Flustering Leo adds fuel to border anxiety
BY the end of RTÉ’s Six One News on Friday, it was clear that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had embarrassed his friends and heartened his opponents. The Taoiseach would have expected Tánaiste Simon Coveney and other senior ministers to support him after the furore that followed his earlier warning, while at the World Economic Forum in Davvos, of troops at the border after a no-deal Brexit.
It was left to junior minister Patrick O’Donovan to robustly defend the Taoiseach – but it was like the Andrex puppy pretending to be the Hound of the Baskervilles.
Mr Varadkar stands accused of contradicting everything that he and the Tánaiste had said before – and of making the DUP and Sinn Féin appear reasonable when their responses are compared to his hysteria.
The Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin synchronised his criticisms with the SDLP’s warnings that the Taoiseach ‘needed to recognise that using border communities as pawns in a political game of chess is dangerous territory’.
WHY shouldn’t I believe Mr Varadkar’s dire warnings about the potential calamity of a hard border following a no-deal Brexit when they are eerily similar to fears expressed by the PSNI? I ask that after recalling the whispered exchange between Transport Minister minister Shane Ross and Mr Coveney, which was inadvertently recorded in Government Buildings.
Ross asked Coveney if he should not have asked him about the border. Mr Coveney replied: ‘We can’t get into where they [the border checks] will be – they could be in the sea. Once you start talking about checks anywhere near the border, people will start delving into that all that and all of a sudden we’ll be the government that reintroduced a physical border on the island of Ireland.’
In the Dáil, Mr Martin asked if there was a private understanding within the Government about the border in the aftermath of a no-deal Brexit. And if so, should it not be shared with the public. In the Dáil, the Taoiseach backed the Tánaiste’s view: ‘His (Mr Coveney’s) only concern answering questions is that if one uses the wrong words or says things in the wrong way, people will misinterpret that as though one has some sort of secret plan to impose a hard border… We have no such secret plan.’
Interestingly, that admirable loyalty from the Taoiseach to his Tánaiste was not reciprocated on Friday’s RTÉ’s Six One News in the wake of Mr Varadlkar’s apparent gaffe in Davos earlier.
I have no doubt that the Government’s vow of silence on the potential chaos in a post no-deal Brexit was purely political, as the Tánaiste said, to avoid being blamed for reintroducing a border in Ireland.
Politics is ultimately always about the next election – and Mr Varadkar never stops thinking of his place in history because if he leads the next government he will be a three-in-a-row Fine Gael Taoiseach.
The Government will want Mr Varadkar’s Davos outburst to be eclipsed this week by further historic votes at Westminster – 100 years after the first Dáil met to declare Irish independence. His media friends tell me that Chris Donoghue, the Newstalk broadcaster-turnedspecial advisor to the Tánaiste, is seeking a Dáil seat for Fine Gael in south Dublin.
If successful, it will mean a cut in salary – a TD only earns €94,535-a-year while he just got a boost to his annual €98,391 salary as a special advisor to the Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Donoghue confirmed his devotion to Fine Gael a few days before Christmas with an ill-judged attack on Bertie Ahern over findings made by the Planning Tribunal – despite the vast majority of the shamed tribunal’s findings being overturned by the courts. Donoghue posted his remarks on Twitter while Ahern was being interviewed on RTÉ and said the reintroduction of Ahern as a credible instead of a disgraced taoiseach made him sick. A deluge on Twitter pointed out that the muchadmired and respected Moriarty tribunal (whose final report was accepted by a Fine Gael-led government in 2011) made serious findings against Denis O’Brien – Newstalk’s largest shareholder and a major funder of Fine Gael.
Donoghue didn’t respond to – or even acknowledge – criticism on Twitter for his steadfastly ignoring Moriarty’s damning verdict on O’Brien.
During a briefing in the Department of Foreign Affairs later, the minister said his adviser – Donoghue – had expressed ‘personal views’. He added: ‘I don’t control everything that people who work for me say and I shouldn’t.’ I wonder who advised the Tánaiste to make that response?