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Tough decision for Fine Gael
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Fine Gael TDs have a tough call to make over the next couple of days: Kenny or Bruton?
Since they turfed out Alan Dukes all those years ago, Fine Gael have enjoyed – some might say endured – the leadership of John Bruton, Noonan and Kenny. All decent men and honourable politicians, but each of whom failed in turn to deliver the prize of government. John Bruton was rescued by Dick Spring when Labour’s coalition with Fianna Fail fell asunder. But despite the general popularity of the Rainbow Coalition in opinion polls right up to the 1997 election and high personal ratings for Bruton’s performance as Taoiseach, the Rainbow was defeated. Michael Noonan’s 2002 election campaign ended in near disaster for his party. In 2007, Enda Kenny restored Fine Gael to its previous level of support, winning back most of the seats they had lost in 2002, plus a few extra. As in 1997, it was Labour’s failure to seal their side of the deal with the electorate that quashed Fine Gael’s prospects of government. In the 2009 local elections, Kenny made Fine Gael the largest party, in representative terms, in the State.
If Kenny’s role was to rebuild his party then he has executed it superbly. But his problems did not start with the Irish Times poll, or even with the slip in Fine Gael’s ratings in successive polls over the past year. His problem is that in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the history of this State he is the wrong man in the right place. Veering between a mixture of populist gestures and incoherent statements on economic issues, he has failed to inspire public confidence.
It’s said too that Fine Gael can’t abide the notion of slipping to second place behind the Labour Party. Whether or not that’s true, Fine Gael’s real problem is how far behind Labour they are in Dublin, the cockpit in which the fate of the parties will be decided in the next election. Fine Gael should be in a position to capture second or even third seats in several of the Dublin constituencies, but instead look more like ceding those electoral prizes to Labour. The difference between capturing those seats and some more in other urban centres could turn out to be the difference between achieving a majority status, or as the Irish Times poll portends, horror of horrors, coming in nationally behind Labour.
The big question is what will a change of leadership do for Fine Gael? The electorate don’t fancy parties that are divided against themselves, so a messy bloodbath won’t favour Fine Gael’s chances.
Would Richard Bruton be a better leader for the times we’re in? There’s no doubting his integrity, his grasp of the issues and his status as a conviction politician. It’s a reasonable bet that his leadership of the party might persuade much of the middle-class, inclined to be seduced by Labour at the moment, to switch their voting allegiance, especially in the capital. But it’s still only a bet at this stage.
Someone once said that while Fianna Fail were politicians pretending to be gentlemen, Fine Gael were gentlemen pretending to be politicians. Fianna Fail will be on the ropes in the next general election. The ultimate prize of an overall majority, or as near to it as makes no difference, lies within Fine Gael’s grasp for the first time in their history as a party. Whether they’re gentlemen or politicians first is up to them to decide.
Update: 5.pm RTE report that Enda Kenny has sacked Richard Bruton as Deputy Leader and Finance Spokesperson (formal announcement to follow!). This means that Bruton will not be attending the FG front bench meeting tomorrow and will have to wait to make his challenge until Thursday at the earliest.
It’s a sign of the times for Enda when his most cogent defenders are Noel Whelan and Martin Mansergh!
It looks like awful time for Bruton, taking all the attention from the confidence debate, but there’s probably never a good time for a heave.
That Bruton et al. have waited this long says a lot about the smallness of their balls. They waited until the ice-berg was approaching the hull before attempting to wrest the wheel from the captain. Late, but better late than never. Given the economic background and FF’s troubles, FG’s performance has been a car crash. I don’t care if Kenny won back the seats. If you cannot win back seats against a spent, sleazy, and incompetent government then you hardly deserve to be leader of anything. Besides rebuilding a party after devastation and preparing it for government are different things. Kenny had done his job and it was long time to find a replacement.
An aside: what is the best outcome for Labour? Kenny survives? : divided FG and weak leader?
Kenny is one of those politicians who was brought up on politics, learned a lot from his father and so on from an early age. He knows how his party works, what makes it tick, how to enthuse the various factions at ground level. But I think you’ve hit the nail on the head about the difference between rescuing a party from oblivion and preparing a party to take power. That requires a whole other set of skills, which the current leader of FG doesn’t have. Then there’s the thing about a time of national crisis. It exposes people’s limitations, sometimes cruelly.
I think Labour will hold on to their massive lead in Dublin if Kenny survives; but they would be at some risk of a drift back towards FG if Bruton takes over. If Kenny loses Bruton as the party Finance spokesperson, I think FG will suffer serious damage. Bruton has done a lot to keep FG’s credibility alive on the economic issues over the past several years and his expertise in this area is beyond question. It’s not just the leader who will be weakened, but the whole FG prospective government ‘team’.
And what must George Lee be thinking?
A few months patience and he’d be finance spokesman now with good prospects of Minister in at most 2 years.
Bruton is by far the most impressive of the FG front bench. Now that Enda has had no alternative but to sack him, it’s a clear either-or choice for the party. The best that can be hoped for now is that it is all over as quickly as possible. The grass roots are desperate for the party to tear into FF on the banking reports, but so long as the leadership issue is unresolved the real issues are being eclipsed.
If Fine Gael fails to back Richard Bruton’s struggle to make the party electable, they will prove again, maybe for the last time, that the party is not interested in representing voters, not interested in governing, not genuinely capable of bringing Ireland past the one-party stage of our political development. A party of hobbyists and public unrepresentatives.
If Kenny loses Bruton as the party Finance spokesperson, I think FG will suffer serious damage. Bruton has done a lot to keep FG’s credibility alive on the economic issues over the past several years and his expertise in this area is beyond question.
Bruton, it should be noted, was in favor of the FF bank guarantee. Given that (if Labour have any idea of the gift in their laps), “damage” would be minimal indeed.
p.s. I have, by the by, a question for Veronica here, which I’d rather like her to answer (and I know from past emails that I’m not the only one!).
Diarmuid Ferriter made an interesting point on the VB show last night – Garret FitzGerald, he said , had taken over leadership of Fine Gael when it was on the floor, having dropped to 43 seats in the 1997 election which delivered a 20 seat majority to Fianna Fail under Jack Lynch. Like Enda Kenny in 2002, FitzGerald set about an effective revitalisation of the party organisation. Simultaneously, he was required to demonstrate to the broader public that he was viable Taoiseach material. The difference between FitzGerald and Kenny, Ferriter suggested, was that FitzGerald succeeded admirably in both of these tasks whereas Enda Kenny, unfortunately, has only succeeded in one of them.
I remember the 80′s. Fitzgerald was such a nice chap, he could never tell Labour to lump it and made the cabinet endure 12 hour meetings in an effort to win consensus. All compromise did was see the national debt spiral out of control.
If Bruton wins is that what we’re looking at? A nice guy who won’t force through the cuts required?
At least Kenny showed some balls today.
Queenie, I smell a Fianna Failer.
Interesting that you hoist the blame for the debt on FG and Labour (both parties i dislike btw).
Maybe you should remember that the Fianna Failers were the ones who ran up current account deficit world records in the late 70s. World record mind you.
So look first to the conduct of your own incompetents before noting the conduct of others.
And,
Queenie hasn’t declared any political affiliation. It makes for better, and more effective, discussion to focus on the argument that’s being made rather than the person who’s making it. In fact, the point being made by Queenie isn’t too far removed from Leo Varadkar’s quip about Garret Fitzgerald doubling the national debt, a remark he now admits he regrets and concedes was a ‘mistake’.
It’s simplistic nonsense. During Ireland’s prolonged economic malaise in the 1980s borrowing to stay afloat was an option because there were few other countries in the same predicament as ourselves – most of the rest of the western world was doing pretty nicely. Yes, the FF splurge of the late 1970s was at the root of our particular crisis, but Fianna Fail in opposition throughout the ’80s ignored their own culpability in generating the depression in the first place and displayed a shameless populist negativity towards any policy advanced by the government of the day that sought to get to grips with it. (As an aside, I think that’s where my own horror of such politics originates.)
Economists regularly point out that had the FG/Labour coalition taken action from around 1985, the depression might not have lasted as long as it did and Ireland would not have reached the brink of bankruptcy in 1987. The question is whether it was politically possible for that government to take the action that economists were pressing them to take, when they were being routinely castigated from the other side by the opposition? And by the media too. It would have been political suicide for the Labour Party to embrace the level of cuts to services that were needed and there was no certainty either that they would work – even if the public were prepared to wear them. What may have been fiscally prudent was not necessarily publicly acceptable. Even after 1987, the Fianna Fail government could not have pursued their policy to tackle the crisis without the support of Fine Gael’s Tallaght Strategy.
One of the key differences between the 1980s and now is that the capacity to borrow forever and a day and try and spend your way out of the crisis is simply not available; there are too many other countries, including some of the world’s biggest economies, that are running up deficits as well and looking for funding to keep going. If we’ve learned anything from the 1980s experience too, it’s that it’s better in the long run to face up to the difficulties and take action to remedy them in the short run.
That’s why I’m more convinced by Richard Bruton’s argument that Kenny’s leadership of FG has run its course than by Enda Kenny’s counterarguments about his undeniable success in rebuilding his party or personal concepts of leadership and loyalty. The underlying reality is that the problems we have now are going to be with us for quite some time to come and Ireland’s economic survival remains a fragile proposition. I don’t think anyone would envy the choice that the FG parliamentary party have to make this week. But I think they deserve some respect for trying to make it even if their timing and means of going about it don’t accord with populist theories of simply telling the electorate what they want to hear, with no substance to back any of it up, and deciding that “ah sure we’ll worry about the solutions once we’re in power for five years”. It’s that sort of politics that has brought us to where we are.
I’ve been reading this guide and it seems pretty straight forward. Seems like a sweet way of backing up all your Wii games to a hard drive so that you don’t have to keep putting the discs in. The laser in my drive has been failing so it seems like a pretty good option.
How to Back Up and Play Your Wii Games from an External Hard Drive
Has anyone actually tried this? Is there any chance of breaking my Wii forever? For those who have already tried it, did you get banned from playing online?