Of all the Fine Gael retirements ahead of the next general election, Fergus O’Dowd’s is perhaps the most understandable: He is 75 years of age. At that age, a man probably shouldn’t be seeking re-election to the Dáil. Though one might joke that they should perhaps be preparing to run for their second term in the White House, as either the Republican or Democratic nominee.
Nevertheless, his retirement simply adds to a stampede towards the exit by members of his party. He joins Frances Fitzgerald, Deirdre Clune, Richard Bruton, Charlie Flanagan, and David Stanton amongst the veteran contingent, and they are joined, more concerningly for Fine Gael, by a group of younger TDs including Joe McHugh, John Paul Phelan and Brendan Griffin who have also decided to leave politics. At the moment, the party is on course to lose a huge swathe of both it’s experienced old hands, and its new young talent, before a vote has even been cast.
One of the stories that’s not getting a lot of attention from political correspondents at the moment is that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in particular are desperately struggling to find candidates ahead of next year’s local and EU elections. One informed observer, involved in selection processes over the past three decades, says he has never seen it as bad: “Nobody wants to run”, was his simple verdict. “And those that do want to run are the last people you’d want on a ballot paper”.
One area in which both parties are particularly struggling is the recruitment of female candidates. Granted anonymity to speak about it, a Fianna Fáil councillor told Gript that the pressure to select women because of state funding requirements was “absolutely lowering the quality of candidates we’re putting forward. We’re selecting absolute no-hopers in places just because we need women”.
The reasons for this are readily apparent, politicians say: It’s a terrible job.
“I don’t think there’s a worse job than this, to be honest” the same FF councillor said. “You do it really as a vocation or a hobby more than a career. It’s endless work for relatively low wages. It suits people with a business where being known in the community is a big advantage – like undertakers”.
“When you do get a talented candidate, the party immediately sees them as a future TD, so local Government rarely gets quality people sticking around. But increasingly, we just don’t get quality people full stop”.
Politicians blame increased public scrutiny of politicians by the public. But Government parties in particular are suffering because of a sense, the Fine Gael activist said, that there’s just no longer any energy behind them.
“We’ve been in Government over a decade. You don’t get people with exciting new ideas thinking Fine Gael is the place to be. At this stage we’re down to the people and families who’d vote for Fine Gael regardless – the true believers. And they tend to make bad candidates”.
At parliamentary party level, there is much frustration in Fine Gael with both the state of the party under the present leadership, and the powerlessness of being a backbench TD. At least one backbencher amongst those retiring is understood to have repeatedly said in recent months that being a Government backbencher was absolutely useless because they have no influence whatever over Government policy. One of them said, some months ago, to this reporter, that they would have more influence over Government “if they had as many twitter followers as you do”. The meaning being that Government, in this person’s view, listens more to social media than to its own backbenchers.
There is also a shared frustration in Fine Gael that the party is simply not listening to the public: On immigration, law and order, hate speech, and other so-called “woke issues”, the same TD described their party as being “absolutely miles away from common sense”. “We had the centre ground under Enda”, they said “but now we’re indistinguishable from the Soc Dems”. Separately, they said that “it’s very frustrating to sit there agreeing with the criticisms but having to be a good party soldier”.
There is a fear in Fine Gael that the retirements might exacerbate already anticipated losses, both at council and national level. “As things stand, we’re on course to be destroyed. Don’t worry about what the polls say. The hostility is at an unprecedented level”, the activist involved in selections said.