Even Lazarus could not match the miracle Micheál Martin has pulled off by managing to drag himself out of the political grave and his entire party along with him. Fourteen years ago, he and Fianna Fáil were suffocating in their own obituaries. The party had lost 59 Dáil seats in the February 2011 general election after Ireland ceded its economic sovereignty. Predictions of the organisation’s total obliteration filled the airwaves. Having succeeded Brian Cowen that January, Martin was being dismissed as “Fianna Fáil’s last leader”. When he appeared on The Late Late Show in November 2011 and Ryan Tubridy suggested that “the next Fianna Fáil taoiseach hasn’t been born yet”, the audience applauded, with feeling. “I may never be taoiseach,” Martin conceded.
In fact, it took him just 8½ years to land the job. After Friday’s election, not only is the Corkonian poised to become taoiseach for a second time, he has put his party back on the top of the heap and established a strong argument against fashionable prophecies that a Fianna Fáil merger with Fine Gael is inevitable. Fianna Fáil will return to the Dáil on December 18th as the country’s biggest party and with sufficient clear water separating it from its oldest rival as to make talk of amalgamation little more than idle speculation.
In that Late Late Show interview in November 2011, he laid a clue as to how he has achieved the once unimaginable. “You’re so heavily tainted by being a minister and a member of that government [that] until you’re gone, Fianna Fáil will never be able to renew,” Tubridy challenged the former minister for health, education, enterprise and foreign affairs. Martin accepted people were angry and admitted Fianna Fáil had “lost the sense of being the party that had at its core the advancement of the working class ... How people feel about you is the important thing at the end of the day.”
Initial campaign spin by Fine Gael rivals that the 64-year-old was a grumpy old man backfired as voters equated age with wisdom and stability. But being Mr Nice is not enough to win an election. Were it so, wee Daniel O’Donnell would be the taoiseach
Hindsight can be hilarious. Looking back at the years of internal Fianna Fáil bickering over Martin’s leadership, the memories seem laughable now. Carlow-Kilkenny TD John McGuinness was a constant critic, damning the confidence-and-supply arrangement with the 2016-2020 Fine Gael-led government as “cowardice” and forecasting in July 2020 that Martin wouldn’t last long as taoiseach because of internal party dissent. Despite being re-ensconced in government after an absence of almost a decade, Éamon Ó Cuív called in September 2020 for a new party leader in response to Fianna Fáil’s declining popularity in opinion polls. At one stage, serious plotting was afoot to replace Martin with Dublin Bay South TD Jim O’Callaghan.
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What makes all this comical in the context of Friday’s election is that Martin has proved to be his party’s singular saving grace. His personal ratings have been consistently higher in polls than Fianna Fáil’s. In the Ipsos/B&A exit poll conducted for The Irish Times, RTÉ, TG4 and Trinity College Dublin, 35 per cent of respondents said they wanted the Cork South Central TD to be the next taoiseach. That is 8 per cent more than those who favoured Simon Harris but, more significantly, 15.5 per cent more than the number who said they gave Fianna Fáil their first-preference vote.
The (expected, at the time of writing) seat losses by Fianna Fáil ministers Stephen Donnelly and Anne Rabbitte compound the impression of Martin as something of a one-man band. He has been poorly bolstered by his party colleagues compared with Harris, who was able to switch the spotlight from himself on to Paschal Donohoe in the final week of the campaign after snubbing care worker Charlotte Fallon in Kanturk. Martin lost his first agriculture minister, Barry Cowen, less than a month into government, followed by his second one, Dara Calleary, a month later. Even Oscar Wilde was lost for words after the second loss.
Having first met Martin through a family connection before he became a TD in 1989, I have watched his metamorphosis from greenhorn to elder statesman with astonishment. In political commentary, the word “decent” has become synonymous with his name. Over the weekend, I heard people say they reluctantly voted for a Fianna Fáil candidate because they wanted him back in government. Initial campaign spin by Fine Gael rivals that the 64-year-old was a grumpy old man backfired as voters equated age with wisdom and stability. But being Mr Nice is not enough to win an election. Were it so, wee Daniel O’Donnell would be the taoiseach.
Inside Martin’s outwardly non-threatening demeanour is an unsentimental ruthlessness, which will be evident in the forthcoming negotiations to form a government. An early signal of it was his ready denunciation of Bertie Ahern after the planning tribunal’s findings against the former Fianna Fáil leader. His oft-reiterated personal story as the son of a bus driver and the first of his family to acquire a secondary-level education is essential to his repositioning of his party slightly to the left of centre. Gone is the Fianna Fáil tent. Martin will not be found golfing with bankers, or residing in a mansion, or inviting Michael O’Leary to launch his campaign.
He has made mistakes. One of the most notable was the lifting of restrictions to facilitate “a meaningful Christmas” during Covid, a week before the worst month for deaths from the disease. With housing and homelessness topping the list of election issues, it is inescapable too that, on a Fianna Fáil minister’s watch the number of people consigned to emergency housing has risen from 8,728 when Martin became taoiseach in 2020 to 14,966.
The famous catchcry of Bill Clinton’s administration that “it’s the economy, stupid” will be rolled out to explain Fianna Fáil’s election success, but the greater verity lies in Martin’s own words when he said on The Late Late Show 13 years ago that “how people feel about you is the important thing at the end of the day”.