Well, it’s a good job somebody is standing up for farmers in rural Ireland – they need all the help they can get in resisting the various initiatives from…… Leo Varadkar’s Government:
“I am absolutely sure that I have the confidence of the vast majority of my parliamentary party and I have done for the past six years.”
Varadkar rejects reports he is ‘losing his grip’ on Fine Gael. pic.twitter.com/V02YEaaaOu
— NewstalkFM (@NewstalkFM) June 12, 2023
We could snark about that line all day – it came on the same day that this publication reported that Irish beef imports from abroad are at a record high, at a time when the Government wants to slaughter 200,000 cattle. But the interesting thing is not what he said. The interesting thing is the question of why he said it.
The Government, patently, is not “standing up for farmers”. Perhaps Varadkar was trying to say that Fine Gael in Government is fighting the good fight against the Greens – a sort of “if it wasn’t for us they’d be slaughtering 700,000 cattle” argument. But the image of Fine Gael’s 35 TDs fighting a valiant rearguard action against the horde of 12 Green TDs doesn’t really make sense, unless you assume that each Green TD has the talent and capacity of three Fine Gaelers.
Nevertheless, I suspect that is the case he is trying to make, and it’s the case that poor feckless Fine Gael canvassers will be sent out to make in rural Ireland ahead of the next polling day. Something along the lines of “if it wasn’t for us it would have been much worse, trust us”.
The problem with this argument is twofold: First, Fine Gael are at least as much to blame for the sword hanging over the necks of Irish cattle as the Greens are. The party under Varadkar’s leadership would have sought by his own admission to introduce a climate bill that would have required a cattle cull regardless of whether the Greens were part of his Government. It was in the last Fine Gael manifesto, a document that had Varadkar’s face on the front of it.
Second, it fits into a pattern of Fine Gael’s persistent failure to deliver to its supporters the things that Fine Gael might traditionally have been expected to deliver: It is a law and order party that is presiding over a dramatic increase in anti-social behaviour. It is a low tax party that has presided over persistent tax increases. It is a party that was first elected on a promise of a bonfire of the quangos, which has instead presided over the unprecedented growth of the NGO sector. It is a party that campaigns on delivering centrist competence and public sector reform which instead presides over growing waiting lists and historic public sector inefficiency.
All told, Mr. Varadkar has a credibility problem.
None of this means that Fine Gael is without support in pockets of Irish society. It still does well, I suspect, with barristers and solicitors, since the legal sector remains entirely unreformed and highly profitable. It does well also with the comfortable and professional middle classes who already have homes and manageable mortgages and want little from the state except stability and a sense that the country is being run better than the UK, in a moral, even if not a practical, sense.
But that is passive, rather than active, support. Many voters in the latter group could be drawn away from Fine Gael by almost anyone other than Sinn Fein, who remain unpalatable primarily on moral and respectability grounds for the kinds of people who like to think the country is a model of Euro-normality and decency. A competent Labour party could probably eat into that support relatively quickly – Mr. Varadkar’s blessing is that no competent Labour Party exists.
And yet I suspect this statement may deepen Mr. Varadkar’s problems in his own ranks. The outburst of dissatisfaction with his leadership this weekend – which prompted his statement above – did not come from nowhere. Fine Gael TDs who actually talk to voters know their discontent on issues like immigration and the cattle cull, and precisely because Fine Gael is supposed to be the party for people who cares about these issues, it may suffer more than any other as a result of them.
One such TD said recently to a friend (not someone who relates inaccuracies) that “the problem with Leo is that he’s all talk. He’ll convince you he’s on your side, but then he’ll go away and sell the farm for tuppence and call it a good deal”.
And that is, I think, a fair summation of the problem. When Leo says he’s for farmers, or that he’s for tax cuts, or that he’s for enforcing deportation orders, or that he’s for getting men out of women’s prisons, you’d be a fool to believe him. And everyone, even his own back benchers, knows it.