Bertie Ahern has thrown a stink bomb into Fianna Fáil’s knees-up for its 100th birthday celebrations on Saturday. Classic Bertie.
Out on a byelection canvass in the bailiwick he previously ruled with the Drumcondra Mafia, all that was missing was the former leader’s ould anorak as he fed a voter what he thought she wanted. His exclusionary diatribe against Africans and Muslims has not only hurt its targets but his own party, too, with its implicit message that Fianna Fáil is stuck in the Ireland of a John Hinde postcard.
Of all people, Ahern should know. His stamping ground of Drumcondra, a magnet now for a young, ethnically-diverse, live-and-let-live generation, is a microcosm of contemporary Ireland. How Micheál Martin must wish his predecessor had never come home from that 1994 whip-around dinner in Manchester.
If Charles Haughey were Harry Houdini then Martin must be Lazarus. Not so long ago, he was being disparaged as the first Fianna Fáil leader destined never to become Taoiseach. Now in his second term of office, about to steer the EU presidency, the longevity of his leadership second only to founder Éamon de Valera’s and with Fianna Fáil restored to the Dáil as the country’s biggest party, his powers of survival have proven more miraculous than any of Haughey’s escapes from attempted putsches.
Martin was elected leader two months after the bailout troika swooped into Ireland with its austerity-medicine bag and then, within weeks, Fianna Fáil lost 58 of its 78 Dáil seats in the 2011 general election. With a dearth of experience remaining in its ranks, Martin traipsed the country rebuilding Fianna Fáil, proving that, like Mark Twain, rumours of its death were greatly exaggerated.
But survival has come at a price. It has necessitated once-unthinkable compromises, such as his confidence-and-supply arrangement that propped up a minority Fine Gael government from 2016 to 2020, followed by successive coalitions with the old Civil War enemy.
When de Valera, wearing his trademark “dead black suit”, launched Fianna Fáil (the Republican Party) in the La Scala theatre, Dublin, on May 16th, 1926, it followed his split from Sinn Féin after two disastrous byelections for that party. Next week, Fianna Fáil will contest two byelections that the auguries indicate it has lost even before voting begins. A crushing defeat will provide another nail in the coffin his internal critics are preparing for Martin’s leadership.
The jockeying for his position has become blatant. Jim O’Callaghan, Minister for Justice and heir-most-apparent, has publicly challenged Jack Chambers, Minister for Public Expenditure and Martin’s choice-apparent, to achieve a reduction in income tax in the budget.
After delivering the graveside oration to mark this week’s 55th anniversary of Seán Lemass’s death, O’Callaghan gave a nod to the parliamentary party’s disgruntled wing when he advocated backbenchers’ entitlement to have their say about the budget. A third potential contender has emerged with the whispering grapevine of “well placed sources” promoting the Minister for Social Protection, Dara Calleary. Whoever becomes Fianna Fáil’s ninth leader, the safe bet is that he will be a he.
Dev was a pragmatist. He overcame his revulsion at the oath of allegiance to King George V to lead his party into the Dáil in 1927. Were he alive today, he might even grudgingly approve of the coalition with Fine Gael. The concession he and his successor Lemass would likely baulk at is the erosion of Fianna Fáil’s catch-all identity. Theirs was a party as genetically encoded in Ireland as Fionn Mac Cumhaill.
Not any more. Not since Haughey’s mansion and his yacht and his Charvet shirts, the Galway Tent and Ansbacher Man, the tribunals and the golden circle, and Pee Flynn whingeing about the cost of having two cars and three houses – “try it sometime” – and John O’Donoghue, as ceann comhairle, taking a €472 limo ride from one terminal to another at Heathrow airport. This was not the future Ireland Dev and Lemass risked their lives for in 1916.
The Republican Party, those bracketed words in Fianna Fáil’s name – the hint on the tin – have lost much of their meaning. It’s not easy being recidivist green nowadays in the era of unity-by-consent – and Martin’s aversion to forcing the reunification issue irks many Fianna Fáil members and supporters.
Incremental incursions into the policy of neutrality, another core Fianna Fáil principle, are making yet others think twice, but the rot had set into its republican brand long before he took over; in its psychology of equality. Look at Fianna Fáil: what you see are more white men than in any of the main parties.
No party can plausibly claim to be republican when it has a woman problem like Fianna Fáil’s. It was “a welcoming place for women – at least, initially”, David McCullagh writes in his Dev biography. One hundred years ago, there were six women on its first national executive, though their number halved a year later with Constance Markievicz’s death and the resignations of Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Dorothy Macardle over the oath. Worse was to come 80 years later when Fianna Fáil did not have even one woman TD after the 2011 election. Only seven of its current 48 TDs are women (14.6 per cent compared with the Dáil’s – still abject – 25.5 per cent). It’s 2026, for goodness sake.
Just one member of the senior Cabinet is a Fianna Fáil woman: Norma Foley, the Minister for Children. In contrast, the three main Opposition parties are all led by women. It is the visible difference between the last century and this century. Ahern’s tone of anti-inclusivity is mirrored by his party. There will be no pressure on it to fix its woman problem as long as media commentators ignore the absence of female contenders in speculation about the next and ninth leader.
O’Callaghan’s Lemass oration last weekend tacitly acknowledged that Fianna Fáil could no longer claim to be The Late Late Show of Irish politics with something for everyone in the audience. A fragmented landscape has left it searching for a niche to be filled. It’s a crowded market. His appeal on behalf of middle-income voters to “not over-tax success” evoked Leo Varadkar’s people who get up early.
Another 100 years? The Ireland that has moved on from a lot of white men will be unenthused as we watch Jack and Jim climb up the hill.
