WELL, THAT’S ONE way to bury the news that Lee Carsley doesn’t want the Ireland job.
Leo Varadkar’s midweek resignation from the office of Taoiseach and as leader of Fine Gael came as a shock, even to senior members of Varadkar’s own party. Perhaps it shouldn’t have. The Taoiseach made it clear in a emotional speech that he no longer felt he was the best person for the job. That he’s been able to keep that bottled up doesn’t say much for Micheál Martin’s “checking in” abilities.
Still, it wasn’t long before the outgoing Taoiseach was back to his old self, joking around with reporters when asked about his legacy.
Taoiseach says he will not be endorsing a candidate for next leader of Fine Gael - he says it is a longstanding tradition that the outgoing leader does not.
— Jane Matthews (@janeematthews) March 21, 2024
@thejournal_ie pic.twitter.com/VuQ4ks9j7f
“I feel sorry for the people who have to write that kind of rubbish on Sunday,” Varadkar said. Thanks Leo, I feel sorry for me too. It seemed an oddly empathetic remark. A notable moment of compassion from a man who has, in the past, had a reputation for treating criticism or unfavourable analysis with a brusqueness that bordered on mean.
“It is a pity they get paid to write it because it is all rubbish,” he went on to say. Ah, there he is. (He went on to say it takes years to properly assess a politician.)
While Leo Varadkar’s legacy in his time as Taoiseach has been referred to before in this column (whenever we’ve had to discuss, say, homelessness, or housing, or the difficulties that come with accessing healthcare), it is his legacy within his own party that seems more relevant during a week when two more Fine Gael TDs also announced they had taken a long, hard look at the ship and decided to bail.
Fine Gael had 35 TDs after the 2020 general election. Of those TDs, Eoghan Murphy has left politics entirely, Joe McHugh left over Fine Gael’s handling of the Mica scandal, and a further 10 have said they will not contest the next election, a number that will rise if Varadkar decides he doesn’t want to face life as a backbencher.
Over a third of Fine Gael’s current TDs don’t even want to be politicians anymore. Even if Leo Varadkar hadn’t resigned, that would have been worthy of a few paragraphs on its own.
With that in mind, it is less surprising that so few of Leo’s would-be successors aren’t clambering over each other for the top job. At time of writing, Simon Harris appears to have destroyed any prospective adversaries at the root in a bloodless power-grab — a description intentionally designed to misrepresent what has been a shockingly dull leadership “contest,” if that’s what you can call watching Gav Reilly count the number of party members announcing their support for Simon Harris one-by-one on Twitter.
If this were the 1980s there would have been fistfights in the lobby of Buswell’s but instead we’re stuck hearing about how Harris has a “proven-track record” from the same people who should be plotting to stab him in the back. We used to be a real country. There should be a ghoulish soothsayer in Paschal Donohoe’s ear right now telling him power could be his if only he were to reach out and grab it. What else is a special advisor for?
Taoiseach says he will not be endorsing a candidate for next leader of Fine Gael - he says it is a longstanding tradition that the outgoing leader does not.
— Jane Matthews (@janeematthews) March 21, 2024
@thejournal_ie pic.twitter.com/VuQ4ks9j7f
Announcing his candidacy, Harris warned that “to anyone who thinks this party lacks energy, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” If Harris is attempting to project youth, the word ‘ain’t’ is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting. Maybe he’ll give his leadership acceptance speech wearing Heelies.
At 37, Harris would be the youngest ever person to become Taoiseach. He would be the first Taoiseach to enter office with a TikTok account. It is plausible that some political commentators will choose to use this kind of trivia to carve Harris out as a personality in his own right. Harris would also, however, be the seventh Fine Gael Taoiseach, and one suspects that this is the identifier that will have more bearing on his approach to matters such as housing, healthcare, education, and the treatment of people in Ireland seeking international protection.
Indeed, the current Minister for Further Education himself said in his announcement that: “Sometimes politics in Ireland has gone a bit too presidential, a bit too personal.” Harris casts himself as a functionary, an operative, someone concerned primarily with “getting things done for people”.
It is possible that the next Taoiseach, whether it’s Harris or some other phantom Fine Gaeler, will not be Taoiseach for very long, but there are still certainly things that they could get done.
It could almost escape notice that this week the ESRI published data reporting that 76% of people in Ireland were supportive of helping asylum seekers while 87% were supportive of helping Ukrainian refugees.
Those figures seem out-of-kilter with the dozens upon dozens of far-right figures we see claiming to be concerned locals in different parts of the country each week. They are also incongruous with the treatment endured by some international protection applicants last weekend, when around 100 men were bussed from a tent city outside the International Protection Office to “shelter” in Crooksling, near Saggart.
The site the men were driven to was the site of a suspected arson attack just months ago, while tents and belongings at the original site were slashed and removed. The Department of Integration acknowledged that basic amenities such as toilets, showers, food, access to health services, and transport links to Dublin were still being added to the Crooksling site last weekend.
It was an episode that highlighted basic failures in joined-up thinking between multiple different actors, but more than that it highlighted a lack of respect for the most vulnerable at a deep and insidious level in the Irish state.
Where we’re at now is somebody’s legacy. The next Taoiseach doesn’t need to share it.
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