You can never assess a taoiseach until they become a taoiseach

At about 1pm today, Simon Harris will come out of the front doors of Leinster House flanked by a cordon of close-protection gardaí and Oireachtas ushers. He will be cheered by a huge crowd of Fine Gael TDs and Senators, councillors and hundreds of supporters, from the party, and from Wicklow.

A State car will be waiting to take him on the 6km journey to the Phoenix Park where President Michael D Higgins will present him with his seal of office. It’s at that moment when he formally becomes Taoiseach.

Of course, the Dáil will already have voted through his nomination. All business in the Oireachtas is suspended today other than the appointment of the Taoiseach. TDs will gather in the chamber at 10.30am. Harris will be proposed by his deputy leader Heather Humphreys and seconded by Peter Burke, the Longford-Westmeath TD, who is expected to be promoted to the Cabinet.

It’s likely that Sinn Féin will nominate Mary Lou McDonald. Its complaints that Harris needs a specific electoral mandate was thin when the party paraded McDonald as the “real taoiseach” back in 2020, and rings very hollow now. It is the Dáil that elects the Taoiseach and that is the Constitutional prerogative. It’s likely that the majority will be 20 or more, thanks to the support of moderate independents. So that’s a mandate, a stronger one than many governments in the past half century.

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Harris will be the 16th holder of that Office since the foundation of the State a century ago. He will also be the youngest, at 37. I think he is also the first to become the third Taoiseach within a single Dáil term. He may be the holder of other – less stratospheric – records. He could become the politician who has served the shortest time as Taoiseach. John Bruton, Micheál Martin and Albert Reynolds were all in the office for roughly two-and-a-half years. If Harris is not elected as Taoiseach again, his term in office could be anything between six months and eleven months.

Harris is described as the TikTok Taoiseach. He will have to apply the rationale of that social media platform to his time in office. If you don’t catch somebody’s attention sufficiently within two to three seconds on TikTok, the person’s thumb will scroll onto the next fix. Politically, Harris is going to have to start commanding attention, and do it in the here and now.

Harris wheeled through all the terminology on immediacy in his leader’s speech at the Fine Gael Ard Fheis in Galway, as Pat Leahy wryly noted in a Tweet.

“A New Energy hit the delegates with a barrage of platitudes. ‘Hit the ground running, ‘match vision with action; ‘stand by our values’; ‘fix housing once and for all’; ‘we will move mountains’; ‘we will not stop until we finish the job’; he promised the adoring crowd.

He and his advisers know that he is going to have to try to make an immediate and lasting impact, or else his party could face a perilous slide in the upcoming cycle of elections.

No 15

The passing of the baton between departing, and incoming, taoisigh follows a well-drilled choreography that is laid down by the Constitution. Leo Varadkar, No 15, went to the Áras at 6pm last night to tender his resignation.

As we report in the main story this morning, Varadkar has left with no regrets while Harris is determined to inject new energy into a party that has been in Government for a long time now, 13 years and counting.

There will be fresh faces. And there will be new energy. You can be guaranteed of that with Harris. Slick communications and promises galore will also go with the territory. The big question, to quote the taunt of 1980s Democrat presidential hopeful Walter Mondale, is: “Where’s the beef?”

Harris’s speech at the Ard Fheis on Saturday evening lacked much political substance. Sure, he promised to build 250,000 houses in five years but there was no detail of how that very tall order could be accomplished. He talked about Fine Gael returning to core values such as law and order, enterprise, low taxes, supporting farming.

There was a bit of stealing Sinn Féin’s thunder with populist doubletalk on climate change. He told farmers: “Fine Gael will never let you down on climate action. We will sit down and work with you and work for you.”

As they say down the country, that’s running with the hare and chasing with the hound.

This is the fifth taoiseach that this reporter has seen at close quarters. One of the things that I have learned over that time is that you can never assess a taoiseach until they become a taoiseach. The position requires skills that will be untested until the person is in office. It’s the ability to lead and to know how to lead, to understand what needs to be done to deal with the huge challenges we face as a State in an uncertain world. As the Roman historian Tacitus cuttingly described the Emperor Galba: “He would have been considered a great Emperor, had he never ruled.”

We are not suggesting that will be Harris’s lot, merely saying it will be 2025 before the first proper assessment of his time as Taoiseach can be made.

The Front Runners

Of course, once Harris returns from the Áras, it will make for an afternoon of intrigue in Leinster House, as we gradually discover how accurate the predictions have been as to who has been chosen for preference.

There is no playbook for today as all other business is suspended. Pat Leahy has a good piece setting out what will happen in Leinster House.

The process for selecting the ministers is well established, and the afternoon’s coming and going are described by Pat here:

“Ministers are shuffled in and out of the new Taoiseach’s office, having been summoned by his staff to come across from Leinster House to Government Buildings via the so-called “bridge of sighs” – an elevated glass walkway between the two buildings. Most taoisigh say they hate this part of the job. There are never enough Cabinet positions to go around.”

Besides Peter Burke, the other three names being mentioned for one full department, and a so-called super junior are Hildegarde Naughton, Patrick O’Donovan, and Jennifer Carroll Mac Neill. Only one of them can become a full minister, and if Naughton is chosen, then one of the two others is likely to become chief whip.

The new Cabinet will then be presented to the Dáil and the composition of the new Government will then be debated. Once that occurs, the Cabinet will travel to the Áras to receive their seals of office. The first Cabinet meeting will be held there – it’s usually a very short one with no real decision-making on the agenda.

On Wednesday, the Government as a whole will approve the new junior ministers. Two or three new faces will emerge with much of the smart money on Neale Richmond as Minister of State for European Affairs.

Best Reads and Podcasts

A beautifully written piece by Fintan O’Toole, in which he details the experience of an Israeli writer, who recounted how his National Service was served as a prison guard in Gaza in the 1970s.

If you missed Jennifer Bray’s insightful piece into what makes Simon Harris tick (and even TikTok), which ran on Saturday, it’s definitely worth setting time aside to read it.

Hugh Linehan anchored the latest Inside Politics cogitating on the rapid changes of the past two weeks last Friday. Again it is great for setting out the context of what is happening right now.

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