INSIDE POLITICS:It would be a great pity if Richard Bruton felt unable to serve because of comments made in the heat of battle, writes STEPHEN COLLINS
THE OVERRIDING lesson of the past week for Fine Gael is that the party needs to ignore the prophets of doom who delight in predicting its destruction, and denigrating every leader it ever had.
Enda Kenny is never going to be a popular figure like Bertie Ahern, but that doesn’t mean he lacks the qualities required to be the next taoiseach. He proved the numerous obituarists of Fine Gael wrong after the 2002 meltdown – and he proved them wrong again during the past week.
What Fine Gael most requires now is a strong dose of self-belief to inure itself from the sneers of the media critics who have consistently treated Kenny with disdain.
What the week’s events demonstrated was that while he may lack charisma, Kenny has other qualities that are far more important in a potential leader of the country, particularly during a time of crisis. High public approval ratings are no guide to performance in the Taoiseach’s office, as Ahern’s tenure testifies.
Fine Gael undoubtedly has to contend with the fact that Kenny does not have the X factor that will wow the voters in the next election, but he has brought other things to the party.
He dragged it back from the brink of oblivion, revitalised the organisation, and put it in a position to field viable candidates in every Dáil constituency.
That hard work made Fine Gael the biggest party in the European and local elections last year – the first time it passed out Fianna Fáil in a national election.
While it is obviously a great advantage for a party to have a leader with star quality, it does not necessarily translate into seats in a Dáil election. Mary Harney was the most popular party leader in polls in the run-up to the 1997 election, with satisfaction ratings touching 70 per cent, but the campaign ended in disaster for the Progressive Democrats who won just four seats. Gerry Adams and Pat Rabbitte had higher satisfaction ratings than Enda Kenny in the final poll of the 2007 election, yet Sinn Féin ended up with four seats, Labour with 20 and Fine Gael with 51.
One of the big mistakes made by people inside and outside Fine Gael in their response to last week's Irish Timespoll was to assume that Labour's surge represented some kind of disaster for Kenny's party. Even if last week's poll ratings do hold until the next election campaign, the odds are that Fine Gael will end up with significantly more seats than Labour simply because Eamon Gilmore and his party have so much ground to make up.
Fine Gael currently has 51 Dáil seats, as against 20 for Labour. Whenever the election happens, Fine Gael is unlikely to lose seats to a declining Fianna Fáil and, on last week’s poll rating, will even make gains from its old rival. While it could lose some seats to a rampant Labour, it will hardly have less than 50, and could be closer to 60 seats in the next Dáil.
By contrast, Labour will go into the next election campaign with just 20 sitting TDs. While the party is poised to make spectacular gains, it is hard to see how it can treble its number of seats to emerge as a bigger party than Fine Gael unless there is a real earthquake in Irish politics.
One of the striking things about Leinster House during the week was the way in which professional politicians in all the parties were rooting for Kenny. For the most part, this was not cynical calculation that Kenny’s survival was better for them, but a conviction that changing leaders in response to shifting public opinion was a dangerous thing for professional politicians to do.
Most of Kenny’s internal opponents were actuated by the desire to do what was best for Fine Gael, and not simply trying to look after their own interests. However, they did display a dreadful naivety in the timing of their action and in the way they went about it.
They have given their political rivals and the media an array of weapons to throw at Fine Gael in the next election, not only through their mounting of the heave but by some of the comments they made during it. Still, events will move on, and the next election campaign is more likely to be dominated by public anger at Fianna Fáil than by Fine Gael’s gaffes.
One thing that will stand to Fine Gael is that the division in the party took place without an explosion of bitterness. There are certainly wounds that will have to be bound up in the aftermath of the heave, but the total acceptance of the result by the vanquished was very important for the party’s future.
The appointment of the new front bench will be the next big challenge for Kenny, and if he is wise he will display the quality of mercy to match the toughness and grace he showed under pressure. The inclusion of some of his defeated opponents would not only represent a display of generosity, but would show that he truly has the best interests of Fine Gael and the country at heart.
Kenny has made it clear he wants Richard Bruton to return to the front bench in some capacity, and it would be a dreadful pity if the former deputy leader felt unable to serve due to comments made in the heat of battle. Another key objective for Kenny is to restore some of the young talent to the front bench and he should ask people like Simon Coveney, Denis Naughten and Brian Hayes to return.
There has been a lot of speculation that he will ask former leader Michael Noonan to take a senior post like the finance portfolio, and that would make a lot of sense. The critical thing for Kenny to do in order to minimise the impact of the past week’s events is to show the public that Fine Gael can field its strongest possible team, regardless of their differences.