Last weekend was big for celebrity birthdays. Taoiseach Micheál Martin turned 66 on Sunday, sharing the date with Madonna (68).
When you think about it, there are many parallels between the two ageing but still sprightly performers. Both were stars early. Micheál in Ógra Fianna Fáil and then winning a seat aged just 28; Madonna with Like a Virgin. Both are notoriously healthy eaters. Madonna (People magazine tells me) follows a strict macrobiotic diet of brown rice, rolled oats, wholemeal pasta and bread, vegetables and fruit, beans, seeds and nuts, along with fish and meat “every now and then”. Micheál, who patrols the Dáil restaurant keeping an eye on people’s diets, would love this. She should invite him over for dinner.
Both are flourishing in the late phase of their careers. Madonna has won 11 nominations for the MTV Music Awards for her recent album, while Micheál triumphed in the 2024 election to lead his party into Government for the second time and is now leading Ireland’s EU presidency, which he loves.
True, there has been the odd flop. Jim Gavin turned out to be a disastrous presidential candidate last year. Madonna’s 2003 anti-war album, American Life, ran foul of the patriotic mood in the US after 9/11.
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Both had groundbreaking mid-career success – Madonna with Vogue, Micheál in the Department of Education – before entering their 60s on top of their respective games. Micheál as Uachtarán Fhianna Fáil, Madonna as the Undisputed Queen of Pop.
Both had low-key family celebrations last weekend – Madonna in Corfu, Micheál in Courtmacsherry. Neither is likely to need the free travel just yet.
I don’t know how Madonna is fixed for the autumn, but it is already clear that the Taoiseach and the Government he leads will face immediate political difficulties on the cost of fuel. As the continuing conflict in the Gulf pushes up prices at the pumps, the rumblings of hauliers, farmers and backbenchers are becoming louder. To nobody’s surprise, with the price of petrol and diesel due to increase by nine and 10 cent on Tuesday week, September 1st, Coalition leaders have decided to recall the Dáil to nix the excise increases.
Brains were racked all week to establish if there was a way of doing this without recalling the Dáil. There wasn’t. The overriding priority for the Government was not to be responsible for shoving fuel prices up again. That trumped everything.
But neither is it possible to shield consumers from every price rise. Even as things stand, the fuel supports have cost the exchequer a billion euro this year.
Sure, Martin’s Government is fortunate in that it has a billion euro it can spend like this if it has to and now a few hundred million more, at a minimum. But that means – unless the Government is going to tear up its own fiscal rules again and that would be deeply reckless – that it’s a billion euro-plus that ministers can’t spend on other things: healthcare, education, public sector pay rises, pension increases, tax cuts, whatever.
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These choices will be brought into sharp focus this September as ministers wrestle over Budget 2027, due in the first week of October. As Jack Chambers struggles to control the pressure for runaway public expenditure increases (the solution for everything in Irish politics is to spend more money, as you know), I expect it will be the most fractious budget process in years.
The Government will want at all costs to avoid a repeat of April’s fuel protests, especially as EU presidency meetings restart in early September when Defence and Foreign Affairs Ministers gather in Wicklow. The rest of the month is marked by regular events in Dublin.
There is a belief among many in Government that a repeated shutdown of the country cannot be allowed, that protesters gleefully boasting that they had the country “by the balls” again would be intolerable. At the same time there is a view that the best way of avoiding this is to keep fuel costs at a bearable level – and €2 per litre seems the most likely benchmark for that. But depending on what happens to the global oil price, that could get ever more expensive.
All this is before we anticipate the inevitable difficulties caused by a looming fodder crisis for farmers (that long hot summer doesn’t come without costs), agreeing a new public sector pay deal or not agreeing it and facing strikes, passing the triple lock legislation and the inevitable row about neutrality, and whatever else the autumn throws up.
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So yes, I think Micheál’s autumn will be more difficult than Madonna’s, who will be (since you ask) promoting her new album, Confessions II.
There is another significant difference between Madonna and Micheál. Madonna’s followers want her to go on forever; Micheál’s, alas, do not.
His TDs expect that when the European presidency concludes at the end of the year, arrangements for the succession will begin. Some of them are likely to demand it. As noted hereabouts before, the argument made for this is not necessarily that his replacement would be better than him, but that it is past time for a change, because, well, it just is.
Previously, he has always outmanoeuvred the plotters. But that won’t last forever. And he probably doesn’t want it to. Instead, the question of the Fianna Fáil succession will loom over the party and the Government in the autumn.
Jim O’Callaghan – Taylor Swift to Micheál’s Madonna – is in pole position. But he is not guaranteed to inherit the crown. Dara Calleary is popular and more experienced. Darragh O’Brien is a canny and able campaigner. But the race is now on and that will become obvious.
Still no word, though, on a Madonna tour. Maybe she’ll go to Cork?
