On a slate grey day in April, in the corridors of Agriculture House on Kildare Street in Dublin, some staff were in tears.
The Department of Agriculture was reeling from the shock news that Independent junior minister Michael Healy-Rae had just resigned from his role in Government over its handling of the fuel protests.
Healy-Rae had announced the dramatic news on the floor of the Dáil, before any of his colleagues in the department – including Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon – had a chance to talk him down.
Healy-Rae loved being a minister, and was quite flagrant about his belief that he was serving first and foremost in the Department of Kerry.
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Although Government colleagues had known that the dynastic politician had been heavily lobbied by constituents who were furious over what they saw as a tone-deaf Government, there hadn’t been a full appreciation in the Department of Agriculture of the pressure Healy-Rae was under to convince his brother Danny to vote confidence in the Government or lose his job.
It is understood that, in the days leading up to the motion of confidence, the Department of the Taoiseach had made it clear to Michael that the deal that allowed him to be a minister of state was dependent on the Government being able to rely on the votes of the two brothers.
A source close to Taoiseach Micheál Martin confirmed on Wednesday that this had been the deal, “and they all accept that”.
But The Irish Times also understands there was a very different view in the Department of Agriculture. There was an understanding that being sacked would have been the “worst of all worlds” for Michael, who would have seen being fired as an existential threat to his reputation.
Among his former colleagues in the department there is a view that the Government would not have followed through and fired him. One person said that, had there been time, Michael would have been assured there was “no way” he would lose his job over Danny’s stance.
Some of those who worked closely with Micheal said they felt the whole affair was a real political shame. Michael need not and should not have resigned, they said.
The different views between the Department of the Taoiseach and the Department of Agriculture on whether Michael should have lost his job are probably moot.
As Michael’s explosive interview on Radio Kerry this week showed, having one Healy-Rae facing pressure in Government while another was in Opposition would have been a political impossibility.
It had been an open secret in the Coalition for a long time that the brothers were not that close, with one Minister saying “we would have known they didn’t get on”.
But the Healy-Raes always respected the family dynasty too much to ever let fractures show in public.
On the day of the resignation, Michael posed triumphantly for protesters outside the gates of Leinster House with a fist in the air, a gesture of a man who had sided with the people. He told the media he had been moved to resign by the sight of grown men crying over the costs of fuel.
A forlorn sounding Danny told RTÉ Radio 1 on the same day that he “fairly well” knew that Michael would resign, and flatly denied that any one brother had exerted pressure on the other, saying: “No one of us tried to make the other fella do anything.”
All of that has been exposed as masterful spin from Ireland’s most powerful political clan by Michael’s highly unusual decision to make public the split among the patriarchs of the family.
Local newspaper reports had drawn attention to the fact that Michael and Danny’s children – all immersed in politics too – seemed to have fallen out with each other.
There’s now a Kingdom to be divided. If tensions deepen, it’s possible Michael’s son Jackie, who lost a job as a special adviser after his father resigned, could run for the Dáil alongside his father – instead of Danny – come the next general election.
But Danny’s children Maura and Johnny, already successful local politicians, could also harbour Dáil ambitions by 2029.
For the first time ever, the 30-year dynasty could be formally divided.
