DEPARTURE TIME

Dempsey is a seasoned politician with a well-oiled machine and his retiring from politics is another serious blow to FF, writes Political Correspondent Paul O’Brien

NOEL DEMPSEY said a curious thing earlier this month. “I don’t think politics is working as well as it should in the current circumstances,” he told Newstalk radio station.

It was the kind of statement you would expect from a new candidate seeking election and demanding political reform. It didn’t seem to occur to Mr Dempsey that he had been a minister for 13 years and that if politics wasn’t working as well as it should, it was partly his fault.

The requirement for a bailout from the EU and IMF, in particular, represented a political failure for which all of the cabinet — and not just the Taoiseach and Finance Minister — must take their share of the blame.

Mr Dempsey chose to see it otherwise yesterday, however, saying he had stuck with things until the Government had laid out its four-year plan for economic recovery. “Now that we’re back on a path — we’ve a plan for recovery — I think it is time to move on,” he said.

In other words, he believes he has done his bit. Given the dissatisfaction ratings with the Government, the public may well agree — though for very different reasons.

But that is not to say Mr Dempsey is without achievements. While the bailout was a black mark for the Government as a whole, he pursued policies as an individual minister that he can rightly regard as accomplishments.

These included substantial improvements to road safety as Transport Minister which helped reduce the number of deaths in traffic accidents.

They also included significant reforms of local government when he was Environment Minister, including much of the leg work on the abolition of the dual mandate (although the process would be finished by his successor, Martin Cullen). In addition, he introduced the plastic bag tax to help protect the environment.

He was also the minister who ensured developers had to set aside a fixed portion of developments for social and affordable housing (although this was subsequently watered down by Mr Cullen).

But for every achievement, there seemed to be a fiasco from a particularly accident-prone politician.

He initiated the process whereby the Government wasted more than €50 million on evoting machines (although much of the blame landed with Mr Cullen). He dismissed the €160m wasted on a botched computer system for the health service as “small change”. His handling of a well-intentioned move to take unaccompanied learner drivers off the roads was positively shambolic. He famously wanted to reduce the number of TDs and reintroduce third-level fees — but crashed and burned both times in spectacular fashion.

The principal reason was not opposition or public pressure — but the reaction from Fianna Fáil’s own backbenches.

Dempsey had an admirable trait for speaking his mind and proposing policies he believed were in the country’s best interests. Oddly, though, for a politician of such experience, he had a terrible habit of failing to get his own party onside first.

Some backbenchers put it down to arrogance, believing Dempsey had simply been a minister too long and power had gone to his head. Others believed he merely spoke his mind too quickly and suffered the consequences.

He had ambitions towards the party leadership but it was never a realistic prospect given the number of backbenchers he had irritated down through the years. In addition, his public profile was probably damaged beyond repair because of his handling of last year’s weather crisis. While the country came to a standstill because of the big freeze, Mr Dempsey was on holiday in Malta soaking up the sunshine. Although he returned home eventually to take charge of the issue, his initial absence seemed to confirm the public’s suspicions that this was a Government out of touch.

Little has happened in the interim to change that view, leaving Fianna Fáil facing into a nightmarish election in which the party is set to lose dozens of seats.

It won’t help that seasoned politicians with strong constituency machines who would have been expected to retain their seats are retiring rather than running again. Dempsey joins Dermot Ahern, Tom Kitt, Beverley Flynn, Sean Ardagh and MJ Nolan in announcing they will step down at the election.

There will be those who claim that the likes of Dempsey and Ahern, in particular, are abandoning the party, given that they are both still relatively young men who could have continued for several years more — Dempsey will be 58 in January, while Ahern is 55.

But Dempsey rejected that suggestion yesterday, pointing out that he will continue to help the party behind the scenes. He has been one of Fianna Fáil’s principal strategists for many years, serving as director of elections in numerous campaigns. He has also been one of the party’s key negotiators when programmes for government were being hammered out for various Fianna Fáil-led coalitions. Despite the public perception of him, and Fianna Fáil backbenchers’ coolness towards him, he will be a loss to the party. But the expectation must now surely be that he won’t be the last major Fianna Fáil figure to announce his or her retirement in the coming weeks.