Martin knows what FF TDs ignore. Irish leaders don’t step down

ENDA KENNY was finally resigning as Taoiseach. To rational political observers he was going because of the numbers. In the five years between 2011 and 2016 he had squandered political capital and mismanaged. Fine Gael fell from 76 seats to 50. Lose a third of your seats and you have to go.

His ambitious Cabinet gave him a year to gather up his things and he was out. But Kenny didn’t think it was a good idea, and he had a strange fellow traveller in the spring of 2017.

Responding to Kenny’s farewell address a fellow veteran TD spoke, he noted how, ‘in recent months, the Taoiseach has given a master class to certain of his colleagues in how to manoeuvre a difficult situation in a beneficial direction. Rather than disappearing quietly at the first sign of panic from deputies more focused on polls than the work of government, he has managed events so that they have proceeded at his desired pace’.

The admiring TD? It was Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, who added that ‘the mischievous enjoyment [of Kenny] was ….a genuine joy to behold.’

It appeared that one centrist politician agreed that another politician staying in his job overrode all other concerns. That the electorate had rejected Kenny’s leadership didn’t really matter. That he had failed in the white heat of the last election, also not an issue.

IN any case, Fine Gael acted, they replaced Kenny with Leo Varadkar, a young, progressive minister who had recently made public that he was a gay man. It was a major milestone in Ireland’s maturation into a modern state of understanding and equality.

Move forward to Election 2020. Fianna Fáil, under Micheál Martin, they told us, had been on a steady march back from the near extinction of the 2011 election. They went from 20 to 44 seats in 2016. On the eve of Election 2020 they had 45 seats. In January 2020 a poll had them at 32%, 12% ahead of Fine Gael. In February 2020 the Legion of the Rearguard was marching back to power, giddily dividing up the jobs, playing fantasy Cabinet in the Dáil canteen and preening themselves for a glorious return to power.

Then the plan, such that it was, went catastrophically wrong. Fianna Fáil lost seven seats and returned with 38 after one of the most incompetent national campaigns the party had run. How does a leader, of nine years at this point, survive this? Micheál Martin, did what he had so admired in Enda Kenny, he managed events. He became Taoiseach, at the head of a coalition with Fine Gael.

But almost immediately shattered Fianna Fáil TDs told me that they would also follow the Fine Gael example. They would, one told me, ‘give Micheál a year as Taoiseach, and then replace him’. They would rebuild. They would place another, Jim O’Callaghan or Jack Chambers or Thomas Byrne in office of Taoiseach and he (always a he) would rebuild the party and… well, lead the Legion of the Rearguard back to their rightful place.

Still, nothing happened. Yes, there were eruptions and criticisms and a review into the general election campaign was carried out by Minister Seán Fleming. (Yes, Minister Fleming who told the inflation-blighted public to ‘stop complaining’). But no move.

More recently, there was the plan to allow Martin to become Tánaiste at the point he rotated jobs with Leo Varadkar, and then six months later he would step down. It was even endorsed by those loyal to Martin. It’s laughable. I’ve been spun this one by representatives of Kenny, Brian Cowen and Bertie Ahern in the past. They don’t go willingly, ever.

And then the boys… no, I won’t bother, you get the picture now.

In reality, this is not about Micheál Martin, it about the psychological makeup of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party member. (To a lesser extent the dynamic is at play in Fine Gael). Fianna Fáil TDs and senators are in a sad place of psychological stasis. They wander around spouting what they will do tomorrow, next week, next month and next year and, do nothing. And deep down they know that they won’t do anything, for they are caught in a timewarp.

Too set in their ways and too steeped in Fianna Fáil mythology they fail to understand that drastic, epoch-warping, swingeing action is required.

For the dynamic that existed as recently as 2017 has changed utterly.

Now, in 2022 Sinn Féin are preparing to take over. And it is not the conceptual opinion polls that warn, it is the cold, hard precedent of election numbers. For Putin’s tanks on the borders of Ukraine, read Sinn Féin’s constituency results in 2020.

SINN Féin were less prepared for the earthquake than Fianna Fáil. But look at the numbers, just in my home patch of Dublin. In the five-seat Dublin South-West constituency the party ran one candidate, Seán Crowe. He took an extraordinary 29% of the first preference vote and was elected on the first count with 20,077 votes.

In the Tánaiste’s four-seat Dublin West constituency in 2020, Sinn Féin’s Paul Donnelly took 28.6%, 12,456 votes. In Dublin Central Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald won 35.7% and 11,223. In Dublin North West Dessie Ellis took 14,375 votes. This was a seismic 44.4% (you’re reading this correctly) of that constituency’s vote. Denise Mitchell – I challenge any member of the public to honestly say they recognise her – took 29.8% and another vote north of 20,000 with 21,344. I know this urban jungle well and Sinn Féin will pick up six seats here alone.

This is not normal, these numbers will not change. For other politicians to ignore the figures indicates madness or stupidity, or both.

Fine Gael, knew something was happening out there but weren’t quite sure what it was. They saw that Kenny had spent over 40 years in the Dáil and seven years as Taoiseach and a change was needed. If a change in culture is required the most visible, decisive move you can make is change the leader. It’s not personal, as Michael Corleone, would say, it is strictly business.

Fianna Fáil, as they showed when moving on Charlie Haughey, Bertie Ahern, Albert Reynolds and Brian Cowen, used to know when and how to act. (By the way, Micheál Martin was one of the prime movers in ousting Brian Cowen). For all Martin and Kenny’s joshing in the Chamber in 2017, what they were witnessing was Fine Gael acting.

The Irish people, rightly, admire Micheál Martin for leading our country through the pandemic, for his dignified leadership of the country. But when he serves out his term as Taoiseach what are Fianna Fáil then collaborating in? They are maintaining a politician – who next year will serve his 35th unbroken year in the Dáil – in a job because they are too scared, undertalented, or incompetent to remove.

The way the party does its business, its media interaction, its social media activity, has not changed. The new plan is the old plan. If, as is clear, they intend to stick with Micheál Martin then there has to be something new, something adventurous. Or they will be annihilated beyond any hope of return.

Be it a gutting of his Cabinet; promoting Lisa Chambers from the Seanad to the top table; putting half a billion euro into childcare provision; sending Irish commandos on a brave raid on Moscow (OK, maybe not that one); something radical must happen. For as Shakespeare said, ‘in delay, there lies no plenty’.

It is as if after the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the generals survey the 30,000 casualties and declare ‘let’s try this again tomorrow, chaps’ (which is, in fact, what the British did).

There won’t be much of the Legion of the Rearguard left, if that is the plan.