Pilgrim Pat's path to the park:Pat Cox went missing this week. The man who has replaced David Norris as the bookies' favourite for the presidency has been avoiding the limelight and any discussion of whether he intends to seek a nomination.
However, the former president of the European Parliament hardly joined Fine Gael for the good of his health, so he must be keen to run for the Áras in the party colours. His membership is due to be ratified by the FG national executive on Tuesday.
President of Ireland? That’s a big question to ponder over the next three days, even for Cox, who boasts a glittering CV. This might explain why the former TD and MEP has taken to the great outdoors: Pilgrim Pat is walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
While journalists were making strenuous efforts to contact him, a contemplative Cox was wending his way along a stretch of the Camino.
Not surprisingly, efforts to contact him yesterday were unsuccessful. So we turned to the journalist Peter Murtagh (of this parish), who recently published a book with his 18-year-old daughter, Natasha, on their 900km walk on the pilgrim route across northern Spain, ending at the tomb of St James.
“Walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela gives you time to think and contemplate great decisions in your life, and perhaps a blister or two,” Murtagh tells us. “About 20 per cent of pilgrims make the journey for religious purposes and the rest are there for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes people just want to step back from life for a while and take some time out. Others walk the route to honour loved ones who have died.
“Lots of people do it when they hit a big moment in their life, like when they have reached a milestone birthday or, maybe, lost a job.”
Or might be contemplating a new one?
Pilgrim Pat will return home with a clear head as he prepares to add yet another party membership to his collection. He has been an independent, a member of Fianna Fáil and a member of the Progressive Democrats. If his Fine Gael application is successful, Pat will join the St Luke’s branch in his home constituency of Cork North Central.
Gay Mitchell is also after the nomination, while his fellow MEP Mairéad McGuinness is currently canvassing FG county councillors around the country for support, as they have a say in who gets the nod. She was in Kilkenny on Thursday night, charming the councillors.
Pilgrim Pat’s Fine Gael way to the Áras may not be as smooth as this week’s exertions.
100 days in government: a lot done, more to do
A week may be a long time in politics, but the Government is discovering that 100 days in politics is no time at all. Fine Gael gave a lot of hostages to fortune by promising to implement 28 key objectives within that time if it came to power.
“There isn’t any time to waste,” said Enda Kenny before the election. “That’s why Fine Gael, if elected to government, will hit the ground running by implementing a comprehensive strategy for the first 100 days.”
It was an impressive to-do list. And the relevant boxes will be ticked, or otherwise, this Friday.
But have Kenny and his Ministers been holding some of their work in reserve? A little more than a week ago, John Perry, the Minister of State for Small Business at the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, caused some amusement when he hung up during a live radio interview because he thought he was being pressed unfairly over a commitment he gave in relation to cancer services in Sligo. At the height of his high dudgeon, Perry told the Ocean FM presenter Niall Delaney that “it will all be clarified on June 17th, and you’ll be invited to the press conference”.
Then we had the Minister for Justice and Equality, Alan Shatter, promising on Wednesday that he would present details of a referendum on judges’ pay to the Cabinet “within two weeks”.
We hear that other departments, too, are planning press conferences to make announcements. “We’re looking at June 16th,” a senior adviser from one of the spending ministries tells us. We feel a much-done-more-to-do moment coming on . . .
MEANWHILE, ON TUESDAY, the Taoiseach entertained 200 public servants in the Italian Room of Government Buildings, a venue at one time (when we still believed we had a few bob) favoured by taoisigh and ministers for Christmas drinks receptions. This pleasant gathering was to thank them for their sterling efforts during the visits of Queen Elizabeth and President Obama.
Enda is still clearly in Mr Motivator mode. At one point he asked his guests to look out the window at the fountain in the front courtyard.
“Now,” said the Taoiseach. “All you public servants are looking in the same direction. I want you all to keep doing that!”
At least he didn’t tell them to “go out through the wall”.
E = Marie Louise 2
The Maiden Bumper continues in the Seanad, as new members line up to make their first speeches to the house.
Two big hitters were out of the stalls this week.
Senator Martin McAleese showed he has been paying attention to all those speeches made by his wife over the past 14 years, as he spoke about the Seanad’s “potential to be much more than an enclosed space where Senators talk to each other, but rather an open space where we draw into official public discourse those who, in these times of trial, are sustaining family and community life . . . instituting the fresh thinking which can help us solve our many problems and evolve models of best practice.”
Not to mention “the transformative power of dialogue and ideas”.
McAleese’s short speech was e-mailed to political reporters by a PR company, Young Communications. That’s a first.
Next up was Senator Marie Louise O’Donnell, who did not hide her light under a bushel. “I will serve this house with clarity of purpose, clarity of vision and clarity of action. And also with an articulate and melodic voice,” she declared. (Maybe she might team up with the Leader of the House, Maurice Cummins, who is a lovely singer and a martyr to the light opera.)
But it didn’t stop there.
O’Donnell will try to bring two “distinct and distinctive qualities” to the house: imagination and energy. “Qualities which were good enough for Einstein, so they are going to be good enough for me.”
Trevor-lasting cabbage for the President
Mary McAleese is a woman up to any task put to her, and she confessed to a new role when visiting the Bloom garden festival last weekend: “I’m a nosy neighbour from across the wall.”
The President confessed that she had come to the event partly to spy on how the walled gardens of the Office of Public Works (OPW) were coming along. Áras an Uachtaráin also has a walled garden, and there’s fierce competition between the two sites. The garden in the Áras, she said, would be receiving its formal organic certificate in the next few weeks, and she was looking forward to that. Anything the OPW can do . . .
More presidential secrets spilled out as she toured the site, sometimes hand-in-hand with her husband, Senator Martin McAleese. The Senator, she said, isn’t a great gardener. “If it grows, he wants to mow it.”
Later, in conversation with the former horticulture minister, Trevor Sargent, she said the spuds in her garden were suffering badly from lack of water. He gave her a consolation present of an organic “everlasting cabbage” (above), which does not head and whose outer leaves can be plucked as required.
Wouldn’t you miss the Greens?
There will be no jokes about everlasting cabbages in this column.
The party holds its annual convention this weekend in Dublin, where Swedish MP Agneta Börjesson will outline how the Green Party in Sweden fought back from wipeout after its first period in government, and Eamon Ryan will make his inaugural presentation as leader.
Richard to Eoghan: 'Hear hear, old boy'
It’s hard to beat the power of the old school tie. Political and ideological differences melt away before it like the snows of last December. What else can explain the enthusiastic response of the Dáil’s ageing enfant terrible, Richard Boyd Barrett to a speech on Dáil reform by young Eoghan Murphy of Fine Gael (below). Impassioned cries of “hear hear” from the Trotskyite TD punctuated Murphy’s eloquent plea that the Dáil should be not just a place of good speeches but a place of great debate.
Maybe it was because the Fine Gael TD for Dublin South East had generously commended the motion put down for debate by the technical group, of which Boyd Barrett is a member.
Another possible explanation is that Boyd Barrett and Murphy are past pupils of one of Dublin’s poshest schools: St Michael’s on Ailesbury Road. It seems the old boys’ network can bridge the gap between the followers of Karl Marx and Michael Collins any time.
Fine Gael and the party of Bertie lite
The prolific Kevin Rafter has been busy rewriting his book on Fine Gael, a task he began in March following the launch of his book on Democratic Left. The revised edition is at the printers now and should be in the shops in a few weeks.
He has details on the Fine Gael election plan that was prepared for Enda Kenny last autumn by Mark Mortell, Frank Flannery and Big Phil Hogan. It should make interesting reading for Eamon Gilmore and his Labour colleagues.
One section of Enda’s plan advises on how the party should “define Labour” in the forthcoming election campaign, furnishing Fine Gaelers with a selection of rather catty descriptions of their future political bedfellows for public consumption:
* The soundbite party.
* The hard-left party.
* The party of high taxes.
* The party of Bertie lite.
“Bertie lite” appears to have been a reference to Labour leader Eamon Gilmore, who is now Enda’s Tánaiste and VBF.
Rafter’s first FG opus was published in 2009 and featured a front cover photograph of a very happy Enda Kenny squiring an equally beaming deputy George Lee into Leinster House on his first day. The latest edition takes up the story from Lee’s “I’m out of politics” announcement in February of the following year. It includes Richard Bruton’s failed heave and the impact of the IMF bailout on the fortunes of the main parties.
Enda appears on the front cover again – on his own.
According to the publishers, The Road to Power: How Fine Gael Made History"charts the most dramatic upheaval ever in Irish politics and tells the remarkable story of how power has shifted in modern Ireland".
Kenny loyalists miffed as Taoiseach keeps his enemies close
The Taoiseach took his time handing out the coveted committee chairmanships. It was late on Thursday evening before his chosen deputies were given the news of their appointments. This would explain the number of Fine Gael backbenchers to be seen wandering nervously around Leinster House that afternoon, phones clutched tightly in their hands.
Enda Kenny had seven jobs to distribute, and when he finally handed out the €9,500-a-year positions, six of them went to deputies who backed Richard Bruton in last year’s leadership heave. In a perfect example of keeping your friends close but your enemies closer, the rebels could have swept the boards had the new party chairman, Charlie Flanagan, accepted one of the jobs on offer. While Flanagan demurs on the question of whether he turned down the offer of a committee chairmanship, a number of his colleagues are adamant that he did.
“It might have suited the leadership to have Charlie chairing an Oireachtas committee rather than a bigger, revitalised parliamentary party full of ambitious backbenchers,” says one.
As might be expected, those who remained loyal to Kenny during the contest are feeling rather miffed at losing out.
The wags in the Dáil bar were quick off the mark when the committees were announced, zooming in on one in particular, the Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality. Members include Fine Gael’s Michael Creed and Billy Timmins, both of whom would have been nursing hopes of advancement since the party returned to power, but with no joy. The wags have re-christened it the Justice for the Forgotten Committee.
By the way, between Enda Kenny’s seven appointments and Eamon Gilmore’s four, there isn’t a woman among them. Sure, they’d only spend the money on shoes.
