Harris’s tense balancing act to save Fine Gael, not the country
SIMON HARRIS should have run off with the circus and mastered the art of walking the tightrope before becoming leader of Fine Gael. Now his head is going to be wrecked by the need to appeal, on the one hand, to city-slickers and urbanites who fret about climate change while sipping wine in their leather sandals in the after-glow of that Vitamin D Ryanair trip to the Canaries and, on the other hand, country folk with agricultural degrees driving John Deeres and wondering if farming is a beaten docket and whom to blame if not the Greens.
Harris will have to consider rewilding and rewetting perfectly good and highly productive farm land, which all his MEPs supported in the European Parliament, while the likes of Verona Murphy and Michael Fitzmaurice, the HealyRaes and Mattie McGrath reach for the pike in the thatch in a way that threatens Fine Gael’s future outside the Pale.
HE’LL have to balance the growing influence of liberal, social and human rights advocates in Statefunded non-governmental organisations and the advice they dispense during their open-access visits to Leinster House and Government Buildings against the almost entirely contradictory political reality across wider society, made clear in the recent Family and Care referendums.
The new Taoiseach must also try to pull off the inherently contradictory manoeuvre of returning the Blueshirts to their traditional law-and-order happy hunting ground while at the same time retaining the utterly discredited Helen McEntee as Minister for Justice. All against a background of the Dublin riots, unprovoked and extreme violence on the streets, a blizzard of cocaine and other drugs coating the country, rampant deaths on the roads as policing falters gravely with a Commissioner who has the confidence of just over 1% of rank-andfile gardaí, and migrants in tents in Dublin city centre.
And then there’s the housing crisis, which no TikTok Taoiseach can excuse because there is no excuse. So he tries to retain balance by promising 250,000 homes in five years, without even the pretence of a plan and without a sliver of evidence, based on previous performance, that it can be achieved.
And his only hope for remaining upright as regards the disaster in Health is to offer up a scapegoat by nodding in the direction of Stephen Donnelly and at the same time hoping that nobody remembers his own four unremarkable years in Angola.
At best Harris can be regarded as an interregnum Taoiseach, in circumstances where an autumn general election looks increasingly likely. After that, he could even remain on for months in a caretaker capacity while Micheál Martin and Mary Lou McDonald both attempt to cobble together a minority government.
One thing is certain: Fine Gael needs time to reset and that’ll only be achieved out of government. After 13 years in power the party is in flitters through exhaustion, and its manifest lethargy is driving people nuts. We may have a booming economy and an Exchequer flowing over with cash, but what’s the point if young people can’t buy a home?
THERE is also the very strong likelihood that our 40-year run of governments serving out full terms may become a thing of the past. The fracturing of party support means that the next five to 10 years will more resemble the early ’80s when we had three general elections in less than 18 months.
Simon Harris has a huge task to dispel the overwhelming image that Fine Gael has lost confidence in itself, made clear by the horde of TDs throwing in the towel, by Leo Varadkar doing a Forrest Gump and deciding he’s tired and should go home, and by Simon Coveney refusing to fight on for the simple reason that he couldn’t handle rejection.
Harris has taken over a party with no clear political mission, with the Greens having disrupted its relationship with its traditional support base, and with the perception that the party has been captured by elites and insiders to the exclusion of real people down the country; a party more adept at rescuing Ireland in time of need rather than driving the country forward in time of plenty.
The new Taoiseach’s main job now is to save Fine Gael, not the country. Traditional Fine Gael voices were much louder at the party’s conference in Athlone last weekend – a clear indication that the modernist, social engineering phase of its history has passed.
Simon Harris’s tightrope act now needs to find that fine balance between old and new. Success will look like 2011; failure will look like the Labour Party.
AN example of what happens when politics works is our excellent education system. That’s all down to the late Donogh O’Malley, who introduced free secondary education for all in the 1960s. And he did this without any go-ahead from thentaoiseach Jack Lynch and while he was, as has been speculated, under the weather. Which proves there’s a lot to be said for the absence of inhibitions with a few jars on board.