Hanafin ready to lead ‘renewed’ Fianna Fáil — if they will have her

MARY HANAFIN says she is ready to lead Fianna Fáil — if they will have her.

Launching her campaign for the leadership in Dublin yesterday, Ms Hanafin said she would love to lead a renewed and proud Fianna Fáil party that encouraged young people and women to take part.

“Politics is my life. Fianna Fáil is my life. I devote all of my time and energy to it. I don’t have anything else,” said Ms Hanafin, who also suggested Fianna Fáil did not do enough to show women it was on their side.

The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Sport, Enterprise, Trade and Employment, announced her leadership bid at an impromptu press conference at the door of the main hall in the RDS, Dublin, before officially opening Ireland’s Creative Expo.

Asked if Fianna Fáil was ready for a female leader, Ms Hanafin, who has been proposed by fellow minister Pat Carey and seconded by Tipperary North TD Máire Hoctor, said she was ready to lead if they accepted her.

“This is a party, this is a country that is divided evenly 50:50 male and female. We should never have a situation where the largest political party in the country is presenting a team of four men to contest the leadership,” she said.

Ms Hanafin said she had rung a number of party colleagues on Saturday night to get their views before deciding to put herself forward as a candidate for the party leadership. “They told me to go for it,” she said.

Asked whether the stance taken by her last week — voting against Brian Cowen in a confidence motion and then saying she had confidence in him as Taoiseach — had damaged her chances, Ms Hanafin said she believed her position had been vindicated.

She said she indicated clearly to Mr Cowen that she would be voting against the confidence motion.

“This weekend we now see that there is actually a difference between being leader of Fianna Fáil and being Taoiseach and I think that position has been vindicated,” she said.

She was not asking other Fianna Fáil deputies to declare publicly who they were supporting because she did not think it was necessary.

Ms Hanafin said she, like the other contenders would be asking the parliamentary party to choose who they wanted to represent a new Ireland and a new Fianna Fáil in the future.

Asked if she was willing to be under the media spotlight, Ms Hanafin said the only time she complained about media intrusion was when a journalist wrote everything she had for her breakfast.

“He decided to list everything I had and the only thing he got wrong is that I had honey rather than marmalade,” she recalled.

She also denied her leadership bid was to boost her chances of retaining her seat in Dún Laoghaire.