Tánaiste versus Taoiseach has never ended well for either

THE Taoiseach is settling down to the thankless task of coping with Covid without the sunshine that marked Leo Varadkar’s last term — but the latter is still struggling with the role of Tánaiste, of which more anon.

Micheál Martin, a pluralist in the Jack Lynch tradition, is never more at home than in brief visits to Belfast, reminding us the Good Friday Agreement means a lot more mutual respect.

“That’s what for the

Good Friday Agreement is all about, transforming the narrative around the NorthSouth relationship...”

But the Irish Examiner seems to want less Jack Lynch pluralism and more Sinn Féin-style pressure.

A somewhat sour report concluded: “Trying not to make waves in his once in a lifetime shot at the top job is not befitting of someone as smart as Micheál Martin...”

Surely not making waves that might turn into a storm seems a sensible policy?

Mr Justice Richard Humphreys reflected the same pluralist view in his recent contribution to the virtual Féile an Phobail.

Humphreys argued that regardless of a united Ireland we need to take the Britishness of unionism more seriously.

In passing, he raised a point new to me and I suspect to many in media.

If British citizens are nominated to the Seanad, accept the nomination and take their seats, they become Irish citizens under Irish law, whether they want to or not!

This means you can’t have full political rights in the Republic at the moment, without being an Irish citizen, even if you’re British.

Humphreys spoke too about a subject close to my heart given, my recent column on the treatment of Bill Bennett.

He said we need to consider further apologies and acknowledgements about the past treatment of Protestants in the Republic.

Finally, Humphreys has no hang-ups about the Commonwealth, asking politely: “If the Commonwealth was good enough for Mandela, why isn’t it good enough for republicanism?”

Back home, Leo Varadkar is still looking unsettled. Lyndon Johnson could have told him why.

Justifying his decision to accept the vice-presidency in 1960, he said: “Power is where power goes.”

By this, LBJ meant that he would be a powerful vicepresident, too.

He reasoned that because he had been a uniquely powerful Majority Leader of the US Senate, be would take that power with him into the lowly vice-presidency, and gradually recast that office into something grander and more formidable.

Leo Varadkar is the first Irish Taoiseach ever to come back as Tánaiste in the subsequent government, and, therefore, he may think the power follows him, too.

The nearest parallel to what Leo Varadkar is trying to do at the moment is probably Dick Spring’s two periods as an unusually assertive Tánaiste from 1993-1997.

But the story is also a cautionary tale — as well as confirming my iron rule that the national question is the only game in town.

Like Leo, Spring never really reconciled himself to being second in command.

He had poor personal relations with two taoisigh, first with Albert Reynolds and then with John Bruton.

In 1992, Spring became Tánaiste and foreign affairs minister in Albert Reynolds’s government. From the start, he was a thorn in Reynolds’s side — but also in the IRA’s side.

Spring’s relationship with Reynolds operated at the level of move and countermove.

Spring would say or do something first, and Reynolds would react by veering off in another direction, usually in concert with the British prime minister John Major.

Major snubbed Spring and would only deal with Reynolds either in London or in the EU Council with the other heads of government.

By and large, Reynolds held Spring to a draw, while the government itself fell to pieces as they played tug of war over policy.

Both Reynolds and Spring endorsed the Downing

Street Declaration just before Christmas 1993, but then divided on the question of decommissioning.

Spring rightly took the hard line on decommissioning of IRA weapons — a line that would ultimately be vindicated.

He told the Dáil in December 1993 that the paramilitaries had to hand over their weapons after they renounced violence, and he repeated this six months later in June 1994.

Reynolds sang dumb and the issue lay there until the row about the extradition of a paedophile priest before Christmas 1994 finished the coalition.

The fiasco at the end was Reynolds’s fault, but Spring’s hard-nosed approach to being Tánaiste from the start was flawed, too.

His intransigence played an important role in wrecking a coalition that could have been in power for the whole of the decade.

Spring’s next stint as Tánaiste came when

John Bruton was elected Taoiseach on December 15, 1994, and formed a threeparty rainbow government with Labour and Democratic Left. The omens were poor.

Spring professed to be repelled by Bruton’s allegedly Thatcherite economics and by his social conservatism, based on Bruton’s sincerely held Roman Catholic beliefs.

Both also came from radically different traditions on the national question.

Bruton identified with the Redmondite tradition that had dominated Irish politics from the 1880s until 1918. Contrary to what is commonly believed, however, his political DNA was not Fine Gael but born of the farmers’ National Centre Party of the 1930s.

Spring came from a republican family in Kerry, with links to the famous Spring-Rices of Asgard fame.

His father had been a vocal defender of the IRA activist Charlie Kerins who was sentenced to death for the murder of a garda sergeant in 1944.

De Valera declined to pardon Kerins — although he had previously pardoned Tomas Og Mac Curtain, son of the murdered lord mayor of Cork, who had also killed a garda officer.

As Tánaiste, Spring once again became a thorn in Taoiseach’s side — and again, significantly, mostly on the national question.

For example, he openly defied Bruton during the UK general election in May 1997.

Bruton had previously and reasonably stated that a vote for Sinn Féin would be seen as “a vote for the IRA”.

But Spring said publicly in Derry he agreed with

John Hume that a vote for SF was “a vote for peace”.

Looking back, it seems that Spring saw himself as a superior political operator to both Reynolds and Bruton, especially after the 1992 election which produced that huge ‘Spring Tide’ of Labour gains.

Like Leo, Spring compensated for his formally subordinate role by running an almost parallel operation from within both governments. Like Leo, too, he never walked past a microphone.

But this ended badly for Spring in the end. The Labour surge from 1992 was dissipated in less than five years, when a less and insubordinate Tánaiste might have husbanded that vote for two or more general elections.

No government can survive these kinds of major public disagreements between the two principals. Labour was annihilated in the 1997 general election.