Harris Must Roll With The Punches To Go The Distance
The new Taoiseach faces a number of challenges if he’s to deliver on his promise of keeping the Coalition together for its full term, writes
Mike Tyson was often observed on breaks from training reading the great political strategists Karl Marx and Niccolo Machiavelli, and military experts like Alexander the Great and Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke. Perhaps Iron Mike’s most famous strategic aphorism is “everyone has a plan before they get punched in the mouth”.
Incoming Taoiseach Simon Harris admires his mentor Enda Kenny and will take advice from him, along with his hastily convened coterie of special advisers. I wonder is it too late to get Mike Tyson onto the payroll? Harris is to his core a politician, and while he is publicly making sunny predictions that the Coalition will run its full term to March 2025, he will know, privately, what a difficult goal this will be to achieve.
The ideal scenario for Harris — and as previously stated by the other Coalition leaders Micheál Martin and Eamon Ryan — is that the government runs its full course to 22 March 2025. This would see Harris achieve that ultimate goal of an Irish politician: the Oval Office meeting in Washington during St Patrick’s week. It can be done and a General Election still campaigned for, according to sources close to Harris.
The fact that we can’t predict with any certainty who that US president will be illustrates how long a year is in politics. It suits everyone in Leinster House, with the final summer break of this Dáil fast approaching, for Harris to be Taoiseach in April 2024. It will not necessarily suit every TD for this to be the case in October.
We heard flights of rhetoric at the Fine Gael Ard Fheis about housing
and making Dublin safe again.
But it was all really stating existent plans. It might seem incredible, but government innovation is almost superfluous for Harris. The new prime minister has only two duties: hold the Coalition together as long as he can to allow his party to retrench, and save as many seats as he possibly can to allow Fine Gael to return to government after the election.
Hence FG’s conference was short on legislative plans or complicated government programmes. There isn’t the time for them, and energy needs to be expended elsewhere. We can predict the more likely sequence of events for the next 12 months. After Harris’s recent elevation to Taoiseach, the Dáil and Seanad are braced for what is traditionally the most bad-tempered of Oireachtas sessions, which will end in July.
Days are long and full of votes as the government tries to complete its legislative programme. Human nature dictates that moods become dark when a large group of people are sequestered in the claustrophobic 18th century parliament building. Sources close to Harris say that the biggest item on the government’s pre-summer holidays agenda — the new funding model for RTÉ — will be finalised in July.