The Shafting of Albert is the enticing title of a chapter in Stephen Collins's new book, The Power Game; Fianna Fail Since Lemass, being published by O'Brien Press without launch or fanfare next week. Collins is the political editor of the Sunday Tribune and this is his fourth book, after tomes on Liam Cosgrave, Dick Spring and Fianna Fail, 1987 to 1992. Other chapters in his latest work include A Head on a Plate, Death of a Thousand Cuts (the fall of Charlie Haughey), The Longford Slasher, The Boys are Back in Town, (Bertie Ahern's ascent) and Burke Bites the Dust. The Arms Crisis, the heaves, the plottings are all there.
The shafting chapter starts: "When it came to selecting the Fianna Fail presidential candidate, Ahern conducted himself with the precision and ruthlessness of a true follower of Machiavelli. The two leading hopefuls, Albert Reynolds and Michael O'Kennedy, were taken out in one fell swoop. Reynolds was his predecessor as a Fianna Fail taoiseach; O'Kennedy was a former European commissioner and an ally. Ahern dispatched them mercilessly in the search for the perfect presidential candidate, without leaving as much as his fingerprints on the stiletto. But neither of the discarded hopefuls was in any doubt about who ordered his political assassination."
It continues in similar racy fashion to detail how Mrs McAleese planned her campaign and got the backing of Mary O'Rourke and Dermot Ahern, how Albert believed he had the parliamentary party on side although the only open ministerial support was from Brian Cowen, Charlie McCreevy and David Andrews and how Bertie showed Reynolds his pro-Albert vote on the first round at which MEP Brian Crowley remarked to Reynolds "you're finished now".
Collins concludes that FF's defining characteristic in recent decades has been its pragmatism - a strength and a weakness in that it simply adopted whatever policies suited it at a particular time. Pragmatic ruthlessness made the party a powerful force as it followed the voters rather than led them, and thus managed to avoid alienating any significant segment of the electorate. The near total absence of fixed principles made the cult of leadership very important and allowed respective leaders to write and rewrite the history of the party to suit their purposes with Stalinist indifference to the facts; witness the erasure of Jack Lynch by Haughey and now of Haughey and Reynolds by Ahern. What is truly remarkable, says the blurb, is that each leader was dispatched Mafia-style by his successor, but like the Family, the party stayed together.
Quidnunc can be contacted at: rholohan@irish-times.ie