Why focus on Smith when at least two others are ripe for the chop?

THE former Minister for Justice Seán Doherty made an interesting comment during a recent interview on RTÉ.

Doherty was generous towards his old friend-turned-adversary, Charles Haughey, who, he said, had always believed in giving new blood a chance. Doherty himself became a minister after just a few years in the Dáil. Likewise with Bertie Ahern, and Albert Reynolds, too. Charlie brought them all to prominence.

Doherty could have gone further, and said what quite a few Fianna Fáil backbenchers are now muttering.

Which is that if Charlie Haughey promoted people at the rate Bertie Ahern does, Bertie would still be a junior minister today. It’s not much of an exaggeration. That is why the forthcoming cabinet reshuffle is of crucial importance for Ahern’s leadership and Fianna Fáil’s prospects of a third term in government.

As a result we have the thoroughly absorbing ‘will he, won’t he’ debate over whether Bertie will send the Minister for Defence, Michael Smith, to the guillotine. The bloodsport that became the heartbeat of the Irish summer began with a slow handclap in the media shortly after Joe Walsh fell on his own sword. Smith, like the aristocrat in the tumbril rattling over the cobbles, could be heard protesting innocence and defiance.

But chaos and confusion reigned. Was that actually Smith speaking, saying that Ahern would have to ‘take him out,’ or merely ‘sources close to him?’ And who signed the execution order anyway? Was it Citizen Ahern’s signature on the paper, or was it the Fourth Estate, the journalists, who started the fuss? Or did one tip off the other to make the decapitation process inevitable? It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Taoiseach in possession of political ambition will be in want of a reshuffle. It is as essential to political survival as pruning is to good gardening. Except that, in politics, it’s not necessarily the dead wood that must go.

Bertie Ahern’s problem is that he has always been reluctant to wield the knife, but he knows that he cannot afford to reshuffle conservatively this time. Fianna Fáil must revitalise itself in time to present a new, fresh-looking team to the electorate in 2007. If they are to perform well, existing ministers must be kept on their toes - they need to see heads rolling on either side of them and hungry young things competing for prominence.

What’s more, Fianna Fáil has a lot of talented but frustrated backbenchers who are restless to progress through the ranks. People like Brendan Smith in Cavan- Monaghan, Tony Killeen in Clare, Tony Dempsey in Wexford, Charlie O’Connor in Dublin and Billy Kelleher in Cork. In the ranks of the junior ministers, Mary Hanafin is the only one who has enjoyed anything like a fast track to stardom. She, along with Dick Roche, Brian Lenihan and Willie O’Dea, are all able dealers who would do well in cabinet. So who does Ahern get rid of in order to make room for the new wave? When you factor in gender, geography and the PD hold on several cabinet seats, you are left with Martin Cullen, Noel Dempsey and Michael Smith looking most vulnerable. Since Dempsey and Cullen have tripped up rather more dramatically in recent times, why all the focus on Smith? Perhaps it reflects the superficial nature of political debate in this country that we’ve become so absorbed in the drama over whether Smith will go that we’ve largely ignored the question of whether he deserves to go.

His claims to oblivion are easy to overestimate. The fact that he’s been around so long and seems to be on his ninth political life, the way he lobbied after the last election to get one more lap of honour in cabinet, the slightly pompous tone which he sometimes adopts (reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher dropping her voice by half an octave when she became leader of the Tory Party), the boring image of Smith’s Department of Defence and, lately, his unparliamentary language in debate with Pat Rabbitte.

But Smith is not as dead a piece of lumber as he might appear. Politically, he’s a streetfighter. His seat has always been marginal and he’s had two spells in the Senate since first entering the Dáil in 1969. He’s the one with the toughness to take Taoiseach’s Questions when Ahern and Harney are absent and, by all accounts, he relishes it. He can take credit for dealing with the army deafness claims at relatively low cost to the state. He’s popular in army circles for streamlining the defence forces and bringing in new equipment. And his latest announcement, that he will bring a proposal to cabinet to have an SSIA-type investment scheme to re-equip the army, is a brilliantly-timed survival device aimed at preventing his demotion.

Although it’s hard to see what good it will do him, it’s also hard to blame him for trying. What use, after all, is life as a backbench TD in a country where the Cabinet dominates the business of the Dáil so completely? A British politician once described backbenchers as people “professionally equipped to digest an enormous variety of facts and opinions fed from above and below, from ministers and constituents.” In the Dáil, it is hard to see how much digestion most TDs really do. Those who want to progress have to endure years of making tedious speeches, listening to other people’s tedious speeches, obeying party whips’ instructions on how to vote, keeping silent perhaps when conscience urges them to speak out, ridiculing opposition ideas that privately seem sensible, and providing empty applause for policies they don’t actually believe in. All that, in the hope of being in power someday. Most of them believe strongly in their ability to do great things when they finally get there. After 19 years in opposition the British Labour politician, Denis Healey, became defence secretary. As he said later, he felt “like a man who, after driving his Jaguar for hours behind a tractor on narrow country lanes, finally reaches the motorway.”

Not surprising, then, that our own minister for defence is reluctant to go quietly to the backbenches. Whether it’s idealism - the desire to achieve change through ministerial power, or the trappings of power - the car, the driver, the office, the staff and the deference - we don’t know. It might even be a mixture of both.

But the hard fact of political life is that oblivion comes to everyone in the end. You can make the best of it by reflecting on all the things you will no longer have to do - no more functions, no more having to stick to the party line on every issue, or spend wasted evenings on documents the civil servants want signed by morning.

You can go gently - retiring to your garden like Gerry Collins and Cicero.

You can go quietly, with no fuss, like Joe Walsh. Or you can shuffle off to the private sector (the French call this process ‘pantoufler,’ named after bedroom slippers). You can even write your memoirs.

But none of these options look attractive to the man screaming from the tumbril as it careers towards the September reshuffle.