SAM SMYTH
THE winner will take it all in the most presidential general election in the history of the State when Micheál Martin faces off with Leo Varadkar in an epic gladiatorial contest. The showdown will probably be next year but the Fianna Fáil leader used this weekend’s ard fheis as a training gym, with Sinn Féin for sparring partners in an effort to show he is the boss.
Micheál Martin’s curt dismissal of Sinn Féin as a potential partner in government will hasten the retirement of Gerry Adams and diminish their electoral threat by reminding voters of Sinn Féin’s violent past.
There are no serious internal challengers to Martin’s leadership and even his most capable colleagues look amateurish beside his natural authority and polished parliamentary performances.
No, the only other politician in the Dáil who can match Martin is Leo Varadkar, who is still enjoying an extended political honeymoon as Taoiseach and aching to show his pugilistic talents as a campaigner.
Yet both leaders know that voters will punish the party that provokes an election for its own advantage, so their exchanges in the Dáil are rarely barbed.
Martin needs to be that good because expectations of him were so low. When he became the eighth leader of Fianna Fáil in 2011, he was also the first who was not expected to be elected Taoiseach.
Yet he confounded his critics in last year’s election by taking Fianna Fáil to within a whisker of winning. The bookies now lay Martin at oddson to be the next taoiseach.
There is a compelling back story to his emergence as Fianna Fáil’s renaissance man.
His introduction of the smoking ban in 2004 was the apex of a mostly undistinguished 14-year ministerial career. And it was the life-changing crises in his family that appear to have matured him to become a formidable politician.
The death of two of his five children – Ruairí as an infant in 1999, and seven-year-old Leana in 2010 – would have broken many parents. But Martin emerged from the tragedies with firm resolve and a clearer vision.
He chose not to go into coalition after last year’s election, instead supporting Fine Gael through a confidence-and-supply agreement, a decision that has stood the test of time and opinion polls.
If he can overturn the richly deserved deluge of shame visited on Fianna Fáil over the past decade and emerge as taoiseach after the next election, it will be close to miraculous – the political equivalent of defying gravity. TAOISEACH, spare us your air of injured innocence saying, ‘I cannot hire or fire him,’ thereby disingenuously distancing yourself from the conductor of your Hallelujah Chorus.
Leo Varadkar handpicked John Concannon to lead his Strategic Communications Unit but instructed the State’s most senior civil servant to headhunt him.
That means the Taoiseach can deny responsibility for Mr Concannon while having him at his beck and call – the sort of tooclever-by-half stunt that he railed against in opposition.
After ducking and dodging questions about the cost of his new vanity project for months, the stonking €5m annual price tag emerged in the Budget last week. The Taoiseach insists that the new unit will be ‘cost-neutral’.
He explains that his department is paying. This is rubbish; taxpayers will have to cough up.
The Taoiseach already has the Government Information Service, staffed by capable civil servants and communicating his administration’s whims and messages to the media and public.
His Praetorian Guard of personal PRs will coordinate the work of the GIS across all the government departments and State agencies. And when the SCU’s principal purpose is to serve the Taoiseach, it raises a serious question: is Leo Varadkar politicising the civil service?
If he fails to inspire the Taoiseach’s troupe of cheerleaders, a P45 will expedite Mr Concannon’s leaving Government Buildings.
It makes you think: if politics really is showbusiness for ugly people, are PR consultants like jobbing plastic surgeons repairing politicians’ disfigured images? TO paraphrase Mrs Merton’s famous question to Debbie McGee: ‘So, Georgina Chapman, what first attracted you to the debauched multimillionaire Harvey Weinstein?’
Maybe the London-born sylphlike rose thought about England when saying ‘I do’ while casting a fashion designer’s reductive eye over his 140-plus kilos back in 2007.
But when she said, ‘I’m leaving,’ last week, Mrs Weinstein had to consider the potential sacrifice for her fashion label, Marchesa. For the past decade, her nowestranged husband instructed the biggest female movie stars in Hollywood to wear Georgina’s fabulously expensive gowns to the Oscars and other major events.
Number-crunchers say Harvey is worth $150m and Georgina $15m, although those figures could even out if Harvey’s lawyer failed to draw up an unbreakable prenuptial agreement.
It would be cruel and crass to mock the misery of any marital separation but it’s reported that Harvey advised Georgina that leaving with their two children was her best option.
Harvey obviously wore the trousers, although there is probably a more apt metaphor to describe their relationship.
Still, Weinstein’s monster horror story is like a poultice drawing out Hollywood’s poisonous hypocrisy as insiders well versed in his depravity for decades throw their hands up in long-rehearsed shock.