Senior TD says Fianna Fáil needs to change leader 'in the not too distant future'

Carlow-Kilkenny's John McGuinness, a long-time adversary of Micheál Martin, said the Taoiseach's leadership should be up for discussion after the presidential election 

John McGuinness: 'We can't talk about the future or about what happened in the presidential election without discussing the type of leadership that brought us to that point'. File picture: SAM BOAL/Collins Photos

A senior Fianna Fáil TD has called for the party to change leader "in due course" and "in the not too distant future".

Carlow-Kilkenny's John McGuinness, a long-time adversary of Micheál Martin, told RTÉ's This Week on Sunday that there needs to be a discussion of just how Fianna Fáil ended the presidential election without a candidate. Mr McGuinness said a review should be held within 10 days.

"We should have an open discussion within the next 10 days on what needs to be done for the future, to correct what has happened, to prepare us for the future and to better represent the country that has elected us to do the business for them in Leinster House."

Mr McGuinness said steps need to be taken to understand how Fianna Fáil stands on 17% in the latest state of the parties opinion poll.

"[We need] to identify exactly what happened. And that's easy to do, because right across the country, 62% of people voted for Catherine Connolly, [Heather] Humphreys was half of that, and then Jim Gavin was 7.6%. We made serious errors, serious errors of judgment, and we have brought a big political party back to 17% from a time where we did enjoy, at some stages, 45% of the support of the general public. That needs to be addressed."

Asked if this meant that Mr Martin's leadership should be up for discussion, Mr McGuinness said it should.

"Of course it is, yes. We can't talk about the future or about what happened in the presidential election without discussing the type of leadership that brought us to that point. And then we must discuss what type of leadership will bring us to greater success with the electorate for the future. To ignore those two questions, will be sticking our heads in the sand and will be causing further detrimental problems for the party itself.

"I emphasise again, councillors, TDs, senators, members of the Fianna Fáil party national executive, were not asked, were not part of any process to select the candidate. And what we were presented with within the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party on that morning was to vote for either Jim Gavin or Billy Kelleher. And that was on the back of a very intense campaign carried out by the leadership of the party to get what they wanted.

"I would say [a change of leadership] is a widely held view in the parliamentary party. How you approach it may be different, but the outcome is that the membership in general believes that they need a root and branch change in all of this. They need to reflect on their leadership, their policies and what has brought us to a point in a presidential election that we ignored our responsibility to the electorate. 

"The responsibility of a political party is to play its role for the country within a democracy, and we treated that in a very shabby way and approached it in a way that resulted in us participating in the shambles as far as the selection and the election was concerned."

Speaking earlier on the same programme, barrister Maria Steen, who missed out on a nomination, said that how nominations for the presidency are reached needs to be addressed. But she was non-committal about running in elections herself.

"The really big story is the spoiled votes. It is unprecedented, 10 times the size of the last spoiled vote count in the last presidential election.

"I think it's fair to say that it is a big rebuke to the political establishment who sought to prevent any competition in this election.

"I think it's clear that there are a lot of people in this country who feel unrepresented."