The year in politics
The Dáil was plunged into international infamy when footage went viral of Tom Barry grabbing fellow Cork Fine Gael TD Áine Collins and pulling her down onto his lap in the early hours of the morning as the Dáil voted on the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill.
Barry apologised and admitted he had been in the Dáil bar before the incident, which sparked a national debate on sexism in the workplace.
Public disgust at the idea of TDs knocking back cheap, taxpayer-subsidised booze in the Dáil Members’ Bar until 5am when they were supposed to be debating the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill forced Oireachtas authorities to make noises about banning TDs from drinking and driving through legislation — nothing was done.
Given that the Members’ Bar is less than 12 steps from the chamber, maybe further action is needed.
Should we breathalyse TDs before letting them take their seats behind the wheel of democracy?
This would not be a problem for most but, obviously, could prove tricky for Justice Minister Alan Shatter, who, despite previously stating his asthma hardly impacted on his life, was forced to admit he could not complete a road side breath test due to his condition during the lurid bout of Dáil mud-slinging that characterised the penalty points row which ate into so much Oireachtas time throughout the spring.
In Alan Shatter’s own version of Wikileaks — Trikileaks — the justice minister ambushed befuddled tax cheat TD Mick Wallace on live TV with revelations the anti-penalty point let-off campaigner had been let off penalty points.
The controversy soon spiralled out of control, with Mr Shatter forced to apologise twice and deny that gardaí supplied him with secret files to use against political opponents as he weathered a Dáil censure motion, and that failed, curious, breath-test became a national talking point.
Quizzed about whether it was appropriate for an HSE-funded website to give teenagers advice on threesomes, Enda Kenny was anxious to avoid the term and would only refer to “sexual practices”, before intriguingly adding: “I haven’t looked at it, and I’d like to see the site first, what the words in question actually mean.”
Former Priory Hall resident Stephanie Meehan expressed despair that it had taken the suicide of her partner, Fiachra Daly, to get the Government to act on the housing scandal. Public outrage forced KBC Bank to call off its attempts to pursue Ms Meehan for nearly €17,000 after her partner’s death, and propelled the long-running controversy to the top of the political agenda as Enda Kenny intervened to promise action after two years.
Ms Meehan, who has had to move her family five times since the development was evacuated in Oct 2011, due to fears over fire safety, criticised the belated comments by Mr Kenny. “I’m sorry, but it took An Taoiseach two years to say that; I think that’s two years too late for myself and the residents — we’ve lost a life here.”
Like typical Irishmen, Enda and Eamon Gilmore grudgingly agreed to marriage, but refused to set a firm date. After talking about extending marriage rights to same-sex couples for more than two years, the pair came together to promise to hold the referendum “sometime” in the first half of 2015.
A plunge in the polls forced Joan Burton and Eamon Gilmore to bury the hatchet — in public at least — but not before some embarrassing revelations emerged as to what Ms Burton had done with the stash of vainglorious “Gilmore For Taoiseach” posters forced on her at the last general election — she dumped them in her late father’s shed.
Whatever had become of them, Joan was asked when the secret broke. Had she warmed herself with a bonfire of Eamon’s vanities?
“You’re not allowed,” she laughed, “I’d be arrested!”
Explaining why she had junked the posters, Ms Burton trilled: “The campaign strategy had changed and they were not relevant at that point in time.”
Rumour has it the ambitious deputy leader may decide Mr Gilmore himself is “not relevant” after next May’s expected Labour drubbing in the Euro/local elections and finally move to oust him.
Standing next to each other at the Labour “think-in”, Burton and Gilmore were asked to sum up their working relationship.
He said: “Excellent.”
She said: “Very good.”
The body language said: “Dire.”
Anti-Seanad abolition senator Marc MacSharry showed why it should be shut down when he accused Enda Kenny of being a “clown” who had “urinated” on the chamber.
Mr Kenny was sanguine about the prospect of having to deal with an angry upper house if it served out its remaining term after proposed abolition. “Politics is about cranky people, and all kinds of people — that’s democracy,” he said.
Enda Kenny lost control of the question being asked in the Seanad abolition debate and when the knife-edge result came in he looked as shocked as the senators now reprieved to carry on doing what they had always done — pretty much nothing.
A crude, cynical Fine Gael campaign had tried to tap into the electorate’s deep mistrust of politicians, but, after framing the argument in those bleak, bitter terms, the move backfired as voters decided the politician they trusted least was Mr Kenny. The Taoiseach tried to down play the personal political humiliation by saying: “Sometimes in politics you get a wallop in the electoral process. I accept the verdict of the people.”
Forbes magazine’s website apologised to President Michael D Higgins after it mistakenly ‘outed’ him as an “acknowledged homosexual”. It would seem the writer had confused him with Senator David Norris.
An unflattering light was shone on the Áras with the sudden resignation of President Higgins’ chief aide Mary Van Lieshout half-way through her public sector “pay cap”-busting three-year contract.
Ms Lieshout insisted the parting was “amicable” but refused to directly address speculation she was angry that access by her to the President had to be arranged through his executive assistant Kevin McCarthy.
So keen to appoint his former driver McCarthy to his staff, the President promised to pay his €49,000 salary from the non-wages element of the taxpaying funding for the head of state.
McCarthy accompanied the President on holiday to the Canaries in January to “help with official business”. Despite this work, the aide paid for his own travel expenses. The President’s wife, Sabina, was unable to go on the holiday due to official engagements.
Despite the austerity agenda, President Higgins has two more assistants than his boom-time predecessor, with his staff numbers stretching into the mid-20’s.
A very public spat erupted between rebel Blueshirt Lucinda Creighton and Transport Minister Leo Varadkar when she accused him of telling her to keep her head down and behave like a “good child” if she wanted to get back in the party fold.
The transport minister hit back, saying with “hand on my heart” that he had not given that advice to Ms Creighton, before going on to claim she had betrayed a confidential conversation, and that he was “disappointed” in her.
Announcing the new Economic and Social Research Institute report, economist John Fitzgerald admitted: “The one thing that is sure about this latest forecast is that it is wrong.”
In his Budget speech Michael Noonan boasted he was “handing Ireland her purse back” — but not before letting Brendan Howlin riffle through it to snatch what cash young mothers and old ladies had left in it. The austerity double act of bad cop and even worse cop was keen to spin the Budget as squeaky clean, but in reality it did not even spare the dead.
Quoting WB Yeats, Mr Noonan tried to present himself as the angel of austerity, fighting off demands to bring in harsher measures from the demons of Fine Gael by using the line: “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” But pensioners, women depending on maternity allowance, and breadline families left without even the €850 bereavement grant to help give the deceased a dignified farewell may have other opinions about the stoniness of the Coalition heart.
Perhaps summing the finance minister up, Yeats could have said of Noonan: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
However, there was some joy for the ranks of the mass unemployed with the news the airport tax was being abolished, thus making forced emigration cheaper. As ever, Yeats had a phrase that befitted a budget such as this: “But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan threatened to grass other pot-smoking TDs to the gardaí if they spoke out against his bill to legalise cannabis. The Roscommon-South Leitrim TD said he would inform on deputies who admitted smoking weed in a protest at the “hypocrisy” of criminalising cannabis users.
In the end, though, Ming stopped short of turning informer after his proposed law change drew sympathetic remarks, despite being voted down.
During the debate, Fine Gael TD Joe Carey said he is open to the decriminalisation of cannabis along the lines pioneered in Portugal, and Clare Labour TD Michael McNamara said the so-called “war on drugs” had failed.
Even for a stroke specialist of James Reilly’s standing, the level of chaos he presided over in the health service budget finally forced the Taoiseach to act.
Reilly’s repeated inability to get a grip on the Health Service Executive’s €13.4bn spending enraged the Troika and provoked Enda Kenny into to sending a financial hit squad to the health department to try and clean up the mess.
Reilly insisted that he “invited” the team in to check his books in order to prove to them just how good he is.
This would be in the same way the Soviet Union insisted it had been “invited” into Afghanistan in 1979 and talk of an invasion was just Western propaganda.
“I invited them in so that they could understand fully the figures are real and this myth aroundmythical figures in the HSE, and the department, is rubbish.
They are real figures, come see for yourself,” he “explained”.
Like the infamous Comical Ali before him who denied American troops had reached Baghdad despite US soldiers clearly being visible behind him when he was speaking, Reilly fast became Comical Jimmy — the health service’s bad joke.
While repeatedly denying a change in medical card policy was causing widespread misery — despite countless cases of seriously ill adults and children having their help snatched away, the HSE faced yet another overspend of at least €200m, while at the same time looking for savings of €666m, as the health minister admitted he “didn’t know” how many people will lose their medical cards in a shake-up supposed to save €113m.
“Stand By Your Nan!” That was the placard plea of the day thousands descended on the Dáil to demand a fair deal for the elderly after the budget battering.
Intrusive surveillance dominated the October EU summit as it emerged the US had tapped Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, but Enda Kenny had far bigger things to worry about than the erupting crisis — he had Lucinda Creighton on his case.
As vice-president of the European People’s Party grouping of the austerity political fan club, Ms Creighton insisted she had every right to be there, despite being sacked as Europe Minister, and Enda could not argue with the fact that she was a VP — though in his understanding of the term it probably stood for Veritable Pain.
The LucEnda Show is the Breaking Bad of Irish politics — but it is still to reach its explosive finale.
The removal of children from two Roma families after their pale, blonde features prompted suspicion did not expose institutionalised racism in the gardaí, Taoiseach Enda Kenny insisted.
“I don’t accept at all that there are any institutionalised racial tendencies in the gardaí,” he said.
Both children were returned to their families, with one undergoing DNA testing.
Amnesty International waded into the controversy and Travellers’ advocacy group Pavee Point accused gardaí and health chiefs of “racial profiling”.
Wit mandatory dayglo orange wrist bands sporting the upbeat message “Have A Great Day!” and heavy police presence, the Fine Gael national conference had something of the feel of an illegal 1990s rave about it — just without the light sticks and artificial stimulants. But surely Enda must have been on something to spout a line in his keynote conference speech as silly as: “And so to the future — where we all have to live.”
A bad-ass billionaire with a cool, gadget-laden car in need of a new sidekick — it looked like Enda Kenny’s lucky day.
Super-rich PayPal tycoon Elon Musk certainly knew how to make an entrance as he beckoned An Taoiseach into the passenger seat of his electric sports car at Dublin’s global web summit.
The pair burst into the gathering at the RDS to the sound of the James Bond theme.
Mr Musk — whom the MC for the event branded a “bad-ass” version of the internet greats all rolled into one — had more shocks in store for the Taoiseach when the pair took part in a question and answer session on stage in which the technology titan was asked what he would do to boost the Irish economy if he was Taoiseach.
Mr Kenny looked distinctly uncomfortable when one of the internet’s most successful brains decided that the key to Ireland’s bounce back was — free university tuition.
Behold the birth of Ireland’s new future force, the PDs — the Politically Desperate.
With all the swagger of a South American soap opera star, Colm Keaveney pulled off yet another unlikely plot twist and let rip with his fiery Latin passion via the teasing tweet: “Perhaps my name will be linked with theirs — fortune favours the brave.”
And how brave it was for Micheál Martin to welcome a man who just last year mused: “The rampant corruption of many of Fianna Fáil’s members and public representatives is part of the philosophy of tolerance that existed within the party.”
In a twist on the old cliché of a bull in a china shop, Eamon Gilmore was caught talking bull in a shop in China. For in a shrill shout-out during a trade push in Shanghai, the globe-trotting Tánaiste revealed who was really to blame for Labour’s collapse in the polls — ex-junior health minister Roisín Shortall. Apparently, Labour’s slump can be traced back to the woman Gilmore branded “nasty and bitter”, in an uncharacteristically graceless swipe, and to her appalling rudeness in not telling Mr Gilmore she was going until he got her resignation letter.
Senator Mary Ann O’Brien said the extreme nature of, and widespread access to, internet porn made her “nostalgic” for the days of Hustler magazine.
“We are allowing our children to see material that a decade ago would have been accessible only in an extreme fetish club,” she said.
“I never thought I would stand up in the Irish Seanad and feel nostalgic for Hustler, Penthouse, or Playboy, but we must now admit that we must think of them as part of the good old days.”
Enda Kenny was clearly excited by a January visit to Tayto Park, exclaiming “I’m a cheese and onion man!” at one point, before he started chatting to turkeys. Always the comforter, Kenny turned to the birds in the animal sanctuary and told them: “Christmas is over. It’s OK, you’re safe now.”
Doctor Who fan Alan Shatter surprised many by declaring himself the “Minister for Time” when he reminded people to put their clocks forward. Ever helpful, the Tardis-head added in a press release: “For those interested it should be noted that a new series of Doctor Who commences on BBC 1 tonight at 6:15pm.” The bizarre incident was not so much a case of Doctor Who but Minister, Why?
Did you hear the one about the pimp, the prostitute, and the war criminal? It’s a national joke, according to left-wing TD Clare Daly.
Unlike the US in Guantanamo Bay, Daly took no prisoners as she declared war on the G8 “fawn-fest” and the national “slobbering” over Michelle Obama and her husband — aka Mr War Criminal.
Ms Daly railed at the Taoiseach in the Dáil, stating: “Is it not the case that he has showcased us a nation of pimps prostituting ourselves in return for a pat on the head?
“We were speculating this morning about whether the Taoiseach would deck out the Cabinet in leprechaun hats decorated with stars and stripes to mark our abject humiliation.”
Daly then turned on Bono for hosting Michelle and the girls: “While we had separate and special news bulletins by the state broadcaster to tell us what Michelle Obama and her daughters had for lunch in Dublin, there was very little questioning of the fact that they were having lunch with Mr Tax Exile himself.”
A rather odd statement from someone who stood solidly by the Dáil’s very own tax cheat, Mick Wallace, to such an extent they could have their own mangled moniker — Click (Clare and Mick).
Mr Kenny branded the remarks “disgraceful”, but the image lingered of Enda slumped in a seedy Oirish doorway touting for trade with his little leprechaun hat on.
The wrong number dominated the Dáil abortion vote: Five — the number of Fine Gael X case rebels — when it should have been 100,000 — the number of Irish women forced to seek a termination abroad since that judgment was made. The restrictive nature of the X case legislation means nearly all of those women would still have had to make that loneliest of journeys, even if it had been enacted in 1992.
A human ribbon of sorrow bound Dundalk together as the town’s quiet grief for fallen garda Adrian Donohoe rippled out across a watching nation.
Det Garda Donohoe’s cortege approached St Joseph’s Redemptorist Church with an honour guard of 2,500 comrades marching behind the hearse in tribute.
By the time the coffin reached its final resting place, twilight was beginning to fall as the haunting lament of ‘The Last Post’ rose above the graveside and drifted out between the sombre magnificence of the Cooley Mountains and the still waters of Dundalk Bay below.
A garda standing by the hearse, its windows dominated by floral tributes declaring “Daddy, Son, Brother”, wept openly.
He was not alone.
The icy winds that swept over St Mary’s graveyard as murdered Det Garda Donohoe was laid to rest sent a chill through national life.
The shadow of the slain detective fell heavily across the body politic as the murder became a lightning-strike moment illuminating much that had been left in the darkness. An overt consequence was Gerry Adams’ long overdue apology for the IRA murder of Jerry McCabe in 1996.
“I want to apologise to Mrs McCabe and the McCabe family, and to Garda Ben O’Sullivan, and to the families of other members of the state forces who were killed by republicans in the course of the conflict,” Adams told a hushed Dáil. I am very sorry for the pain and loss inflicted on those families. No words of mine can remove the hurt. Dreadful deeds cannot be undone.”
Though welcome, this statement raised immediate and significant questions: Namely, on whose behalf was Gerry ‘Army council? What army council?’ Adams apologising? What authority does Adams have to make such a pronouncement, if it is to be taken as legitimate?
And also, what “conflict” was raging with “State forces” in the sleepy town of Adare, Co Limerick, that Mr McCabe’s killers believed warranted such a vile and needless taking of human life?
The shooting dead of Mr McCabe provoked heated Dáil exchanges when Sinn Féin attacked Fianna Fáil for opportunism over its opposition to the closure of police stations, as, in government, the party had agreed with the troika to cut force numbers. Fianna Fáil justice spokesman Niall Collins, who represents the town where Mr McCabe was shot dead, responded: “You’ve got your own way of reducing garda numbers.”
Enda Kenny attacked Sinn Féin’s “cruelty” at taking 17 years to apologise for the murder of Mr McCabe, prompting a stinging reference to Micheal Collins from Sinn Féin’s Pádraig Mac Lochlainn who shot back across the chamber: “Who founded your party? Gandhi? Martin Luther King?”
Kenny, humbled and embarrassed by his initial misjudgement over how to handle the McAleese report into the exploitation and degradation of the Magdalene Laundry women and girls, rose to the occasion when he spoke from the heart to deliver a stirring Dáil apology after two weeks of delay.
“The Magdalene women might have been told that they were washing away a wrong, or a sin, but we know now — and to our shame — they were only ever scrubbing away our nation’s shadow,” he told an eerily quiet chamber as TDs and survivors alike strained in anticipation of the overdue apology.
Kenny’s voice cracked as he remembered the moment a survivor had sung ‘Whispering Hope’ to him: “A line from that song stays in my mind — ‘when the dark midnight is over, watch for the breaking of day’.
“Let me hope that this day and this debate heralds a new dawn for all those who feared that the dark midnight might never end.”
Kenny apologised a second time and the public gallery dissolved into a human wave of tears and hugs, as the decades of abuse were officially atoned for, as the wrongs the women suffered were dragged into the light at last.
The Magdalene survivors had shed these tears many times before, but this time they were not alone — a nation and a Taoiseach was weeping with them.
One elderly survivor, shaking with emotion in the Dáil’s public gallery, gripped the hand of the woman next to her as the State’s apology finally came, and the pair sobbed openly.
The applause that began on the floor for Enda Kenny’s speech soon spiralled out into something far more profound, as the Dáil stood in ovation and acknowledged the hardship and pain inflicted upon generations of women.
The women also stood and applauded — for the validation of their long, lonely struggle, and for the memory of the thousands upon thousands of their fellow victims who never lived to see this day.
It was an extraordinary moment in Dáil history — one that befitted the presence of extraordinary women in the Dáil. Shame the compensation deal was yet another letdown.
Small business minister John Perry was thrust into the spotlight by the not very small business of having the Commercial Court give him six weeks to sort out debts of €2.47m.
Court documents lodged by Danske Bank also stated that the minister needed a loan to clear €100,000 of tax arrears, and had dropped the fact he personally knew Bank of Ireland chief Richie Boucher into conversations about his debts. Perry would neitherconfirm nor deny the claims, and settlement was reached on the debts in September.
Despite opposition calls for his resignation, ministers rallying to Perry’s defence insisting his money troubles made him a more effective small business minister, not one lacking in credibility. Leinster House wags mused that if similar logic was applied elsewhere, Lapgate shame TD Tom Barry could be put in charge of overseeing gender equality issues in the Oireachtas. And, maybe, spliff king Ming Flanagan could be the new drugs czar.
After giving God just two weeks notice that he was quitting, Benedict XVI, now pope emeritus, then had the nerve to blame the Big G for everything that went wrong during his papacy. That’s gratitude for you.
Saying that “the Lord seemed to sleep” at times of crisis over the past eight years struck a very odd note from a man leading a Church that is meant to believe God’s divine hand is everywhere, at all times.
And in another remarkable moment, Enda Kenny drew a line in history when he moved to divorce Church and State in a landmark Dáil intervention regarding the X case legislation.
“I am now being branded by personnel around the country as being a murderer,” he said. “I’m going to have on my soul the death of 20m babies. I’m getting medals, scapulars, plastic foetuses, letters written in blood, telephone calls all over the system, and it’s not confined to me.
“Therefore I am proud to stand here as a public representative who happens to be a Catholic but not a Catholic Taoiseach. I am a Taoiseach for all the people and that’s my job.”
Showing a distinct mastery of communication for a communications minister, Pat Rabbitte used a book launch to make a rather off-key joke on the day the Croke Park II details emerged, details that will, once again, lash into the low-paid while those at the top get a much easier ride. “Another busy day diminishing the living standards of our people,” Rabbitte mused to a rather mixed reception.
Environment Minister Phil Hogan presided over yet another PR shambles as Revenue letters on how to pay the property tax led to mass confusion, and a loophole in the legislation he rushed through the Dáil saw some people still having to pay the levy in 2014 on houses they had already sold.
After getting a chilly reception in the freezer section of a supermarket from an angry garda while campaigning in the Meath East by-election, Enda Kenny fared better as a would-be house buyer asked him at an AIB branch: “I’m going in for a mortgage, any tips?”
“I’ll come along with yer!” offered the Taoiseach as he whisked her through the doors. Kenny then asked the rather baffled assistant: “Can you give her a mortgage?”
Kenny’s enthusiasm was at odds with Finance Minister Michael Noonan, who gave the banks carte blanche to launch a wave of repossessions.
Lucinda Creighton enraged her Fine Gael colleagues by branding their attitude to the X case legislation as “groupthink”. TDs backing the bill said the only group they were thinking of were Irish women in danger of losing their lives.
The sacked Europe Minister was accused of posturing like a “Southside Evita”.
However, Ms Creighton won widespread praise when she give up her ministry in order to stand over her beliefs. Her husband, Senator Paul Bradford, lost the party whip the same week for making the same stand.
Joan Burton took U2 to task for taking advantage of overseas tax breaks, but in the battle between Bono and Joano, the band could have hit back saying “Look at you, too,” as US senators branded Ireland a “tax haven” for global giant Apple.
Simon Coveney cemented his position as the Taoiseach’s heir-apparent after a deft year which saw him survive the contaminated meat scandal with only a light grilling over why Irish officials knew about the initial problems for weeks before telling him — and consumers — about the scandal that would explode into a Europe-wide food crisis, and skilfully played to both sides during Fine Gael’s agonising over the X case legislation.
Lifelong equalities activist David Norris provoked outrage with an ugly rant against Fine Gael deputy Regina Doherty, stating: “I object in the strongest possible way to the idea that someone who has spent years in the House should have to listen to the Regina monologue from someone who has not been a wet weekend in the Oireachtas and is talking through her fanny.”
Alan Shatter’s bonk-buster book Laura left him with something of the night about him as the Dáil debated daylight-saving.
The chamber seemed to slip into another dimension as TDs discussed switching timezones, with one reciting poetry while another longed for the days when politicians sang some of their speeches, and Shatter decided to express dissatisfaction his book had not been mentioned.
But thankfully, before Shatter could delight the chamber with a few salty lines, Timmy Dooley saved the morals of the nation. “We need darkness for that. It is not one for daylight,” he declared.
Within hours of publishing laws to protect those who shine light into the dark corners of society, Finance Minister Michael Noonan was ordering a Garda inquiry to hunt down those responsible for the Anglo tapes exploding onto the public consciousness and provoking global headlines and the disdain of world leaders such as Angela Merkel.
The moment the country finally exited the Troika bail-out was officially marked two days early on Friday 13th, and the suspicious minded hoped this would not impact on the Coalition’s controversial decision to return to economic sovereignty without the safety net of emergency backstop loans being put in place if a crisis hit the unpredictable money markets as this would effectively have amounted to Bail-Out:2.0. Falling unemployment rates (though helped by continuing mass emigration), better than expected tax returns and Forbes magazine providing the psychological boost of naming Ireland the best country in the world to do business in, all added together to give the nation a rare feeling of relative optimism on which to usher in 2014.
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