We need a new leader – and a general election

As the Government limps along doing nothing, the pretenders to Enda Kenny’s throne have a duty to seize it

The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, was here in the United States this week meeting with Apple’s CEO Tim Cook while taking in trips to other American multinationals with significant foreign direct investment in Ireland. Photos showed Mr Kenny looking very pleased with himself. It is hard to see why.

While the United States, and indeed the world, remains agog at the thought of the impending presidency of Donald Trump – with its promise of a protectionist, ‘America first’ economic policy – the Irish State is hamstrung by a Government that is barely functioning.

After his historic election, Americans know what Trump and the Republican party stand for. The announcement by Trump during the week that corporation tax will be slashed to 15%, with a view to bringing business and jobs back to the United States, while perhaps unrealistic, shows a President-Elect determined to make his mark.

Meanwhile in Ireland, citizens have no idea what their Government stands for. It has no ideology, no policy coherence, no agenda. Perhaps most damning of all, it has no leadership. The Taoiseach seems happy to hold the office while he utters platitudes that he will continue until 2018. To what end, though?

The mixed messages over the debacle that is water charges illustrates the crisis that the country faces. What are the phalanx of water charge payers to make of the fact that their Government has apparently decided that they are to get no refund despite them having done their civic duty by paying the legitimate charge?

Meanwhile those who did not pay the water charge get away scot free. Leo Varadkar’s comment during the week that there were ways of recovering water charges from those who did not pay was so far removed from reality as to be barely believeable.

While Varadkar and the other main pretender to the throne, Simon Coveney, at least had the guts to come out and say that those who paid the water charges should not get a refund, the Taoiseach and Finance Minister Michael Noonan vacillated. Again. That they were joined by the Cabinet’s ultimate do-nothing man, Shane Ross, sums up the dire nature of governance in modern Ireland.

HIDING behind the Oireachtas committee on water, the Taoiseach continued to betray all those who voted for Fine Gael in the last election. Anybody with even the most cursory knowledge of how Irish politics works knows that the so-called Expert Commission on water charges was a fudge – and they also know that the ultimate report of that committee will be a fudge. Waiting for it to report is an abrogation of leadership by the Taoiseach.

Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil is riven with doubts as to what to do over water and basically seems to be adopting a make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach, much as it did with its policymaking when in power during the boom. It would almost make one yearn for the decisiveness of Bertie Ahern. But Fianna Fáil in Opposition is as culpable as the Government regarding the lack of political leadership in the State.

The confidence and supply deal is simply not working. If politics is supposed to be about helping people live better lives, well Fianna Fáil in Opposition, as much as the Government in power, has failed to deliver. Fine Gael is afraid to try to pass any legislation because it’s worried about what Fianna Fáil will think. Fianna Fáil, with an eye on leading the next government, doesn’t want an activist Fine Gael Government. The result is inaction and the losers are the Irish people.

There is a solution. In early 2017, someone in Fine Gael should challenge Enda Kenny for the leadership and for the position of Taoiseach. They should then call an immediate general election. The likelihood is that if Kenny is challenged he will fold.

What possible good can there be for Fine Gael from Kenny staying on as its leader? The party knows it cannot go into any future general election with him in charge. Kenny knows it and his putative challengers know it.

Political leaders never really want to go, but Coveney or Varadkar would be doing both Fine Gael and the State a good day’s work if they went to Kenny in the spring and said: ‘Either go or I challenge.’ I suspect if there was a challenge, Kenny would lose. Who would be there to run his campaign? Alan Shatter gone, Phil Hogan gone, Michael Noonan, to put it bluntly, is too old. Moreover what sort of vision can Kenny offer? The answer is none – and the spoils of office will go to those who throw their lot in with the pretenders.

As I wrote in these pages after the general election, Kenny has served Fine Gael and the State well and history will, I suspect, treat him kindly. But by presiding over a do-nothing Government, he risks being seen as a leader who stayed on too long and ended up a lame duck Taoiseach. History won’t be kind either to those in Fine Gael who let it happen.

The new Fine Gael leader shouldn’t worry about Micheál Martin, as they should seek an immediate mandate from the people to govern. Elections, as we know, are unpredictable. A new Fine Gael leader with a fresh mandate from his party might well invigorate and enthuse the Irish electorate.

BUT if an election in early 2017 would bring a similar result to that of 2016, then there is also a solution – and that is a proper Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil coalition in the national interest. A government that will have a proper programme for government and a legislative agenda that it can pursue knowing it will last five full years. Dinosaurs in both parties who still cling to Civil War pieties about never coalescing with the other should consider the alternative: the inaction that has us in the morass we currently face.

The stakes are simply too serious for the current Government to limp along doing nothing. The tsunami of Brexit has yet to pummel our shores and we are neither prepared for it nor for the Trump presidency and what that might mean for foreign direct investment.

It is time for some patriotic action. If the Taoiseach won’t lead, it’s time for a dauphin to seize the throne for the good of the people and then go back to them seeking a new mandate. Who knows, the new leader might even get it – for electorates like people who act decisively. Just ask Donald Trump.