BREXIT BATMAN AND ROBIN
Stephen Donnelly has spent the past five years excoriating Fianna Fáil. Micheál Martin’s poaching of the Independent TD is both audacious and inspired. They are the...
IT’S hard to walk the corridors of Leinster House without hearing a conversation about Trump. TDs should be equally exercised about Brexit but vanilla Theresa May does not excite as much as an orange-hued US President. It might explain why our response to Brexit has been so poor.
Enda Kenny resisted numerous calls to appoint a Brexit minister. The Taoiseach, increasingly imperious and detached, succumbed to temptation – his advisers now tell us he is the Brexit Minister.
Fianna Fáil have thrown a hand grenade into the mix. Poaching Stephen Donnelly is controversial; appointing him Brexit spokesman is inspired. Micheál Martin finally has a sidekick that comes up to his exacting standards.
The Fianna Fáil duo will form a Brexit Batman and Robin that will surely outshine Enda Kenny’s Riddler.
Kenny’s decision to assume Brexit point duty means there is no fully focused Brexit minister. Micheál Martin is more cunning than Enda – he didn’t blunder into the Brexit trap. Yet he understood that an able politician was needed to project authority.
What he really needed after Brexit was, well, another Micheál Martin. He needed a renaissance man, a financial wizard, a man with a deep knowledge of all aspects of public affairs but with a common touch.
Invaluable would be an ability to forget the past and convince others to forget it too. Was there such a man? Not in his 2016 parliamentary party, it seems.
LAST July, Micheál was at one of his favourite gigs – the MacGill summer school in Donegal. He had noticed Stephen Donnelly before, most recently at the leaders’ debates during the general election. He liked what he saw. Indeed, Fianna Fáil had tried to recruit Donnelly in 2013, but there was no passion in this early flirtation.
The two men were speakers at MacGill. When Stephen spoke, Micheál was struck by a lightning bolt. He saw much of himself. A perfect partner to fight the Brexit beast.
Donnelly told the audience that in Ireland ‘incredible social and economic progress has been made – and credit for that, in part, must go to our political system.’
And sure who has been running the country for most of this time?
‘Fianna Fáil,’ you can picture Micheál mouthing from the back of the darkened auditorium.
‘And – it’s getting better,’ said Donnelly, ‘the imbalance in power between the executive branch of government and parliament is being addressed. Parliament now orders its own business.’
Who is one of the primary architects of New Politics? Micheál Martin, of course.
It was utter nonsense, of course. But this is the language of political summer schools. Micheál Martin had been a member of the Cabinet that ran Ireland for a 14-year term that ended so catastrophically. And Donnelly had spent the previous five years excoriating Fianna Fáil.
The New Politics that Martin and others had so enthusiastically promoted is a sad joke. Erratic Independents are in Cabinet. The Government loses votes all the time. It is so paralysed by indecision and internal feuding that it cannot get anything done.
Brexit appears to be an abstract concept, confronted only by Kenny’s platitudes.
What is clear about New Politics, however, is that anything goes.
Stephen Donnelly had no background in politics. He grew up in the leafy south Dublin middleclass bastion of Dundrum. His mother was a teacher and his father worked in retail. As Dundrum became overcrowded, the family moved to Delgany in north Wicklow.
Donnelly is very bright. He graduated from UCD with a degree in mechanical engineering. He studied further at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and moved to London, where he worked as a management consultant with McKinsey.
Back in Ireland in early 2011, his friends and family were tired of his griping about the bailout. He says it was suggested to him at a rugby match (where else?) that he should run for the Dáil. He did so as an Independent and won a seat by just 57 votes.
In 2008, however, he had completed a master’s degree in Public Administration in International Development in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. This suggests that the 2011 candidacy was not the completely spontaneous decision to run that Donnelly says it was.
Donnelly, like his new political blood brother, Martin, can manipulate his past record. All his vehement and vitriolic criticism of Fianna Fáil is forgotten (he was just as vitriolic about Fine Gael). His founding membership of the Social Democrats will similarly be wiped from the CV. He has gone from first-time TD in 2011 to frontbench spokesman on Brexit in the deeply traditional political institution of Fianna Fáil. He will be in Cabinet soon.
DONNELLY and Martin can see that all the certainties of politics are gone. The days of Fianna Fáil holding 80 odd seats are perhaps gone forever. The traditional pathways to the top are blocked. Now, such disparate figures as Mick Wallace, Gerry Adams and Shane Ross are in the Dáil. Women must make up 30% of candidates.
Fianna Fáil will only enter Government as a coalition partner, perhaps on an equal footing with Fine Gael or Sinn Féin.
Martin is, like all successful politicians, utterly ruthless and devoid of sentiment. This is business. Martin owes nothing to the class of 2011, the men left standing by his side after the electoral defeat.
Anyway, after early internal dissent, Martin has never trusted his parliamentary party colleagues. The party is run by his inner circle of chief of staff Deirdre Gillane (a fellow Corkonian), communications director Pat McPartland and general secretary Seán Dorgan.
They were ecstatic at their leader’s coup. They saw it as the landing of a ‘big fish’. Past criticisms, conflicting ideology, contradictions mean nothing now in the pragmatic world of New Politics.
Donnelly may know a lot, but he has no experience of the Hobbesian, brutal world of Fianna Fáil internal politics. He will be a marked man for those who still don’t understand how the world has flipped. The viciousness will be a culture shock.
Donnelly shrewdly assessed his electoral market in Wicklow. His north county base is a middle-class extension of south Dublin. There are rich older families and younger families who could not afford housing in south Dublin.
From 2011, Donnelly attacked the established party – Fianna Fáil – who had caused the crash and capitulated to the IMF. He attacked Fine Gael, who were exacerbating the mistakes. He denounced banks. He spoke about negative equity and the housing crisis. He became a middle-class hero.
In 2016 he won 14,348 first-preference votes, the second highest in the country. Yet he does little constituency work and his appearances and impact at Dáil committees are patchy.
A new party colleague told me after the press conference: ‘Donnelly is a big-picture man. I don’t imagine he likes to get his hands dirty or fancies rolling up his sleeves. So time will tell.’
And Micheál will remain the chief Fianna Fáil representative at summer schools. Batman, after all, calls the shots.