Seán Kelly has gathered his 12 apostles but, alas, there will be no biblical miracle for the Fine Gael MEP. Kelly’s campaign looks like it is over before it has even had a chance to begin.
Fine Gael’s selection process is ridiculous. It was drawn up at a time when the party was in the clover with a parliamentary party of more than 100 between TDs, senators and MEPs.
The nomination threshold of 20 members of the parliamentary party, 25 councillors, and five members of the executive council seemed reasonable at the time.
But when your parliamentary party is reduced by almost half – it now has 59 members – it becomes a very different proposition.
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Twenty members of the parliamentary party is a big ask these days, except for the favourite.
The bar for getting your name on the ballot for a Fine Gael leadership contest in the party is much easier. You need the backing of 10 per cent of the parliamentary party, which is roughly six names.
But political party rules have sometimes worked against candidates in strange ways. In 2016, following an abysmal election, Labour saw its number of TDs reduced from 37 (in 2011) to a meagre seven. The Tipperary TD Alan Kelly wanted to succeed Joan Burton as leader but failed to get enough TDs to nominate him. The number required? It was two, and that included his own vote. So not a single one of the other six deputies was prepared to back him.
If he had succeeded, the leadership would have been decided by the 4,000 members of the party. But opening up a party’s democratic systems can be perilous. In Britain, the ease of becoming a member of Labour led to a mass sign-up by left-wing activists resulting in the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Eamon Ryan guided the Greens to a record number of seats in the Dáil in 2020 but barely survived the one-member, one-vote leadership contest weeks later, partly because their party’s rules allowed its members in the North to vote, and they tended to be more radical than their southern colleagues.
The last two leadership contests in Fine Gael have been processions. They have turned on the successful tactic of the favourite getting as many supporters to pledge as quickly as possible.
Most of the undecideds or fence-sitters see the direction the wind is blowing and cast their votes accordingly. There’s no point in betting on a horse who is already an also-ran, especially if you have front-bench aspirations.
We have seen it this week with a pile-on of support for Heather Humphreys. It means the remaining 13 days of the nomination process will be a dead rubber.
There has long been wrangling about how internal votes in parties should be conducted. Back then, the total electorate was no wider than the parliamentary parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The big rows – especially during the heaves against Charles Haughey – were about whether or not there should be a secret ballot or a roll call.
In this century, both big parties have moved towards wider decision-making with the use of college voting systems. But they are nods rather than embraces of democracy. Fine Gael’s votes are weighted heavily in favour of the parliamentary party, which has 65 per cent of the vote, with ordinary members representing 25 per cent and councillors getting a mere 10 per cent of the say.
It means that if you have the strong backing of the parliamentary party, it is all done and dusted.
Under Fianna Fáil’s Corú (its rules, last updated in 2016) the distribution is a little more equitable. The college for party members is 45 per cent; TDs account for 40 per cent of the vote; while the voting strength of senators, MEPs, councillors and members of the party’s árd chomhairle is 15 per cent.
As it happens, this new form of contest in Fianna Fáil has yet to be used, so no verdict can be given on it. It was introduced after Micheál Martin became leader in 2011 and he looks like he’s not going anywhere soon – despite Kilkenny TD Peter Cleere pronouncing this week he would make a great president.
I won’t even begin to try to explain Sinn Féin’s voting system for the leader’s position. It incorporates cumainn, cúigí, the árd chomhairle, and, perhaps, anyone who has shaken hands with Mary Lou McDonald over the past decade. You could spend less time solving the 1934 murder mystery Cain’s Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers, renowned as one of the hardest puzzles of all time.
Heather Humphreys is on a victory parade, as happened with Simon Harris last year, when he succeeded Leo Varadkar.
While Varadkar was never going to be caught by Simon Coveney in 2017, at least there was a hustings and it did the party no harm. Coveney put in a spirited campaign and his challenge raised some doubts about Varadkar, who learned quickly that he had to be on his toes. Harris might have benefited from a similar road test in the spring of 2024.
It’s not quite a truth universally acknowledged but leadership hustings are generally a very good exercise. Parties should prefer contests over coronations.
