Politics

Weather changes but Simon Harris looking to election on horizon

Fine Gael needs to provide details of proposed new State-run early education and childcare service to give it credibility

Taoiseach Simon Harris speaking to Minister for Justice Helen McEntee and Minister for Rural and Community Development Heather Humphreys at Fine Gael's event in Tullamore on Wednesday. Photograph: Alan Betson
Taoiseach Simon Harris speaking to Minister for Justice Helen McEntee and Minister for Rural and Community Development Heather Humphreys at Fine Gael's event in Tullamore on Wednesday. Photograph: Alan Betson
Pat Leahy's picture
Pat Leahy
Wed Sept 11 2024 - 19:46

Taoiseach Simon Harris had not long started his remarks to the media outside the Tullamore Court Hotel on Wednesday when the dark clouds gathered and a downpour began. This forced the Taoiseach, his handlers, the reporters and camera crews scuttled inside to the ballroom to start over.

By the time he was halfway through, typically enough, the sun was blazing again outside.

Harris was peppered with questions on the issues of the day, on which he is seldom reluctant to comment (a tendency which reporters seldom object to). The Pat Finucane inquiry, the Apple tax case, the push to make religious orders contribute to the cost of compensating sexual abuse victims, the inadequacy (as he sees it) of the Sinn Féin housing proposals, and the timing of the election, inevitably, were all on the agenda.

In another clear nod to Fine Gael’s policy plans for the election, Harris took questions on plans for a new State-run early education and childcare service. It now seems certain, having suggested the idea in an Irish Times interview last month, that he intends to make this a centrepiece of the Fine Gael election offering.

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For now, we have yet to get past the stage of ‘wouldn’t-this-be-a-great-idea’. But if fleshed out and implemented, it will be a multibillion euro commitment, and a potential game-changer in early-years education. That will take the hard policy work of detailed planning, crunching the numbers and finding the money. That’s the only thing that gives a policy credibility. Otherwise it’s just a vague election promise.

Selling that message will be the Fine Gael ministers – their black Audis ostentatiously arranged outside the hotel front door – and TDs and newly selected candidates who gathered in Tullamore.

Addressing the faithful in the Faithful County at the outset, Harris told them “Fine Gael is a party that always puts people before politics”. Observers of a certain vintage will remember that slogan “People before Politics” was the one used by a young Bertie Ahern in his first election as leader of his party.

Five years later, running for re-election, Ahern used another slogan, a version of which is used by every incumbent government party that is running for re-election: “a lot done, more to do”.

It means you stand on your record, but not just on your record: you have plans for the future. You are not complacent; you know that elections are more about the future than the past.

Whether voters judge Harris’s plans for the future to be credible and deliverable will determine whether he gets a second term as Taoiseach.