A House hushed to silence

THE trademark ruddiness of John O’Donoghue’s face must have deepened and contrasted ever more starkly with the pale pastel hues decorating the Georgian walls of his Leinster House fiefdom as he pleaded with Eamon Gilmore not to damn him into oblivion on the Dáil floor.

Time was ticking down to the deadline for Mr Gilmore’s demand for a summit of the five Oireachtas party leaders so they could agree on a solution to the expenses scandal paralysing Irish political life.

The Ceann Comhairle believed he was engaged in a desperate, though still winnable, battle to save his career – he did not realise events had already condemned him to humiliation as the Labour leader decided to set in train the end game that would see Mr O’Donoghue carry the infamy of being the first holder of his office to be forcibly toppled from the Speaker’s chair.

With less than an hour to go to the flash-point resumption of the Dáil last Tuesday, Mr O’Donoghue placed the call he hoped would buy him the time he needed to attempt to shore-up his crumbling support base and stagger on to a meeting the next day of the Oireachtas Commission he himself chairs and which was due to discuss his extraordinary expenses in a private session.

A second conversation then followed, this time instigated by Mr Gilmore, who insists he told the Ceann Comhairle that the Taoiseach’s refusal to discuss the matter meant he had no option but to raise the issue at the imminent Leaders’ Questions.

The Irish Examiner knew the bullet was coming, but few others gathering in the packed chamber realised the psychodrama about to play out in the arena before them.

Mr Gilmore rose with the slow, but determined resignation of an unwilling assassin. But he was keenly aware the declaration he was about to unleash would pierce the heart of the wounded Ceann Comhairle’s credibility and leave him politically dead.

The normally rowdy House hushed to silence as the Labour leader smashed through a parliamentary taboo and moved todepose the Speaker in front of him.

Mr O’Donoghue allowed little emotion to show as Mr Gilmore’s biting words flowed over him, destroying any hope of escape from the €700,000 expenses scandal slowing suffocating him since the summer.

The Taoiseach and Enda Kenny were both left fumbling and wrong-footed by Mr Gilmore’s coup de grace and a palpable edge of tension settled over the House as Leaders’ Questions drew to a close.

That tension was lifted by the need for a vote on a procedural order and as TDs milled out across the chamber Mr O’Donoghue remained frozen in his chair – static at the centre of a room of movement.

It was as if Mr O’Donoghue was already vanishing into history as the chamber began to fully absorb the intrigue and high drama it had just witnessed.

The long corridors of Leinster House then sighed and whispered with rumour and counter rumour as excited huddles of deputies, senators, lackeys and journalists gathered and dispersed, relaying the latest speculation and intrigue between the flow of forming and reforming groups like a virus as they did so.

IN THE opulent elegance of his spacious rooms on the first floor, Mr O’Donoghue was still in denial, still urgently railing against the fate that was now clear to almost everyone except him.

A flurry of frantic telephone calls then buzzed along the optic fibres across Government Buildings and Leinster House as the doomed Ceann Comhairle explored what support remained if he defied logic and let Labour’s no confidence motion roll on towards him.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen contacted Green leader John Gormley three times in the space of four hours to see if he would back Mr O’Donoghue if it came down to a showdown on the floor of the Dáil.

Bizarrely, Mr Cowen would claim he was merely acting as a go-between for Mr O’Donoghue to Mr Gormley with no agenda of his own. The response to that assertion could be summed up as: “Yeah, right – and the O’Donoghues might fly economy.” In the real world it looked very much like Mr Cowen was once again putting Fianna Fáil before country and testing the water for a bruising and divisive clash in the Dáil which would have dragged public life even further into the gutter than it had been already.

Mr Gormley stood his ground and said no.

Mr O’Donoghue finally bowed to the inevitable at just after 10pm, but left one final hand grenade in the text of his resignation statement – it would not take effect until next Tuesday.

This will allow him 15 minutes to put his side of the story, try to salvage whatever of his reputation remains, and, maybe, settle a few scores with those he believes brought him down.

However, the deposed Ceann Comhairle would do well to remember that Mr Gilmore may have fired the fatal shot, but it was the court of outraged public opinion that passed sentence, and Mr O’Donoghue who provided the gold-plated bullets – all €700,000 worth of them – that finally did for him.