Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin got what he wanted: Jim Gavin will be the party’s presidential candidate. But the circumstances around Gavin’s victory may raise questions for the party.
The former Dublin Gaelic football manager comfortably beat Billy Kelleher in the parliamentary party ballot, but not by the margin Martin would have hoped. Gavin’s 41-29 win may seem decisive on paper, but inside the Fianna Fáil party it will be read as evidence of an undercurrent of unease with the leader’s strategy, and as a signal that Kelleher retains significant goodwill within Fianna Fáil’s ranks.
For weeks it was assumed that Martin’s endorsement would essentially guarantee Gavin an easy ride. The Taoiseach leaned in heavily on the race, mobilising cabinet ministers and trusted allies on Gavin’s behalf. He had the backing of all Fianna Fáil Cabinet Ministers, which clearly didn’t hurt.
As former party leader Bertie Ahern observed last week: “In all my time in Fianna Fáil, I’ve never seen a period where the leadership really lose out in these things.”
And so naturally, that level of political capital was supposed to deliver a commanding mandate.
Instead, the race was a decent bit closer than it theoretically should have been.
There is bruising here because Martin expended authority in corralling support for an outsider candidate – someone who has never run for election, held office, or been part of Fianna Fáil’s internal machinery. For many in the parliamentary party, this was a step too far.
Many in Fianna Fáil are clearly still proud of their party name and have a tribal, chauvinistic belief in it: as then-Senator Erin McGreehan allegedly said at a parliamentary party meeting in 2022:
So it stands to reason that the leadership seeking a total outsider candidate would ruffle a few feathers.
There were many names that were floated by parliamentary party members in recent weeks as to who should be the nominee, such as Eamon Ó Cúiv, or Bertie Ahern, or indeed, Billy Kelleher. There was very little organic appetite for dropping in a random sports manager. Many within the party’s rank and file backbenchers evidently wanted to keep the candidate “in-house” rather than bringing in extraneous nonpolitical figures. Which is understandable and what one would expect.
Many of the party’s TDs and Senators also objected to the long delay in deciding whether or not Fianna Fáil would even run a candidate at all, privately expressing dismay at how the process was approached by the leadership. This will have generated some frustrations and led to a level of exasperation as well.
And moreover, the closer-than-expected outcome undermines Gavin’s ability to claim he carries the full weight of Fianna Fáil into the presidential campaign.
Say what you will about Fine Gael’s policy of refusing to let their councillors nominate independent candidates, but their argument is one of internal unity: according to party leader Simon Harris, Fine Gael councillors are the ones themselves who wanted to back their candidate Heather Humphreys to the hilt, at the expense of all other candidates. Some councillors have since attested to this, saying that the entire party is behind Humphreys lock, stock and barrel and they wouldn’t want to nominate anyone else anyway.
Humphreys’ main opponent, MEP Sean Kelly, even dropped out of the race, leaving the field completely clear for her.
Now that’s what you call party unity – whether you like it or not, nobody can say she doesn’t have the wholehearted backing of Fine Gael, if nothing else.
By contrast, Jim Gavin is now going forward with a divided Fianna Fáil behind him, many of whom did not, in fact, support him.
In political circles, Billy Kelleher was not expected to get anywhere near 30 votes. That he did reflects two realities: his personal likability within Fianna Fáil, and the unease some feel about the optics of parachuting in a non-political figure at the behest of the leader. Evidently, and perhaps unsurprisingly, many in the party apparently preferred a Cork-based party stalwart with many years of services under his belt, albeit one with a limited national profile, rather than a completely untested, unknown quantity.
Gavin will now enter the race without the kind of emphatic internal endorsement that presidential candidates typically seek. A candidate hand-picked by the leadership is meant to embody party unity. This time, that was not present.
For Martin, the episode appears to expose the limits of his influence. He got his way, but not without burning through capital he might wish he had saved for other battles. For Fianna Fáil, it raises a deeper strategic question of whether the party afford to appear divided, and can a candidate who only narrowly secured his own side’s backing project strength to the wider electorate.
The nomination was won, but Martin’s image as leader may have paid a price in delivering it.