Martin to Varadkar: name date of election
■ FF leader seeks Easter vote in letter ■ Chambers hit by new ‘Votegate’ claim
FIANNA FAIL leader Micheal Martin has written to Leo Varadkar to demand that he bring stability to the country and name a date for the next General Election.
In the letter seen by the Sunday Independent, Mr Martin told the Taoiseach to “step in and give some certainty” and provide for an orderly wind-down of the Government.
“The responsible thing to do at this point is to end the speculation and agree a date for the dissolution of the Dail, a date for the holding of the election,” he added.
And he warned the Taoiseach: “Nothing positive can be achieved if we allow growing escalation of speculation” or “short-term tactics” concerning the calling of the election.
Mr Martin said the growing speculation “ignores the need for stability and the reality of the completion of Brexit and what needs to be done over the coming months”.
Yesterday, the Taoiseach said he had not spoken to Mr Martin about an election date but planned to meet the Fianna Fail leader when the Dail term has ended.
“He does talk about an orderly wind-down of the Government and I’m not sure what that means,” Mr Varadkar said. “The Government needs to be focused on its job always and all the time and not be wound down.”
Government sources said the Taoiseach had yet to read Mr Martin’s letter as he was at a European Summit in Brussels last week. Another senior Fine Gael source involved in election preparations poured cold water on speculation surrounding a snap election in February. “A February election would be a little bit premature at the moment. I think more water needs to go under the bridge on
Brexit before we get to that point,” the source said.
Meanwhile, the Sunday Independent can also reveal Mr Martin is facing a fresh headache over his frontbench TDs and Dail votes. New Dail footage shows seven votes being recorded in Fianna Fail TD Timmy Dooley’s seat while colleague Lisa Chambers sits in his place.
Mr Dooley, who was sacked from the Fianna Fail frontbench over a previous voting controversy, yesterday insisted he was in the chamber during the almost hourlong voting session even though he was not in his seat.
“I checked my own notes and I was present in the chamber for that parliamentary voting session,” he told the Sunday Independent.
Mr Dooley could not say where he was in the chamber when the seven votes took place.
Ms Chambers, who was issued a warning by the Dail’s ethics committee last week for voting for a colleague who was not in the chamber, did not respond to a request for comment.
In his letter to the Taoiseach, Mr Martin asks that they meet and agree a date for the election, saying: “We can end this growing instability now. I am available to discuss this matter.”
Outlining his preferred timeline, Mr Martin said: “It is my view that Easter represents the natural end of the current Dail and the spring session should be used to complete important legislation and this will allow for 34 sitting days to consider and complete that necessary legislation.”
He also listed the priorities that the Government needs to deal with in the New Year.
These include the recently published bill on open disclosure which, he said, “is vital to restore confidence and critical elements of the health system”, the nursing home support scheme amendment bill and the need to legislate to increase the income threshold for those over 70 who are not currently in receipt of medical cards.
He said there was also “an urgent need” to address online abuses in terms of spending during election campaigns that could be addressed through amending the social media transparency bill.
The need for serious engagement to commence on restoring devolution to the
Northern assembly was also a priority. Last Friday, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin again said that he saw Easter as the natural “cut-off point” for the Dail.
Yesterday, in an interview with Brendan O’Connor on RTE Radio One, Mr Varadkar said his preference was still for a summer election but said when the vote was called may not be his decision.
“It may not be Micheal [Martin] or me that decide,” he said.
“As you can see, the numbers in the Dail have got very tight — people retiring, by-elections, people defecting. All sorts of things. And there are even indications that one Fianna Fail TD might vote against Fianna Fail. So it may not be any of our calls,” he added.
“When this Government was formed three and a half years ago I don’t think anyone thought that it would last this long. The reason why it has lasted this long is because of a truce between the two major parties around Brexit.”
He added that Brexit was not finished. “What we have is Brexit moving on to a different phase. What we have managed to achieve in the last couple of years is to avoid a no-deal hard Brexit,” he said.
The Taoiseach said he needed to focus on his job rather than an election over the coming weeks.
“The papers may be focused on elections. I’m not. I have not discussed any dates with any Government minister. That doesn’t mean the ministers won’t speculate with journalists in the bar,” he said.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe welcomed the outcome of the UK general election and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party majority.
“The scale of the government means that Prime Minister Johnson will be able to make big decisions about the future of the UK,” he told the Sunday Independent.
“This matters for Ireland and we will be ready to respond,” he added.
ON balance, the British general election has been good for politics in the United Kingdom, especially in Northern Ireland.
Let me begin with Britain, where Boris
Johnson was deservedly the big winner just as the infantile leftist, Jeremy Corbyn, was deservedly the big loser.
Many in Irish media are now covertly climbing on the Boris bandwagon.
But last July I was almost alone in warning his critics that “Churchill too, was dismissed as a drunkard, messer and all-round chancer”.
I wrote: “I believe Boris Johnson knows well he has been a liar, a lout and a layabout. But, like Churchill, he sees one last chance to redeem a feckless life and he means to grab it with both hands.”
Which he did. Dom Cummings supplied the strategy but what delivered it was what Professor Helen Thompson brilliantly called Boris Johnson’s “pagan energy”.
Professor Arthur Aughey acutely noted the inversion of the last general election when Theresa May was the prim vicar’s daughter and Corbyn seemed the voice of pagan youth.
Contrary to groaning by The Guardian, the Conservative party has been moved firmly to the centre for two reasons. First, Boris Johnson is by nature a pragmatic and personally liberal One-Nation Tory and not an ideologue like Margaret Thatcher.
Second, and more importantly, the Tories have been moved to the centre by their new voters.
Boris Johnson knows he cannot win a second term if he ignores the needs of the Labour supporters who lent him their votes. In sum, it’s the ERG who will be marginalised.
The result is also about the resurgence of English nationalism. Here the big question is whether it’s a benign English kind of nationalism or a malign one on the racist East European model.
I believe a Boris Johnson government will not be racist, not least because Johnson is of mixed-race ancestry, describing himself as “blended honey” of many ethnicities.
But for Boris Johnson to win, Jeremy Corbyn had to lose. He did so thanks to the Trotskyites of Momentum who infiltrated the Labour Party — which will remain unelectable until the centrist socialists split away.
Trotskyites are the purist descendants of Plato who believed that man can be perfected by society, whereas social democrats know society can only fix a few of our problems.
As we speak, Trotskyite Momentum activists are telling Labour members “we lost because we were not socialist enough”.
The same purist PC mindset prevented the Democratic Party from running a right-of-centre candidate to trump Trump in blue-collar America.
Let me turn with relief from these losers to the real winners in Northern Ireland — Colum Eastwood’s resurgent SDLP.
Two seats in the bag and a likely seat in South Down next time round means
Sinn Fein’s strategic aim of liquidating the SDLP is now a forlorn hope.
Naturally RTE news did not rub in the fact that Sinn Fein was down seven points whereas the DUP was down only five points.
The DUP were lucky not to be down more. As their sometimes sole defender in the Republic, I am entitled to give them some tough love. If I take flak for them, I have a right to give them some.
To start, I am not devastated by Nigel Dodds losing his seat. Naturally
I am sickened to see John Finucane, equivocal on IRA actions, take his place.
Finucane lost his father to a loyalist murder gang. But he callously refused to condemn the IRA murder gang that set out to kill Nigel Dodds when visiting his daughter in hospital.
Finucane also showed his lack of class by his graceless victory speech that failed to mention Nigel Dodds — who had the good manners not to do the same.
But Dodds was also responsible for the DUP’s disastrous Brexit policy and for the flawed decision not to support Theresa May’s deal — which opened the way to Boris Johnson’s betrayal of the DUP.
Dodds is a decent man but he was psychologically too much in thrall to the Tories in Westminster to pay attention to what was happening at home.
Looking always to London, he lacked the vision of a David Trimble, Ian Paisley or Peter Robinson, all of whom, in different ways, rightly sensed the best way to subvert Sinn Fein and protect the union was to make nice to moderate nationalists.
Like other DUP leaders — and I don’t mean Arlene Foster and Jeffrey Donaldson —
Dodds wrongly thought Westminster was where the action was and the Tory party was the final bulwark of the union.
But as Edward Carson clearly saw, that was a delusion that would eventually run out of road. That time has come. And unionism needs a new strategy that starts at home.
The battle against Sinn Fein’s bullying brand of Irish nationalism will not be fought and won at Westminster but in the cockpit of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Because Johnson’s betrayal shows that London is no longer a unionist referee but more of a linesman leaning to Dublin.
From now on, the referee with the final decision will be a plurality of the people of Northern Ireland who are willing to work the Good Friday Agreement.
That in turn means that unionism, which in practical terms means the DUP, must persuade moderate nationalists to settle down for the foreseeable future in a pluralist union that respects their identity.
Stormont and not Westminster is where that work must be done — and to bring it to a successful conclusion will require the active support of the Irish Republic in keeping pressure on Sinn Fein.
That is why I want to underline for unionists that even someone like me, who loathes the IRA and cherishes the constitutional position of Northern
Ireland, believes that unionism is too dependent on unstable British goodwill rather than on the more stable desire of the Republic to retain the status quo.
The status quo, as Leo Varadkar, Simon Coveney and Micheal Martin spelt out on RTE radio last Friday, means backing the Good Friday Agreement and not Sinn Fein’s Border poll stunts to spook unionists.
Unionists should take courage from that consensus and from the fact there is no urgent passion for a united Ireland in the Republic.
But to spancel Sinn Fein, the Republic needs reciprocal gestures like generously recognising the cultural identity of Northern nationalists.
Naturally unionists would be more inclined to run risks if RTE gave up its green log-rolling and made some pluralist films about the Warrington March and the Peace Train.
Likewise, The Irish Times should give less space to immature comedians and more insights of the sort we got from Ronan McGreevy’s inspiring interview with that confident unionist, Senator Ian Marshall:
“We are told that unionism is dour and uncompromising when in fact significant sections of unionism are behind marriage equality, prochoice, social economy, antipoverty, reconciliation work, restorative justice and the support of workers’ rights.”
‘Unionism is too dependent on unstable UK support and should seek the Republic’s goodwill’