Two TDs lost. What will happen when the economic landscape gets even worse?
NED O’KEEFFE is as prescient as he is hard to understand. In November 2007, Ned, much earlier than any other Fianna Fáil TD, could see that Bertie Ahern’s tribunal troubles were destabilising the coalition. He lost the whip for refusing to vote confidence in health minister Mary Harney following a controversy over missed breast cancer ultrasounds in Portlaoise Hospital. Just like the issue that saw two Green TDs lose their party whips this week, this was a vote about how the health sector treats women.
Ned may have struggled with his conscience but I struggle deeply with the Cork accent, and boy does Ned have a Cork accent. I was among a small group of journalists late at night in Leinster House dealing with the aftermath of who had voted what way. At first I couldn’t find Ned in the warren-like old Georgian building. When I tracked him down, I couldn’t make out what the excited Mitchelstown man was saying. That was just the start of the hilarity. Having always had Fianna Fáil press handlers on hand, Ned wasn’t acquainted with the Byzantine Leinster House regulations on press conferences. He tried to address us in the main lobby, which isn’t allowed. It was, I recall, raining outside.
THE authorities frantically tried to move Mr O’Keeffe out. He felt this was further persecution, on top of what he was already suffering from Bertie. There then followed a Benny Hilltype chase around the parliamentary complex as Ned tried to speak to the press, the ushers tried to move us on and expletives were exchanged (I think I recall). This was then rinsed and repeated as a form of moving guerrilla press conference around the maze.
Eventually he delivered his message. Mr Ahern, Mr O’Keeffe sensed before most, was finished.
And all the myriad other political reasons for challenging the leadership came into play as the succession of Brian Cowen came into view.
This week two Green Party TDs voted with the Sinn Féin motion on the National Maternity Hospital. It’s clear that they held moral objections to the plan for the maternity hospital. But no such political decision can be assessed in isolation.
Neasa Hourigan and Patrick Costello have been Coalition sceptics since its 2020 birth. The pair abstained on a Green parliamentary party vote to back the programme for government. This appeared bizarre in Ms Hourigan’s case, since she was a chief negotiator of the programme for government! Nevertheless, Ms Hourigan was made party whip in the Dáil. Barely a month after the Government was formed, she voted against the Government. On this occasion she voted against the Residential Tenancies And Valuation Bill, a long way ideologically removed from the National Maternity Hospital.
Also back in July 2020, Green Minister Joe O’Brien voted against the Bill. The two lost speaking rights for two months. Adding to the surreal nature of this affair the Dáil was about to adjourn so, in reality, they lost rights for just two weeks. Mr O’Brien, a minister, remained a minister, an unprecedented leniency. A junior minister earns an additional €54,549 on top of their TD’s salary meaning Mr O’Brien continues to take home €154,740 per annum.
Perhaps unfairly the Green Party has a reputation for flakiness and a dreamily blasé attitude to life. However, the above examples of infractions indicate that the Greens also have a flaky and blasé attitude to parliamentary discipline. Yes, Ms Hourigan and Mr Costello have been suspended from the parliamentary party for six months. Yet they are two serial rebels, and in Ms Hourigan’s case a serial breaker of the whip.
What chill factor is there now in the Green parliamentary party when they see that Minister O’Brien can retain offices, extra pay and perks while dismissing the party whip as a mere annoyance?
And what of Ms Hourigan? Nowhere in the fallout from this latest rebellion has anyone mentioned the possibility that Ms Hourigan should lose her position as chair of the Budgetary Oversight Committee.
She continues to pick up the extra €9,595 as a chair, despite voting twice against that Government.
The leaders of the Coalition have been shouting bullishly about unity and cohesion. But, privately, TDs are far less ebullient. This week’s event dealt a grave blow to Government morale. Increasing numbers of TDs are gradually processing that this indiscipline heralds a far shorter lifespan to this Coalition than previously accepted.
For this is the phoney war period. The Dáil will freewheel to the recess in mid-July. There will be contentious votes among the mass of legislation that gets rushed through, but it will pass. Once the politicians head for the beaches the heat will be removed. But prices will continue to rise over the summer, the war in Ukraine will continue and the fuel crisis will be thus exacerbated. Negotiations with unions justly seeking pay rises for struggling workers will continue and the housing crisis will get worse.
AND then the Budget, with the Government still down two whipped Green TDs, rolls around quickly, in October, barely a week after the Dáil returns from summer recess. There is a lot of whistling past the graveyard, with an ill-founded assumption that the unaligned Greens and the de-whipped former Fianna Fáiler Marc MacSharry or some group of independent TDs will support the Budget.
But after the phoney war, where will inflation be in October? Could it be in double figures? What will the elderly and those on the breadline need just to survive? And what rises to pensions and other social welfare payments would be deemed politically necessary to all these unaligned TDs?
And that’s just for Budget 2023 (as the October budget is called). There is a long, bleak winter of discontent ahead with, almost inevitably, a world-wide recession next year. Economic bleakness affects political weather systems, and since those chill political winds are not accompanied by discipline in the Green Party, how do we expect them not to bow to sectoral pressures?
This Lord Of The Flies contagion could spread as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael backbenchers are expected to vote through environmental policies and carbon tax increases that are going to alienate large swathes of their core vote.
Leo Varadkar takes control as Taoiseach in December but he may well be too weak to reshuffle his Government now that the Coalition numbers are reduced.
This column has said that Mr Varadkar must consider dropping damaged ministerial veterans such as Simon Coveney and Paschal Donohoe. But with the precedent of a worn-out Eoghan Murphy resigning his seat, along with this outbreak of Green backbench rebellion, suddenly the Government numbers present a clear danger.
Who can be sure that Mr Coveney and Mr Donohoe would not just resign their seats? Or certainly threaten such action as a reprisal. In different ways I know that the two have wearied of the amplified conflict and the subsequent effects on young families that comes with modern politics.
Ned O’Keeffe sustained burgeoning business interests in tandem with a 30-year political career, a rarity in Irish politics where such dualism attracts unfair suspicion. Those in Leinster House who didn’t know him well dismissed him as a pig farmer, which he was.
But partly because of communication difficulties and partly because they didn’t look deeper into a fascinating politician, they didn’t grasp that he had invested his farming profits very well. Besides, I’m told, it’s a big pig farm.
With his financial interests and antennae, he was the first politician who warned me, in September 2008 at the Fianna Fáil parliamentary get-together in Galway, that our banks were in deep, deep trouble.
Less than a year earlier, Ned had been politically prescient and got his move in.
This Government could do with some of his prescience now. Or perhaps Neasa Hourigan and Patrick Costello have it.