And so Varadkar bunks off… without paying…

This is my first Mooney on Politics column / podcast in a good few weeks.. apologies for the unforgiveable delay. Normal service will now be resumed. 

Well… where do I start? It is a few months since I last produced a column or podcast, not that I haven’t had a few failed attempts since then. Many rarely got past paragraph three or four when the demands of the paying job distracted me, but even more were redundant as events moved faster than my typing speed.

So much has happened in the weeks since I last published anything that I would need several columns and podcasts to cover everything. But I haven’t the time to write them and you haven’t the time or energy to bother with them either, so rather that looking back and let’s start at where we are now, on Thursday March 21^st and try to look forward.

Not there is a great deal to look forward to… but let’s not jump to the inevitable conclusion too soon.

The first question is why did the outgoing Taoiseach pick this week to announce his departure? Well, like most, I have no idea. There may be many reasons why he has decided to cut and run now, and there is no shortage of online speculation as to the reasons, but let’s not go there.

Whatever the reasons, the timing appears to make sense, though only if you view it from Varadkar’s own perspective.

People of a certain vintage will recall the days when buses had bus conductors, who would walk up and down the bus collecting fares. If memory serves me right, “bunking” was the act of evading paying your bus fare, especially by schoolkids who would ride as far as they could to their destination without having to pay the price.

You see where I’m going with this?

In my view Varadkar has bunked off at the last possible stop to his destination before having to pay the price. The price, in this case, being him leading his party into yet another electoral hammering. Last January’s European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) poll pointed to Fine Gael losing three seats at the upcoming European elections, falling from 5 to just 2 seats. Ironically, the same poll suggested that this drop could help their Fianna Fáil coalition colleagues go from two seats to three via Fine Gael eliminations.

According to some Fine Gael friends there were rumours of another poll suggesting an even worse outcome with Fine Gael falling even further than the ECFR poll suggested. Whether that was the case of not, is not important, suffice to say that the solid rejection of the two referendums and the slew of long standing and well-established Fine Gael TDs deciding not to contest the next election pointed to a dark time ahead.

Well, thanks to Varadkar’s departure, he can now look at his successor and say, this is YP… your problem. How altruistic of him.

But maybe I am being unfair. Before Varadkar’s announcement (and before the landslide No-No at the referendums) there was a growing sense within Fianna Fáil that it could be a net beneficiary of Fine Gael’s woes. Fianna Fáil TDs in constituencies where the sitting Fine Gael TD was not running again were picking up on the sense that local Blueshirts who wanted to see this government continue might lend them their votes next time, in what one might term a reverse Phil Hogan.

The gains would not be significant, but there was a hope that the steady decline since February 2020 might be stemmed via some spare Fine Gael votes. But this hope all depended on Fine Gael having a leader in place who agreed with Micheál Martin that the best outcome to the next election would be a return of this coalition, with or without the Green party.

You could even read the last few opinion polls as pointing to the return of the current coalition as a distinct possibility, though as a minority government. I explained this recently on the Brendan O’Connor show on RTÉ Radio One, but the TL;DR is that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael look likely to lose seats at the next election, even in Dáil with 14 extra seats, but they would combined be sufficiently far ahead of the Sinn Féin led alternative to mean a hung Dáil or a precarious FF/FG minority government courtesy of independents who wanted to avoid another election.

But this scenario depended on Fine Gael wanting to continue in government. The questions now are:

Will the next Fine Gael leader be so determined to return to government following the next election?

Or, will that leader decide the path to rebuilding Fine Gael long term depend on going into opposition after the next election and its leader being the leader of the opposition – i.e. the leader of the biggest non governing party.

But for that to happen its new leader needs either (a) Both Sinn Féin to be in government and Fianna Fáil to have fewer seats than Fine Gael or (b) for Fianna Fáil to be in government with Sinn Féin, no matter how many seats it wins.      

There are a lot of moving parts in that scenario, and lots of things that could go wrong for the next Fine Gael leader, but if their goal is to take Fine Gael into opposition after the next election, then having the ability to decide the timing of the next election is a major advantage.

Will the incoming Fine Gael leader cede that advantage to the leaders of the other coalition parties in exchange for a calm relationship with their partners for the remaining months of this government? I sincerely doubt it. And I think the leaderships of the Green and Fianna Fáil parties are naive to imagine otherwise.  

I can understand the instinctive urge of both Ryan and Martin to speak glowingly of the benefits of stability and the desire of this government to fulfil its 5-year term. But the hard political reality is that Varadkar bunking off has destabilised this government just weeks after the public’s rejection of the government’s Yes-Yes referendum message destabilised the confidence of back benchers, especially the Fianna Fáil ones.

I have avoided naming the most likely next Fine Gael leader in the above analysis, because I do not want to tempt fate… though it is clear at the time of writing this that it is hard to imagine that being anyone other than Simon Harris.

I am content to wait until after 1pm on Sunday next (March 25th), when nominations for the Fine Gael leadership close, to start considering the qualities and skillset of their next leader. But while we wait, might I suggest that we briefly turn our attention to another election due to play out, namely the Seanad By-Election to fill the vacancy unfortunately caused by the resignation of Senator Niall Ó Donnghaile.

Nominations close at 12 noon tomorrow, Friday March 22^nd with voting by Oireachtas members due to start on April 15^th and finish by 11am on April 29^th. Given the government’s majority, it is expected that their agreed candidate, The Green Party’s nominee, the defeated Belfast city councillor, Mal O’Hara should win easily… but who knows what might happen in a secret ballot… especially in an uncertain time.

One thing I do know, I will not allow as long a gap between columns again.