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SeriesWinners and Losers
On cloud nine or stuck in the dog house? Here are the winners and losers of the political week
Ireland was at the political centre this week, but who’s winning?
EVERY WEEKEND, OUR political team casts an eye over the events inside and outside Leinster House that have people talking.
Dublin was the epicentre of international political affairs, for one day at least, this week but there were also plenty of domestic issues to get us through as well.
Here is our rundown of the political winners and losers of the week.
Winners
Micheál Martin
You might say it’s an easy win, but the scale of the show Ireland put on this week was not in itself easy, and it was very much the Micheál Martin show.
As the single biggest diplomatic set piece of the EU Presidency, the European Political Community (EPC) Summit in Dublin was set up to be a high point of this Taoiseach’s tenure.
There are arguably more significant days in policy terms but coordinating a meeting of so many heads of state, not-to-mention Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, is a big deal that involves various government departments pulling together.
The Taoiseach greeted each world leader as they arrived at the doorstep of the Convention Centre and the conviviality he displayed was the work of someone who is very much made for this kind of thing.
Asked on RTÉ whether he’d see another EPC and lead his party into the next election, there was a slight prevarication before he assured everyone that he would do. Some 24-hours later he suggested any notion to the contrary was “rubbish”.
Jack Chambers
While the EPC and the subsequent EU meeting the following day went through without much of a hitch, this wasn’t a guarantee if hundreds of thousands of public sector workers had been on strike on Thursday.
The likelihood was that a deal was always going to be reached but, as Tuesday turned into Wednesday, it was getting a little close for comfort.
It was probably a source of stress for Jack Chambers, who would have shouldered no shortage of blame had the negotiations with public sector unions gone sour.
As it stands, the agreed deal still needs to be ratified by the union membership but, barring a surprise rejection, Chambers will be happy enough with how it all went.
The €5.2 billion deal out to March 2029 was probably a bit pricier than he would have hoped but, with current Exchequer largesse, he can afford it and now gets to add a deal with the unions to an impressive CV for a 36-year-old minister.
To take it a step further, the other minister (and potential FF leadership rival?) who got a deal this week was Jim O’Callaghan.
Big Jim probably had a tougher task in changing the legal aid system, but he nonetheless comes out from his own industrial battle a little more bruised than the younger man.
Scott Colom
I walked the Trump rally line to listen, not make assumptions. I talked with voters, asked questions and heard what matters to them. When I'm elected, I'll represent all 82 counties and every Mississippian, no matter who they voted for. That's what being your senator means. #MississippiMatters
— Scott Colom (@scott_colom) October 31, 2026
A literal winner this was Scott Colom, the new Senator for Mississippi who was elected eight days after the midterms in a historic result for his Democratic Party.
Colom becomes the first Black person elected to the Senate from Mississippi in 140 years, and the first Democrat since 1982.
Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney, defeated incumbent senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who once blocked him from becoming a judge in the state.
Colom ran an impressive campaign that connected with voters of various backgrounds, something evident in the campaign video above which showed him speaking to Trump supporters queuing for a rally.
Losers
Simon Harris
Simon Harris went into his party’s Ard Fheis last weekend with questions swirling about what Fine Gael really stands for these days.
Harris sought to appeal to the party faithful with a mix of business-friendly soundbites, some Shinner-bashing and a vague threat to those who are unemployed and “refuse to engage”.
“The dole is a safety net, not a way of life,” he said, adding that new penalties could be coming.
His words got a cheer in the room, and maybe that was the point, but they also framed the message of the entire Ard Fheis.
As soon as the following day, criticism of what the opposition called punching down was on the front pages and Harris was trying to argue that there was some cherry-picking underway of a much larger address.
The controversy continued throughout the week, not exactly the new “journey of renewal” he said he was looking for.
Pete Hegseth
If there’s one person whose days appear to be numbered in Washington it’s Defence Secretary, sorry Secretary of (unpopular) War, Pete Hegseth.
After from his boss Donald Trump, Hegseth is the face of the Iran War, which is being blamed as the primary reason for the Republicans’ beating of historic proportions in the Midterms.
The Fox News-pundit-turned-Secretary narrowly avoided an effort to impeach him this week, when the House of Representatives voted 211 to 204 to essentially save him for now.
He might not have won that vote had 11 Democrats not missed the vote. And all this before the new House takes its seats in January, when the Democrats will have an even bigger majority.
Hegseth wasn’t really convincing anyone when he argued this week that ”history will judge the Iran War quite differently” than it is being judged now.
To make his week worse, a US military guard was seen loudly reprimanding the group he was with on Veterans Day for laughing and chatting near a sacred tomb.
Even if Hegseth isn’t impeached by the soon-to-be Democrat-dominated Congress, Trump himself may look to shift the war blame more squarely onto someone else.
There’s precedent for this too. Back in 2006 when the US was stuck in another unpopular war, this time in Iraq, George W. Bush’s Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit after another Democratic victory in the Midterms.
History has a strange way of repeating itself.
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