Category: Fianna Fáil

Does MM stand for: Micheál Martin or Managerial Minimalism?

by dsmooney, posted in Fianna Fáil, Mary Lou McDonald, Micheal Martin, Pandemic, public transport, Taoiseach

This week’s column first appeared on Broadsheet.ie on Monday Novembe 15th and returns to a familiar theme; the flawed political leadership style of Micheál Martin.  

You can tell that it wasn’t a great week for the current government, when one of the least worst headlines it garnered was: Taoiseach defends Eamon Ryan’s appointment of cronies to climate council roles.

It’s like Zapponegate never happened… or maybe it’s that this administration spends so much time lurching from problem to problem that it hasn’t yet had a chance to learn the lessons of the last one?

Let’s look back over the stories that dominated the headlines during just the first few days of last week.

On Tuesday, we discovered that it would be 2042 before we would see a Dart underground line. We also found that that there won’t be new metro lines south or west of Dublin with the next two decades either. All this courtesy of a National Transport Authority review of its strategy for the capital.

This was the same day that we learned that the Department of Finance was considering going after the home purchase deposits coming via the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’. (It took Pascal Donohoe several days to walk this story back.)

Continue reading “Does MM stand for: Micheál Martin or Managerial Minimalism?” →

The Shinners ready themselves for government… but are we ready for them?

by dsmooney, posted in By-Election, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Government, Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Féin, Taoiseach

This week’s column first appeared on Broadsheet on Monday November 1st 2022, two days after the Sinn Féin Árd Fheis in Dublin. I explain why I think speculation about Sinn Féin being in government North and South within the next year, or two, is far too premature. I do not say it is impossible, just that it requires the leaderships in the two traditional big parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, to continue to mishandle events and misread the public mood. I firmly believe that one of these two former big beasts (at least) will soon come to its political senses and see that it is not offering the change demanded by a sizable cohort of what is still a moderate electorate.   

Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, at the 2005 Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis in Killarney

For about twenty years I lived within a ten-minute walk of the RDS and Simmonscourt. This was particularly useful for the Fianna Fáil Árd Fheiseanna.

It meant I could soak up the atmosphere and anticipation in the hall during the build up to the party leader’s speech, but quickly nip home to see the full speech live on TV and catch the RTÉ news review.

This gave me a better sense of how the speech played in the world outside, as I was seeing what the people at home saw… well, those few who bother to watch these things.

Continue reading “The Shinners ready themselves for government… but are we ready for them?” →

This week’s #Covid19 reopening should have gone ahead

by dsmooney, posted in Covid-19, data protection, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, GDPR, Green party, Micheal Martin, Politics, Sinn Féin

This week’s column first appeared on Broadsheet on Monday Oct 18th, the day before the government decided not to proceed with its original plan to lift most of the continuing Covid19 restrictions. I think ministers are making a mistake. They should have focused instead on (a) making life less burdensome for the vaccinated and (b) placing increased pressure on the 300,000 or so un-vaxxed to folks to get vaccinated ASAP. Though I accept full 100% coverage is impossible.

Getting more people to get their shots is what drives the Italian workplace Green Pass system (which I indirectly reference below). I recommend listening to this 17-minute Podcast on the Italian system. It is from my colleagues in BEERG/HRPA.  

The idea that the way to stop folks breaking rules is to make more rules is akin to saying if two wrongs don’t make a right… let’s try three.

It is absurd to hear the government talk about not lifting restrictions only days after boasting about our being the Covid resilience world leader.

Yet that’s where we are. You cannot turn on a news show without hearing yet another minister preparing us for the October 22 re-opening not going ahead.

The Taoiseach took it a step further in yesterday’s Sunday Independent. There he hinted that the government had already decided to pause further reopening. As if to sugar coat this failure of policy, Martin sought to comfort us by saying:

“… we are not contemplating going backwards. The only issue facing us now is going forward”

If he is expecting the public to be grateful that we are not going back into lockdown, he will be disappointed.

The government is doing this the wrong way around.

Rather than passively accepting that they cannot go ahead with the October 22 re-opening, they should be proceeding with it. Rather than preparing us for disappointment, they should also be tasking public health officials with putting the necessary measures in place. Continue reading “This week’s #Covid19 reopening should have gone ahead” →

When leadership colours matter… Fail to Define Yourself and others Will do it for you

by dsmooney, posted in Confidence and Supply, Dublin, Fianna Fáil, Fleming Report, GE2020, Micheal Martin, Sinn Féin

This week’s columns, which first appeared on Broadsheet on Monday October 11th, looked at Fianna Fáil’s ongoing problems with defining itself and the decision of its leader to contact out the job of defining the party’s aims and beliefs to a 12-person-commission.   

GE2020 – Fianna Fáil’s missed opportunity to stand for something

 

As I have mentioned before, the truest rule of politics is Lyndon Johnson’s “never tell a man to go to hell unless you can send him there.”

It recognises that today’s enemies may be tomorrow’s allies, while warning that hollow threats only expose the weakness of those making them.

My second favourite political saying is: “You buy your colours on your way into a match, not on your way out.”

It comes from someone a million miles away from LBJ, the Yellow Rose of Finglas, the late Jim Tunney. Tunney was a junior minister, Lord Mayor of Dublin and a Fianna Fáil TD for 23 years. He prided himself on his absolute loyalty to his party leader, especially Charlie Haughey.

Not only had Tunney a penchant for quoting himself, he did it in the third person. He uttered the phrase less as a strategy and more as a self-description, especially when defending his decision, as parliamentary party chair, to hold open rollcall votes, rather than secret ballots.

Continue reading “When leadership colours matter… Fail to Define Yourself and others Will do it for you” →

Maybe We’d Believe Them More If The Numbers Were Smaller?

by dsmooney, posted in Dublin, Eamon Ryan, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Government, Green party, Housing, Jim O'Callaghan, Paschal Donohoe, Policy, Politics, public transport, Tanaiste, Taoiseach

This column appeared on broadsheet.ie on Monday October 4th, a few hours before the launch of the government’s €165 billion National Development Plan (NDP) 

After weeks spent playing catch-up on the self-inflicted mess that was Zapponegate, ministers and advisers will be relieved to be dealing with real hard political issues.

And there are no shortage of them. Over the next ten days we will see the fruits of their behind-the-scenes labours delivered via two major announcements. The first comes today with the launch of the National Development Plan (NDP). The second comes next week with the October 12th Budget.

Political convention suggests that the long-term political fate of this government rests on the success of these two events, plus the Housing for All package announced last month. But political convention hasn’t been right for a while, and there is no great reason to thank that is about to change.  

Though the NDP overshadows the Budget when it comes to the amounts involved, it will be a decade before we start to see if it is working or not. The NDP is the political equivalent of planting trees in whose shade you will never sit, though here it is more of a case of politicians delivering infrastructure for which they’ll never get the political kudos. Continue reading “Maybe We’d Believe Them More If The Numbers Were Smaller?” →

A brief history of the no confidence motion

by dsmooney, posted in data protection, Dáil, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, GE2020, Government, Leo Varadkar, Micheal Martin, Sinn Féin

This week’s Broadsheet column, which first appeared online on Sept 13th 2021, looked at the history of the no-confidence motion and concluded that while Minister Coveney and his Fine Gael colleagues had probably done enough to earn the dubious honour of having a no confidence motion tabled against him, it did not deserve to pass… just yet 

Johnny Carson famously called Oscar night the time when Hollywood stars put aside their petty rivalries and brought out their major rivalries.

So it is with Motions of No Confidence. Oppositions set aside the boring business of holding ministers and governments to account to solely focus on scoring big political points.

Just like the Oscars, motions of confidence are about ritual and theatricality. This applies to both sides – opposition and government.

Opposition politicians who hope one day to become government ministers act outraged and appalled. Governments ministers, who were once opposition hopefuls, accuse their rivals of base cynicism and partisanship.

The script writes itself. Scroll back through no confidence debates of the past fifty years and you see the same formulaic lines pop up each time, just mouthed by different actors, few of Oscar winning standard.

Continue reading “A brief history of the no confidence motion” →

The pubs are re-opening, so normal politics is resuming… and endgame is near

by dsmooney, posted in Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, GE2020, Housing, Leo Varadkar, Micheal Martin, Politics, Simon Coveney, Tanaiste, Taoiseach

This is my first Broadsheet column in about five weeks… and what an eventful five weeks it has been. What makes it even more interesting and potentially significant is that it leads into the final steps in the re-opening of society via the relaxation of the remaining Covid-19 restrictions. This means a return to normal politics via a return to face to face meetings of the various parliamentary parties. This I believe means that the endgame is near for both the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael leaders. 

“I didn’t show up here with a speech, I came here well-resourced with material…”

At the end of July I said that come September I would be back and ready to offer my thoughts on what’s happening on the Irish political scene. 

Well, I am back, but little did I imagine we would see so much political activity in August. Like many I assumed that politicians from all sides who have – to be fair – endured a difficult 16 months, would leap at the chance of a having a calm and uneventful August.

I was wrong. I failed to the factor-in the capacity of Fine Gael’s officer class to completely overestimate their own guile and ability and to fatally underestimate the public’s impatience with the appearance of ministerial entitlement.

Though the Taoiseach and his allies, more of whom are in Fine Gael these days than in Fianna Fáil, may want to portray #Merriongate / #Zapponegate as a silly season story that is not resonating with the public, his TDs, Senators and Councillors know that’s not the case.

Voters may not be familiar the minutiae of who said what, to whom, in what text and over what platform… but who is? The stories and sequences coming from the Tánaiste and the Foreign Affairs minister seem to change every couple of days, including at today’s second attempt by the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs to establish the facts.

Continue reading “The pubs are re-opening, so normal politics is resuming… and endgame is near” →

My interim by-election review for Fianna Fáil

by dsmooney, posted in By-Election, Confidence and Supply, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Government, Irish Labour Party, Sinn Féin, Social Media

This column first appeared on Broadsheet.ie on July 12th, a few days after the Dublin Bay South by-Election result. That result shows that Fianna Fáil is facing a crisis of relevance and viability, one that its leader of over 10 years is unwilling to address or acknowledge. This column was offered as an independent review of what I think went wrong in the by-election. 

A few weeks after the February 2020 election I said that Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin needed to stop and “take a hard look at why his party lost support and seats”. I said it again, several times, over the weeks and months that followed. I even offered the independent review the Australian Labour Party had commissioned into its electoral failure as a template.

I thought it was essential that the party examine why it had done so badly before doing anything precipitative, such as going into government with the party it had promised to put out of office.

The leadership thought otherwise. It felt Fianna Fáil’s best course of action was to get into office and that its political revival would come from the government program for recovery. It seemed to miss the inconvenient truth that this meant giving Fine Gael a veto on Fianna Fáil’s fortunes.

This was one of the main reasons I ended my 40 plus year membership of Fianna Fáil. Why would I knock myself out trying to rebuild a party, when the top Fine Gael brass would have a bigger say in it than grassroot members?

Continue reading “My interim by-election review for Fianna Fáil” →

Why does Martin’s Fianna Fáil have such a stubborn problem with young people?

by dsmooney, posted in By-Election, Elections, Fianna Fáil, Micheal Martin, Social Media, Taoiseach

This week’s column first appeared on Broadsheet last Monday (July 5th). In it, I look at the argument on Fianna Fáil’s real and demonstrable problems with young voters that mysteriously leaked out from the parliamentary party. Indeed, it is long past time for folks to wonder why (and how) there are so many leaks from what is supposed a confidential meeting of elected colleagues, particularly when most of that leaked material is often detrimental to those not on the leader’s side. I also take a final look at the Dublin Bay South By-Election. 

According to the many detailed leaks from last week’s Fianna Fáil parliamentary party meeting (an issue itself worthy of an article) the suggestion that young people perceive the party as toxic and inimical to their needs, angered and upset several TD’s and junior ministers.

And not in a good way. Rather than being angered that young people feel this way – and sadly they do, as almost every poll published over the past 18 months has shown – some ministers were outraged that colleagues would dare point this out.

Even the recent Irish Times Ipsos/Mori, which optimistically showed Fianna Fáil’s support increasing nationally by 6pts to 20%, still found that the party is only on 8% among Dublin voters aged under 35. This puts it in a very weakened 5th place in Dublin, well behind Sinn Féin, Fine Gael, The Greens and Independents.

Continue reading “Why does Martin’s Fianna Fáil have such a stubborn problem with young people?” →

Why does an unpopular party have a popular leader?

by dsmooney, posted in Elections, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Leo Varadkar, Mary Lou McDonald, Micheal Martin, Sinn Féin, Taoiseach

Last week I rekindled my love affair with the word “paradox”, so expect to see it pop up here a lot, including in this week’s Broadsheet column where I look at the paradox of Fianna Fáil’s poll ratings remaining stubbornly low, while the approval ratings of its leader move up. Has An Taoiseach, Micheál Martin learned how to disassociate himself from his party… and doesn’t this mean that what is in his interest, is not in his party’s.. and vice-versa?   

Ipsos/MRBI Irish Times Poll – June 16th 2021

Though I probably keep this fact well hidden from readers, I really try to not write about polling too often. I say this through clenched fingers as I know it must seem that I have written about little else over the past few weeks and months.

It is a fair criticism to say that political pundits talk and write excessively about polling in the guise of political analysis. While the soap opera aspects of politics, who’s in, who’s out, who’s politically in bed with whom, does help liven up what can often be a dull area, the focus should be on the policies and the decisions rather than who makes them.

The old Heisenberg uncertainty/indeterminacy principle applies to politics as much as it does to physics. If you cannot accurately measure both the position and the velocity of an object simultaneously, then you should focus more on the  trajectory of an object or an idea than analysing snapshots of where it was a few days or weeks ago.   

All of which is a long-winded way of me explaining/excusing – why I am once again talking about polling. In my defence, I do this as there is something that is worth discussing in the two most recent opinion polls: yesterday’s Ireland Thinks/Irish Mail on Sunday one and last week’s Irish Times/IPSOS/MRBI, as they offer some contradictory results.

Continue reading “Why does an unpopular party have a popular leader?” →