For many years I was the Fianna Fáil TD and minister the party wheeled out when they needed someone to hold the line on the media. I have spent most of my political career defending the party and its leaders. In good times, and bad.
I have lived through several leadership crises and been an active player in a few. I have seen Fianna Fáil at its strongest in the late 1990s and at its weakest in 2011. But never have I seen the party in a deeper state of despair than it is today.
It has been badly damaged by recent events. This is not just about the fuel protests it goes wider and deeper. Despite warnings, ministers failed to grasp the looming agri-fuel price problems. Rather than act, they monitored the situation.
Not for the first time the senior leadership had taken its eye off the ball. I hear every week on the doors and in my messages that this government has become too detached. Much of this ire is directly at the Taoiseach and Tánaiste.
Never have I seen as many emails and messages as I have received in recent days. Not even at the depths of the 2010-2011 crisis. These are from people I know. The names are familiar. These are people I have assisted over the years. From people who have voted for me in the past and even canvassed for me.
The core message is the same. They’ll never vote for me again because I’m representing the wrong party. That is not some social media campaign. This is our own base talking back to us.
The job of a TD is not to be permanently going out to explain the Government’s problems to people. It is about explaining the people’s problems to the Government. And delivering action. People don’t expect miracles. They get that not every problem can be solved. But they do expect to be listened to and acknowledged.
Yet too often we sound like civil servants defending a system instead of standing up for the people who elected us. This is the point that three of my youngest parliamentary colleagues: James O’Connor, Albert Dolan, and Ryan O’Meara were making last week.
They are right. The government has become beholden to process and allergic to humanity. That perception is killing us politically.
This problem has been a long time coming. Read any of my columns here and you will see that I have been flagging Fianna Fáil’s real identity problem for a few years. In government, alongside Fine Gael, it has become harder for voters to see what is distinctly Fianna Fáil.
We sound like an echo of our government partner, not a party with its own voice and instincts. Meanwhile, Fine Gael never misses an opportunity to put its partisan interests ahead of government cohesion.
Time and again Fine Gael figures take public shots at Fianna Fáil to score a day’s headlines or shore up their own base. We saw this last week with the briefing against Jim O’Callaghan. What demoralises our members most is not just the point scoring; it is the fact that the party leader is slow to defend his colleagues. Preferring reflexively to avoid any rows with Fine Gael.
When people say they can no longer tell the difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, they are not being cynical. They are telling us that we have failed to explain who we are. Failed to stand up for ourselves and our values.
I spoke about this problem in last week’s column when I argued for a more open, cross-party discussion on reforming the triple lock, not scrapping it. Abandoning our support for the United Nations is a Fine Gael doctrine, not a Fianna Fáil one.
It’s also the case with our commitment to Irish unity. Fianna Fáil’s core constitutional republican goal of achieving a united Ireland is rarely mentioned by senior party figures these days. The shared Ireland unit is a great initiative. When we look back at Micheál Martin’s time as Taoiseach, it will be rightly seen as his finest hour.
So, what happens now? First, we stop having discussions and we move to action. We address the members and activists who are drifting away. We grasp why younger voters see us as irrelevant to them. We were told this would happen post Jim Gavin. It hasn’t. The situation is now worse than it was.
In any organisation that is malfunctioning, the leadership has to take responsibility, and act. Party unity is no excuse for a leadership to be beyond question. Admitting mistakes and calling out failures is not “disunity.”
The real disloyalty would be to watch Fianna Fáil decline in silence. I am far from persuaded that this reality has been grasped by the appropriate people.
