ‘faith’, ‘motherhood’ and ‘biological females’?

To be left-wing was to be progressive, enlightened, inclusive, diverse, modern. But to stray even slightly east of centre you were immediately ‘far-right’, either too stupid to be heeded or too wicked for redemption.

Only one party in the Dáil, Aontú, stood alone against the two referendums, while the rest of the House – all three Government parties and all the other Opposition parties led by Sinn Féin waving their Yes/Yes, banners – stampeded to what they expected would be the safety in numbers on the ‘woke’ left. What a shame nobody noticed, until way too late, that almost 75% of the electorate were hastening in the opposite direction.

I don’t recall veteran Fine Gaeler Michael Ring speaking out against the proposals to water down marriage, or erase women and mothers from the Constitution, during the referendum campaign. But now, like a lot of his party colleagues, the scales have somehow fallen from his eyes, and he sees clearly the need to return to those ‘core values’ they’d have scorned a month ago: Fine Gael has been ‘too left for too long’, he declared on Sunday.

Now he wants the ‘hate crimes’ bill scrapped, and he ‘won’t be allowing Fine Gael to go into all these kinds of social issues that people don’t want’.

Well, that makes a change. Just a year ago, his new party leader Simon Harris notably failed to support Leo Varadkar when the Taoiseach said he didn’t agree with putting male sex offenders in women’s prisons.

Prison

In fact, Mr Harris went so far as to say that, legally, there was no such thing as a ‘female prison’. Again, I don’t recall any great outcry from Fine Gael stalwarts at the notion of men in dresses being placed in women’s jails at that time, but I guess that was then – the party’s lengthy ‘lost weekend’ wandering in the woke, left-wing wilderness… along with Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin, and the Greens and all but a handful of independents.

The referendum put paid to the Shinners’ prospects of selling themselves as agents of ‘change’, since they were indistinguishable from the rest of them when it counted.

Now, it’s clear, the change people want is a shift away from a relentless liberalism, an acknowledgement of traditional values, customs and culture, and at the moment there’s no major political party to represent that constituency. Simon Harris has a tiny window of opportunity to reclaim Fine Gael’s traditional ground and win the trust and support of that huge and disenfranchised cohort.

And being slick on social media, being ambitious and energetic, being the youngest ever Taoiseach alone won’t cut it – seven years ago, after all, Leo Varadkar was that great white hope.