A bad week left many in Fine Gael longing for Brexit again
THERE’S an old gag about a clueless magician who performed with a very mouthy parrot on his shoulder abusing his poor attempts at tricks.
The magician and his parrot were among the acts booked on a certain luxury liner called the Titanic. And the gag has it that on a freezing North Atlantic night in April 1912, the selfsame parrot could be heard above the band’s mournful hymns, while that ill-starred posh tub went glug, glug, glug.
“Now how did he do that?” the parrot was heard repeatedly asking.
Some Fine Gael people may be asking the same about Leo Varadkar today. You see, if you spool back just six weeks, the Taoiseach was being urged by several key lieutenants to go for an election they believed he could win.
By late October, Fine Gael and Mr Varadkar were motoring very well indeed. They were eight points ahead of the old adversary, Fianna Fáil, in the popularity rankings, and Micheál Martin was left ruing his own lieutenants’ unforced errors about a thing dubbed “Votegate” which had tarnished that party.
In the blue corner, Leo Varadkar looked like something of a “golden boy”. On October 10 he met with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and offered him an honourable way out of the Brexit corner into which he had painted himself. On October 18, in a most unusual move, the Taoiseach was invited to join the EU’s key leaders at a final summit press conference as the Varadkar-Johnson compromise had carried the day.
If only government were all about Brexit and EU issues. Leo Varadkar and his Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney have rarely put a foot wrong on this one. It’s a big issue for every Irish person and their work is appreciated – for a time at least. And Leo Varadkar is particularly good at most EU issues.
Yet, we can paraphrase the late Harold Wilson and say six weeks is times-six a very long time in politics. And today the Fine Gael party is reeling from a very bad week indeed. In
Trim, Co Meath, after a special Cabinet meeting yesterday, the Taoiseach acknowledged this. “In politics, there are tough weeks and there are good weeks. And there’ll be good weeks again,” he insisted.
He also paraphrased a former Tánaiste Mary Harney advising then-Green Party leader John Gormley that “your worst week in government is still better than your best week in Opposition”.
The Taoiseach’s “roll of horror” really started on Saturday with four by-election counts showing Fine Gael could not win even one. Well, in fairness it was only ever rated as having a chance of the one in Dublin Mid-West, and its candidate there, Cllr Emer Higgins, like several other Fine Gael candidates on the day, set down a marker for future outings.
Mr Varadkar and his colleagues were left reminding how governments rarely win by-elections. They were busy pointing up healthy enough Fine Gael vote shares in all four constituencies. But it’s all a poor substitute for a win and new TDs. Then ensuing days
brought the no-confidence motion in the embattled Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy, who barely squeezed home on Tuesday night by three votes. Like the by-elections, Fine Gael is not without its arguments here either.
Mr Murphy is the fifth person to grapple with the housing crisis and some marked progress is happening on his watch. But this crisis is dragging on, and the Housing Minister is frequently accused of lacking ambition and failing to give the State a more direct role. As winter advances, and
Christmas beckons, more than 10,000 homeless people, one-third of whom are children, have growing political consequences.
At all events, that no-confidence vote dovetailed neatly with the daddy of all Mr Varadkar’s woes: the case of the now former Cork North-Central Fine Gael TD Dara Murphy. Fittingly, Mr Murphy looked into the Dáil on Tuesday night to vote for Minister Murphy.
Then he quit as a TD the following morning, leaving a trail of acrimony behind, as he began a new €150,000 per year job in the EU Commission. Dara Murphy clearly knows how to work those Brussels corridors. The problem is that for almost two years he drew his full TD salary of €94,500, and expenses of €52,000 on the basis of minimal attendance in line with existing rules. This one lands very close to the Taoiseach indeed – and because it lacks any kind of complication, it has big resonance with the voters.
Mr Murphy, a former junior EU minister, began working with Fine Gael’s EU affiliated grouping in late 2017. When he announced in May 2018 that he would not contest the next election, the Taoiseach publicly eulogised him and looked forward to working again with him in his new European role.
Micheál Martin was quick to remind the Taoiseach of all of this and accuse him of “poor political judgment”. From the Taoiseach’s standpoint, his officials say he had also told Dara Murphy he must continue to attend the Dáil and keep his constituency office.
Efforts by Mr Varadkar to talk up tightening Dáil attendance rules are more after-the-event moves. His calls for an investigation into Mr Murphy’s conduct are equally problematic as he is no longer a TD.
The one remaining option, a review by the clerk of the Dáil, looks rather unlikely.
It’s a time for Fine Gael to do nothing beyond some reflection for a little while before plotting slow steps back out of the slough of despond.
But an election is likely early in the new year. So, did we just hear a ghostly parrot ask: “Why not bring back Brexit?”
If only it were all about Brexit and EU issues