Bailey battles on, but she has no moral case
SHARP elbows, stiletto heels and a weaponised sense of entitlement helped secure Maria Bailey’s seat in Dún Laoghaire for Fine Gael in the 2016 general election. Yet she hopes to stop the Taoiseach removing her as a Fine Gael candidate in next year’s general election with a long and agonisingly detailed document about procedure.
But Ms Bailey’s missive dated last Monday was not so much a begging letter as a declaration of war.
If the party leader proceeds with his proposal to remove her as a Fine Gael contender, her letter could be read as a threat to run as an Independent against the official Fine Gael candidate in Dún Laoghaire.
In those circumstances Ms Bailey is unlikely to be elected – but she would also spoil the chances for Fine Gael’s official candidate.
Ms Bailey’s tactic appears to be MAD – or Mutually Assured Destruction – a strategy that prevented the US going to war with the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
And if she does run against the official Fine Gael candidate – and the choice of the local organisation in Dún Laoghaire that helped get her elected in 2016 – there will be casualties.
TO do so, Maria Bailey would have to be living in a bubble. She would have to have forgotten the shock and anger that followed her insurance claim against a Dublin hotel when she fell off a swing with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other?
The Fine Gael-led government was under fire from businesses needing public liability coverage and paying exorbitant insurance premiums: the ‘compensation culture’ had to be tackled.
When the story broke last May it emerged that her friend, Josepha
Madigan, a minister in the Fine Gael-led government, had originally advised her about taking the legal action against the Dean hotel.
In a radio interview Ms Bailey said that the swing had not been properly supervised at the time of her fall. A subsequent internal party review found she had ‘overstated’ her injuries and Ms Bailey was asked to step down from her €9,000-a-year ‘nixer’ for chairing the Oireachtas Housing Committee.
Ms Bailey now appears to believe that criticism of her taking the legal action should have ended when she withdrew her claim against the hotel.
SHE seems to be ignoring the controversy over her insurance claim and concentrating on the procedures used by the Taoiseach to remove her from the Fine Gael ticket in the general election. In her letter to Fine Gael members in south Dublin she says that no review was carried out before she was dropped as a candidate. She raised ‘serious issues’ about the procedures of the constituency meeting held on Halloween night in the Royal Marine Hotel where Fine Gael members voted to restructure the constituency ticket.
Ms Bailey even quoted the Taoiseach: ‘I make this proposal because, in my judgement, the best interests of the party are served by deleting Maria Bailey TD as a candidate for the next general election.’
Ms Bailey is clearly miffed at the Taoiseach, Paschal Donohoe (director of organisation for elections) and Tom Curran ( General Secretary) – and the Fine Gael organisation.
But while she may have a technical case as to why she should remain on the ticket, she has no moral case.
Maybe Ms Bailey should have paid more attention to social media if she needed to know how she was regarded by her peers in Fine Gael.
Josepha Madigan, Kate O’Connell and Maria Bailey – the Three Musketeer FG Feminist friends – were all first elected as TDs in the 2016 general election.
Last month Culture Minister Josepha Madigan removed a photo of Ms Bailey (whom she originally advised on the ‘Swing-gate’ compensation claim) from Twitter.
And Dublin TD Kate O’Connell took down the cover photo of Ms Bailey from her Facebook shortly after the infamous radio interview with Sean O’Rourke in May.