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FG’s internal battles rage on
25 July 2010 By Pat Leahy, Political Editor
The past week has demonstrated not just that the divisions in Fine Gael following the failed leadership challenge to Enda Kenny remain, but that the problems which led to that episode also still remain.
Two public interventions - from TDs Brian Hayes and Lucinda Creighton -and one damaging revelation about the party’s fundraising demonstrated both the uncertainty that has crept into the party in recent months, and the hostility that endures between the leadership and some of its critics.
Yes, despite some recent wobbles the party’s standing in the opinion polls is at record highs -though with Fianna Fáil at record lows, Fine Gael could hardly avoid adding some support. Yes, the party remains on track to lead the next government. But its leadership now faces some complex and challenging problems. Last week showed that fixing them will not be easy.
Enda Kenny demonstrated character and a cool temperament in his response to the leadership challenge last month.
He also insisted in its aftermath that he bore no ill-will towards his challengers and that he would select his new front bench with a view to using the best talents available to him.
Then, despite including some of the Richard Bruton supporters in an enlarged front bench, he omitted Brian Hayes, the former education spokesman and effectively the campaign manager of the Bruton heave.
Hayes was previously a stout defender of the leader in public and private, but when forced to make a choice between Bruton and Kenny, he backed the loser.
In the real world of politics there are consequences to such an act and Hayes can hardly have been surprised at his banishment.
But his exclusion makes a nonsense of Kenny’s claim to be burying the hatchet and selecting the best talents for his front bench. Hayes’s abilities put him ahead of most of the new front bench.
Hayes’s comments did not proclaim explicit disloyalty to Kenny, and he did not repeat the damaging assessments of the leader which circulated freely during the leadership contest. But the message was clear enough, all the same.
‘‘The jury is out," Hayes said. ‘‘He’s got to prove himself."
Kenny’s supporters could be forgiven for assuming that a Fine Gael jury had returned its verdict on Kenny’s leadership.
But Hayes was referring to the perception of Kenny among the voters, not among the closed world of his party.
Hayes was saying that the issues which gave rise to the challenge haven’t gone away. He was saying: we’ll be watching the polls.
In this sense, it’s clear that for some within the party -including several TDs who now have no prospect of personal advancement under Kenny, in or out of government -the leadership issue may not be closed. Several TDs who spoke to The Sunday Business Post in recent weeks have echoed this sentiment.
Creighton’s intervention was encompassed in a speech dealing with political values, but in some ways it was more damaging.
‘‘That means there can be no room in Fine Gael for the cute hoor politics," she told the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal. ‘‘These are the politics which have defined and tainted Irish public life like an incurable cancer.
We cannot be satisfied with low standards in high places.
Fine Gael in government must be much more than simply ‘Fianna Fáil Light’."
Within the party, this is seen to be as much an attack on Phil Hogan, the Carlow-Kilkenny TD who saved Kenny’s leadership with an aggressive campaign, as it is on Kenny.
The body language between Creighton and Hogan, who both attended the summer school, was pretty unmissably hostile.
But Creighton’s attack wasn’t just personal.
She seized on the revelation last weekend that Fine Gael had been tapping property developers, including some whose loans have transferred to Nama, at a golf classic in the K-Club for contributions to the party.
Despite the large amounts of public money (some €13.6 million last year) that is now channelled into the political system, and the fact that all parties claim high levels of volunteerism, all parties and all politicians continue to fundraise from private sources.
There are some requirements for disclosure, though these can be at least partly circumvented.
The optics of the K Club golf round, though, are especially awful and the story has the potential to damage Fine Gael profoundly.
Why? Despite what the party claims, Fine Gael has not in reality promised to present a radically different policy platform to Fianna Fáil.
Its appeal under Kenny has been essentially one of managerial superiority to Fianna Fáil, rather than profound political or philosophical difference.
At the last election, the party’s pitch was essentially that it would do much the same as Fianna Fáil, while allowing the voters to eject a government that had been, for most of its tenure, pretty unpopular.
The Fine Gael leadership had run their own party well, they could do the same for the country. Fine Gael would be better managers than Fianna Fáil. And cleaner too.
No tribunals.
No Galway tents.
Bashing around a posh golf course with property developers in return for bags of money is behaviour that the public associates with Fianna Fáil.
More particularly, they associate it with the cosy relationship between party and developers which led, in some part, to the inflation and bursting of the property bubble.
Last week’s revelations enable Fine Gael’s opponents to cast it as business as usual, just with a different name over the door.
‘‘We cannot, on the one hand, condemn Fianna Fáil for entertaining developers in the Galway tent, while on the other hand extend the biscuit tin for contributions from high-profile developers who are beholden to Nama.
The Irish people expect more from Fine Gael; they demand more, and they are right," said Creighton.
Come the next general election, there will be hundreds of thousands of ‘‘change voters’’ encompassing many of the 70 per cent plus of the electorate who won’t vote for Fianna Fáil. Fine Gael just took a big step in alienating many of them.
Kenny’s response to the story and the Creighton speech compounded the damage and underlined why so many of his TDs expressed no confidence in him so recently.
He hadn’t read Creighton’s speech, so he wouldn’t comment.
And what about the K Club story?
He hadn’t read that either, he said. In fact, he hadn’t read the Sunday Independent for three years. Perhaps this is actually true.
But nobody believed it. Kenny didn’t actually claim that he was unaware of the story; he just contrived a silly way of avoiding a question that he would have to answer sooner or later.
This is the sort of thing that puts the fear of God into Fine Gael TDs, who are terrified of damaging implosions during the white heat of an election campaign.
It’s a failing that Kenny exhibits from time to time -h is tendency to waffle when confronted with an unexpected question.
Sometimes, he’s quite artful. Other times it’s harmless -’ ‘I can hear the din of political battle over the hills of Donegal already’’ was one response to a question at MacGill.
What?
And sometimes it suggests that he is so desperate for office that he will do anything and say anything to achieve it.
Last Thursday evening, again at the summer school, he assured a member of the audience that he would be prepared to look at the possibility of extending the Western Rail Corridor to Donegal.
This might go down well with some audiences -t he country is full of areas which claim the Celtic tiger passed them by -but it worries voters who want a more profound political change. Fine Gael’s worry -loudly expressed by the dissidents -is that these voters are looking to Labour.
The tug-of-love between Fine Gael and Labour for these voters will be one of the most important dynamics of the next election.
The extraordinary public antipathy towards Fianna Fáil may yet fade, but it shows no sign of doing so at this point.
So differentiating himself and his party from Fianna Fáil now becomes a key challenge for Kenny. Swanking around the K Club in a polo shirt is not the way to go about that.
The rise of Labour has presented Kenny and Fine Gael with a challenge they have never before had to contend with.
The party has spent seven decades fighting Fianna Fáil. Now, with the old enemy on the ropes, a new foe arises. It will be a difficult, and a different, contest.
And one which a party divided will find all the harder to fight.
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