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Killian Foley-Walsh is a writer, and the former President of Young Fine Gael
“Look my lad, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now” says the man, presenting a cage whence hangeth the head of a parrot that: “was no more; had ceased to be; had expired and gone to see its Maker; a late parrot; a stiff; bereft of life; resting in peace [having] run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible; an ex-parrot”
“Nah, that’s not dead, it’s pining for the fjords! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue; beautiful plumage!”
I am a lifelong fan of Monty Python who believes that there is—in its canon—a sketch to parody every possible occurrence and eventuality in life, and when it comes to Leo Varadkar and his career as Leader of Fine Gael, “The plumage don’t enter into it”.
When he was elected Party leader in 2017, Leo did so with my full support. I was the National Secretary of Young Fine Gael at the time, and had broken ranks with my colleagues to declare my support for him, much to the chagrin of the Coveney supporters who would probably have formed the majority of Young Fine Gael at that time, and of those nobly dedicated to keeping the peace between us and them.
My reasons for endorsing Leo were very straightforward. I believed what I was told about him by people whose opinions I trusted back then: that he was electoral dynamite; that he meant what he said about Fine Gael being a “warm house” for social conservatives; that he would empower the membership by dislodging HQ’s ancient, stultifying mandarins and apparatchiks; and that he was a young, modern, policy prodigy and Minister Midas who turned every department he touched (including Angolan Health) into gold, who was preferred by the Parliamentary Party that knew both leadership hopefuls the best, and who would finally stand up for the people who pay for everything.
These bright feathers, and Leo’s more obsessed devotees, combined to generate an almost Messianic cult of personality that still endures for some, and that I bought into.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea yada yada yada, but I derive a weird, almost Stockholm Syndrome-style solace from the fact that, for all of his faults, Leo was the best option available. At the time of the leadership contest, his opponent Coveney had attracted support from nefarious corners of the party. The Kate O’Connell formerly known as a TD was amongst the first out of the traps, alleging that Leo’s supporters were only in it for the favours they might get from him: “choirboys” as she put it. I wasn’t the only one whose ears pricked up at what sounded like an old, anti-gay dogwhistle, especially when it was followed by a speech by former Party-grandee Dr James Reilly in Cavan, in which he claimed that Coveney “Understands what it’s like to rear a young family.” These insults, in contradictory tandem with the 1970’s, social-democratic, “Fair Society” mumbo-jumbo that Coveney had chosen to resurrect (black and white and all), were all a bit much for me, so I joined the Varadkarite minority of the grassroots membership who believed that Leo was the future.
A few short months after his election in June 2017, Ireland’s Margaret Thatcher—who had impressed my end of the party with his “Welfare cheats cheat us all” campaign just 2 months earlier—had a sterling opportunity to prove all of his supporters right in the form of Budget 2018. Times were good, more people were getting up early in the morning than ever before, and we all hoped that we had somebody in the driving seat who understood that you shouldn’t have to give him and his pals 52% of your earnings in return for the privilege of doing so and damn all else. Suffice to say we were disappointed when budgetary goodies were distributed in a 2:1 split between increased spending and tax cuts, with even the malignant, “emergency” Universal Social Charge mutating and sputtering on into another year, in spite of Leo’s January 2016 promise to abolish it!
Fast forward 12 months, and my disillusioned friends and I are standing at the back of the hall ahead of the Leader’s Speech at the Fine Gael Ard Fheis in the Citywest Hotel in Dublin in November 2018. We are battered in the wake of an abortion referendum campaign in which 2 Fine Gael ministers and 4 other Fine Gael Oireachtas members publicly and proudly called for a No vote, and in which Young Fine Gael with me as President had declared neutrality, but in which Leo’s commitment to facilitating all views within Old Fine Gael manifested in the form of “factual” leaflets calling for a change to the law, with only Kerry’s Paul Coghlan managing to extract literature with a contrary message from the Party’s printers, like blood from a turnip.
We had long since learned how to put Fine Gael’s ideological betrayals behind us, so were hoping for a speech that could unify us behind the Party’s reputation for economic good-sense and prudence; the things that had made most of us join in the halcyon days of 2010/2011 in the first place, and we were not disappointed. The Taoiseach entered and made an unforgivably unforgettable promise to raise the point of entry of the higher rate of tax to €50,000 over the following 5 years. It was a brilliant proposal with the potential to turbocharge young people’s spending and saving power in Ireland as our careers progressed and other countries lured us with more attractive jobs, tax regimes, and qualities of life.
3 years later in November 2021, and the point of entry has moved from €33,800 to €35,300. It was always too good to be true.
There is every possibility that my assessment up to now is skewed, biased, and overly subjective; determining Leo’s success based on my policy priorities. That’s how every voter makes their decision, though, and it’s why the real proof of Leo is in the polling and electoral pudding.
Unfortunately, on that front, things don’t look any better.
Leo’s leadership has either coincided with or precipitated a remarkable waning of Fine Gael’s fortunes, depending on your perspective. Poll after poll has shown the party stagnating in the low-20’s while our traditional opponents in Fianna Fáil have sunk into a near-single digit fight-to-the-death with the Green Party, Labour, and even Aontú in some areas. The Irregulars’ demise has enabled some of Leo’s sycophants to loudly boast that Fine Gael is still in the “Big 2” parties at the top of the ladder, but without acknowledging that the “Big 1” enjoys nearly twice our support.
In the General Election of 2020, Leo oversaw the orderly withdrawal of Fine Gael deputies from the Dáil when an already middling 50 seats was reduced to an absolutely paltry 35, placing the Party in 3rd place behind both Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin for the first time in history. Lots of us hoped that such a devastating humiliation might rouse the Party from the insipid stupor we’ve been in for so long, but it did not deter Leo from plumbing deeper and deeper depths in his quest to retain his Ministerial car, including using Fine Gael to finally make Míchéal Martin the Taoiseach. The whole thing is such a sorry, self-serving shambles that the only real question is why Sinn Féin is taking so long to breach the 40% ceiling they’ve come up against; the mind boggles at the heights an actually effective opposition could reach.
Crowning all, though, is that in the 5 Dáil by-elections since he became leader, Leo has presided over 5 straight losses, representing the transfer of 2 previously safe Fine Gael seats to Sinn Féin and the Labour Party in convenient annual instalments. This trend reached a deafening crescendo with the Dublin Bay South by-election from the summer just gone, sparked by the resignation one of the many former right-hand men Leo boxed and shelved after his coronation: Eoghan Murphy. Ivana Bacik’s victory on Labour’s behalf means that Fine Gael is without a seat in the leafiest, most liberal constituency in the country, where 2 out of 4 TDs were Fine Gaelers (in name if nothing else) when Leo took charge 4 long years ago.
The only point of light comes in the form of the Local Elections in 2019 in which Fine Gael grew from 235 council seats to 255. The European Elections of the same year saw the party hold its own, though Leo’s unjustified ejection of Phil Hogan from a weighty European Commission portfolio in 2020 makes sure he’s left his fistprint on that sphere as well.
Proving less “electoral dynamite” and more “electoral wet powder,” Leo is out of saving graces, but those mere political concerns arguably pale into insignificance in comparison to the most extant issue of his leadership: his persistent effort to undermine Fine Gael’s oldest, bloodiest, and most treasured reputation—that of being the party of Law and Order.
Earned after WT Cosgrave, Fine Gael, and its predecessors built Ireland after Independence and the Civil War, and after Liam Cosgrave and Fine Gael stood between Ireland and the IRA in the 70’s, I do not believe that Fine Gael’s Law and Order reputation has been tarnished by the way in which so many parts of Dublin have become no-go areas after dark on Leo’s governments’ watches. I’m not talking about the syringe my dog found stuck into the bark of a tree in our local Dublin 8 park the other morning and what that says about modern Ireland either, or even about Leo’s extraordinary use of the law to exercise essentially limitless control over all of our lives for the last year and a half.
No. I’m talking about the fact that the Leader of Fine Gael is of interest to the Gardaí, and has been for the better part of 2 years now.
The circumstances of that interest and the facts surrounding the alleged leak of documents from Cabinet are complicated, not fully known, and don’t really matter in-and-of-themselves in my opinion. Leo is entitled to due process and we all hope that the criminal investigation into his professional conduct as a Cabinet member exonerates him. Nevertheless, headlines detailing the way in which that investigation will drag into 2022 are as deeply, deeply unhelpful to Fine Gael amongst its middle-class base as headlines detailing the various arrests of Gerry Adams were to Sinn Féin in the same key demographic, and cannot but be contributing to the real-time evaporation that we’re witnessing of the only political force that seems remotely capable of withstanding ascendant Sinn Féin and all of its crusty, microparty tag-alongs.
Leo is the latest Fine Gael leader to become wreathed in talk of plum EU jobs and lucrative, Clinton-style speaking circuits. Certainly, if his immediate predecessor is anything to go by, the boards of the country’s multinationals are crying out for ex-Taoisigh and their rolodexes, so whenever the time does come to exit stage left, Leo will be just fine. He has also imposed an expiry date on his political career of his 50th birthday, so the 42 year-old knows the value of departing gracefully on one’s own terms.
In that sense, the question turns to who can replace him, and that’s not an easy one to answer. Unfortunately, Fine Gael is not a hotbed of talent these days, and my preference is for someone practically capable of and egotistically comfortable with leading the Party through a long and overdue period of reconstruction in Opposition after more than a decade of bruising government. They should be rural to help the Party to recalibrate itself away from D4 wokesters who we have tried and failed to court in favour of its country base, and they should have demonstrated political and ministerial ability.
Now that I think about it, it should be Kildare’s Minister Martin Heydon.
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