How the veteran Fianna Fáil leader dragged his party into the 21st century and won his place as taoiseach
The soon-to-be-taoiseach has dragged his party – even when they were plotting against him – into the 21st century and to electoral successonce raged at the New York Times for failing to give him, a fellow New Yorker, a break. For years, Fianna Fáilers in Cork groused that the Examiner was too keen to trumpet the political achievements of the city’s Fine Gael merchant princes. No longer. Never mind the princes now, boy.
There is little need here to rehearse the calamities that befell the Cowen government – the crash, the bank guarantee, the panic – and then, the denials, the bailout, the chaotic last days of the administration. The new Fine Gael and Labour government, with its 50-plus seat super majority, dwarfed Fianna Fáil. But Labour’s decision to enter government proved to be Fianna Fáil’s first stroke of luck in a long time. It allowed Martin to be the leader of the opposition – and that mattered in terms of parliamentary profile and public prominence.
The first public sign that Fianna Fáil might not, after all, be destined for the scrapheap of history was the 2014 local and European elections. Martin’s campaign was low-key. But he managed to surf a wave of resentment against the Fine Gael-Labour coalition – implementing policies that had largely been both necessitated and agreed by the previous Fianna Fáil government – and win the largest share of the vote in the local elections, and the highest number of councillors.
By the 2016 general election, just five years after it been angrily ejected from office, Fianna Fáil was nearly back in the game. Martin exploited the unpopularity of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition – which had fixed the public finances but at a fearful cost – with a deft touch and won 44 seats, just six fewer than Fine Gael. Enda Kenny made approaches about a possible “grand coalition” but Martin was having none of it.
Without the numbers for a coalition themselves, the two old rivals enticed the Greens into power with the promise of a step change in climate action, which they mostly kept. It was Martin, the arch-pragmatist, at work, making a virtue of necessity. The election strategy this time round was to be the “adult in the room” – sensible Uncle Micheál. Convinced that Simon Harris’s new energy would run out of steam, Fianna Fáil backroomers conceived a plan that contrasted their man’s “substance” and experience with his relatively callow government frenemy on one side, and on the other, facing Sinn Féin, to be the defender of middle Ireland’s success, its economic model, its gradualist progress.
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