In the purge and the purification of Fianna Fáil’s parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday night, the rare became wonderful. A sincerely emotional and humble Micheál Martin said sorry.
For those watching carefully in the packed parliamentary room, the realisation dawned that the Fianna Fáil leader’s apology wasn’t the unusual thing. The mistake that demanded it was unusual.
For all the tumult and change that has marked Martin’s 14 years at the helm of the party, even his detractors will admit that he has rarely called it wrong.
The next morning, TDs were feeling a cathartic relief. The night before had reminded some of the famous bloodletting at the 2021 think-in at the Slieve Russell Hotel in Co Cavan, where a bruised Fianna Fáil let rip at the leadership. What some in the parliamentary party had wanted this week was just to feel heard, not necessarily be heeded.
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For a long time, TDs and Senators have been smarting over what they feel is Martin pulling down the political shutters on them, running an overly centralised Fianna Fáil that relies too much on the advice of too few. Ministers who feel more sanguine about Martin’s leadership are quick to point out that such claims appear over the top when compared with the party’s infamous Haughey era. But it has become an overwhelming criticism both inside and outside the party.
“I think there are times when he relies too much on his advisers or on party people, instead of going with his own gut instinct,” former minister Mary Hanafin said. Hanafin is very warm and complimentary of Martin’s skills, but questions if he has surrounded himself with staff “who are with him so long they might not be as tuned in to issues as some of the people who are actually out on the ground all the time”.
The Taoiseach relies on a close and trusted circle which includes long-time advisers Pat McParland and the influential Deirdre Gillane. He can be judicious about who he takes advice from. Loyalists point out that it’s to Martin’s credit that he has kept the same staff around him for so long; McParland has been with him since 2011, Gillane even longer than that. However, others argue that depending on a small group of people has its perils. Ultimately, those in the know argue that the loyalty of the likes of Gillane shouldn’t be mistaken for deference. There are many times when Martin has heated discussions with some of his closest advisers over issues.
On a Thursday night, if he’s down in Cork, the Taoiseach enjoys a few pints and the counsel of a group of close friends. Martin has known these people for more than 40 years, so the distinction is important: they are friends first and political allies second.
The group, which includes local councillor Terry Shannon, is made up of people Martin met in Ógra Fianna Fáil in the early 1980s. Now, they attend the weddings of each other’s children. They can be frank with him and show little docility towards his title as Taoiseach. (“This an obituary, is it?” Shannon says, in his dry Cork drawl, when called for comment.) According to Shannon, Martin has “the best political antennae in the country”. But he strongly resists claims that Martin acts unilaterally.
“If he makes a bo***x of something, he’ll be told,” Shannon says. “Whether he listens or not is another thing. But this notion that he’s ‘out of touch’ is nonsense.”
Martin also benefits from the advice of his wife Mary Martin, the unofficial matriarch of modern Fianna Fáil. Adored within the party for her devotion as a wife and a mother, Mary Martin is also highly regarded for having a natural political instinct that can’t be taught or trained. She has no problem challenging her husband when she feels it is necessary.
His children, who are fast becoming the next generation of a Cork political dynasty, put Martin under pressure if and when they think he has gotten it wrong. And back when he first became a minister, Martin was afforded no airs and graces by his late mother Eileen, who was known to friends and family as Lana. Martin would be dispatched to resolve even the smallest matter for neighbours. “I’m a minister!” he would complain. “Go up to Annie,” Lana would insist, “she’s looking for you.”
Those who were there in 2011 feel that a depleted Fianna Fáil effectively did cede more power to its leader, who was trying to pull the once-mighty national movement back from the brink of political extinction. In recent years, a sense has grown that the weekly parliamentary party meetings have started to feel unlike the frank and challenging affairs that they once were. Those meetings used to feel more important and more pivotal to the direction of the party.
[ Micheál Martin finds himself in a familiar story but with an uncertain endingOpens in new window ]
Stalwarts think the change is because the so-called “money votes” have increased. A smaller party in a coalition government has a larger proportion of people with senior and junior minister jobs. Mumblings from the backbenches surmise that those who have taken jobs have been effectively neutered and can’t criticise the leadership.
Some question if this is entirely Martin’s fault. If power has been removed from TDs and Senators, “the parliamentary party doesn’t have sufficient cojones to stand up for itself and take it back,” one figure says.
Questions were asked of Martin this week, by members of his own party, following Jim Gavin’s failed presidential campaign. The added sense of urgency in those questions was likely because his critics knew they may not get such a chance again.
Within Fianna Fáil, the only real “mistake” colleagues can point to Martin making is the confidence-and-supply agreement with Fine Gael, with debate still raging about whether it lasted too long. But his supporters present this as evidence of his leadership skills.
Any sober assessment would have to say that the confidence-and-supply agreement was a political mistake: it damaged Fianna Fáil’s ability to distinguish itself from its main political rivals. Martin was thinking of the outcome rather than the politics. Even though it was unpopular, Martin was swayed by the sense of duty to make Ireland look calm and unified in the wake of Brexit.
There have been times in his tenure when he has gone in a different direction to his own party. Martin’s 2018 Dáil speech backing the repeal of the Eighth Amendment was an extraordinary takedown of the constitutional ban on abortion. He sounded more like a barrister making a bulletproof case against the Eighth Amendment, with his own party being the jury he was seeking to persuade. “He went one way, the party went another, but the country went with him,” one supporter says.
“When a lot of politicians look to the next election, Micheál looks into the next generation. And that might suit a lot of people, because their attention span might not be as long as his,” Shannon says.
Martin used to be derided as a minister for taking too long and commissioning a notorious volume of consultations before making a decision. As a new Fianna Fáil leader, in 2011, his cautious tendencies were seen as a necessary antithesis to the “McCreevynomics” which had come before. But like many politicians, his strength is sometimes his weakness.
His habit of being “cautious in advance”, born of a deep aversion to strategic leaks or what he sees as people “playing politics”, is what colleagues see as the reason for him closely guarding Gavin’s name for so long during the summer. This directly led to the agitation that consumed Fianna Fáil when Fine Gael’s former candidate Mairead McGuinness pulled out, and the party started to get antsy about running its own candidate.
The events of recent weeks seem paradoxical for a politician whose strength has always been listening. During his apparently charmed tenure in the Department of Education, Martin seemed to have the usually difficult unions enchanted. When he left the role, The Irish Times wrote that “never has a Minister for Education had such praise ringing in his ears upon leaving the Department”.
In the mire of late 2010, when Fianna Fáil was polling at a catastrophic 15 per cent, Martin made a striking appearance on RTÉ’s The Frontline to talk about the future of the party. At the time, Fianna Fáil despised the programme, decried within the party as “Liveline with pictures”, which it felt was overly critical.
But Martin pitched Fianna Fáil as a party that would act in the national interest, even giving its blessing to Fine Gael’s plans to rebuild the economy.
In his memoir, former colleague and erstwhile rival Leo Varadkar said he was taken by how long Martin spent talking to the community in the wake of the devastating Creeslough explosion.
Martin is known as a raconteur, a mimic and a very empathetic person. In his inner circle, it has been noted that the public are usually disarmed when they meet him in public.
In Douglas, he knows everyone by name. “Even the babies,” a local says. But while he used to have a stronger connection with some of the long-term TDs, asking after wives and children by name, some question if he has managed to nurture the same connection with the latest intake.
Martin has been in national politics for longer than his deputy leader Jack Chambers has been alive. But he wears his age of 65 well, and it is rare to talk to someone close to him who doesn’t mention his strict diet. When he first became a Cabinet minister, he was derisively nicknamed “Steve Silvermint”, the animated “cool, clean hero” mascot for the mints.
Cutting the ribbons on new housing estates, the Taoiseach is liable to point residents to local greenways as a great way to get their “20,000, 30,000 steps a day”. The lore in Fianna Fáil is that his Garda detail, often several decades Martin’s junior, would breathlessly curse the Taoiseach as they trailed behind him on his breakneck walks into Cork City. Mary Hanafin passed a remark about when Martin started to eat both the indulgent yolk rather than just the austere white of eggs. “Christ, Micheál”, an exasperated friend once told him, “what’ll you ever die of?”
The first front page questioning his leadership appeared in June 2011. His energy and resilience over the last 14 years can’t really be disputed, even by his least generous critics. “I’ve never seen him yawn,” one colleague said. This is probably why Martin often responds to questions about whether he will lead the party into the next election with the kind of astonishment that few think could be feigned. Whether or not Martin will be the Fianna Fáil leader for a possible 2029 general election, we don’t know. What we do know is that he sincerely believes he will.
In 2014, Fianna Fáil stalwart Willie O’Dea looked around the parliamentary party for a future leader and saw no “Messiah”. “When I look in the mirror I don’t see him either,” he said at the time. Today, most of the party faithful feel Jim O’Callaghan is the only obvious successor to Martin, but even the Justice Minister’s most loyal supporters concede that his ascent would be premature if it happened now.
O’Callaghan is thriving in the Department of Justice and seems in no rush to move on from a role that he’s enjoying. At his budget press conference this week, a relaxed O’Callaghan told reporters that he would like to be leader “at some stage in the future” but it was not “an immediate concern”. He said he had no issue with Martin’s leadership and thought he was doing a good job.
It may not have escaped the notice of Martin that there was something familiar about the elegance of O’Callaghan’s comments. In December 2010, Martin said that he was interested in being leader “if the situation arose” but that he was committed to supporting then taoiseach Brian Cowen. It would only take a month for Martin to resign as foreign affairs minister, effectively forcing Cowen’s resignation, and take over.
During Albert Reynolds’s abortive heave against Charlie Haughey in November, 1991, Martin as a backbencher went on the radio and warned that if Haughey was unceremoniously ditched, then Fianna Fáil would become just another political party, rather than the national movement that it was. “Forty per cent” is an emotionally charged statistic for those who regret that Fianna Fáil’s era of national dominance is behind it. It is today what a young Martin feared it would become over 30 years ago – “just” a political party.
It was in this new, modern, 20-per-cent space that Martin considered the merits of running former Dublin GAA manager Jim Gavin for president under the Fianna Fáil banner. Martin wanted someone who would tap into the national zeitgeist, who would represent something bigger and broader than a political party, and who would have a foot in every part of the country through his involvement with the GAA. As usual, he was thinking of the outcome. He was not thinking of the politics.
The hows and whys of this will be interrogated at length under the process his party colleagues have now demanded in the wake of the political disaster. But those closest to him don’t believe the event will influence Martin’s judgment, or indeed his political lifeline. Fianna Fáil’s most famous survivor will continue, for now.
