Taoiseach survives - Vote will not avert the inevitable

SO much melodrama, so little change. So much time and energy wasted for so very little of any immediate importance or relevance to the country’s future.

Mr Cowen remains leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach but it is foolish to imagine that he is secure for anything much longer than the shortest of short terms. The sword still hangs over him on a frayed string and, like his party, it is unimaginable that he will not face his day of reckoning.

The challenger Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin emerges from the process with considerable credit. He showed unusual, selfless conviction and a degree of passion that is not always as apparent as it might be. He had the courage to express strongly held views even if those views cost him his ministerial post.

He ploughed a lonely furrow, especially at Cabinet, but persisted because he believed he was right. Those who dismissed Mr Martin’s challenge as eccentric have cause to review their position this morning.

It would wrong too not to recognise that Mr Cowen behaved with dignity and generosity throughout the process. His remarks about Mr Martin after the result was announced stand in stark contrast to the appalling behaviour of previous Fianna Fáil leaders, triumphant and vengeful, in similar circumstances.

This stands in stark contrast too to some of their Cabinet colleagues’ behaviour, most especially Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, who was accused of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. One deputy — John McGuinness — accused him of stoking the fires of discontent to the point that it almost made a leadership challenge inevitable. Statements by Mr Lenihan’s brother, Junior Minister Conor Lenihan, earlier this week give credence to those accusations.

It will be interesting too, as the details of last night’s meeting inevitably emerge, to try to get a better understanding of the reluctance of Tourism, Culture and Sport Minister Mary Hanafin to make her position public. As with Mr Lenihan this bashfulness may have more to do with the next leadership challenge than last night’s events.

Mr Cowen secured more than half of the 71 votes cast in secret see off the discontented rump of his battered party.

Such an endorsement, such a victory, no matter what the margin, must be as manna from heaven to a man who has brought his party to a 14% nadir in the opinion polls.

For every member of the public who say they might vote for Fianna Fáil in the election — 14% — at least three times that percentage of the parliamentary party voted to endorse their leader.

There could hardly be a starker, more illustrative example of the contrasting worlds inside and outside of Leinster House. Could there be a better illustration of the disconnect that has made politics such a discredited, disrespected and dysfunctional process?

It is a simple, undeniable fact that Mr Cowen was one of the dozen pivotal figures in the orgy of greed, blind-eyed regulation and hubris that has destroyed our economy, so much hard-earned private wealth and our banks. This carnage has, unforgivably, re-ignited the plague of emigration, stretched dole queues to frightening lengths and forced us all to redefine our ambitions.

It has also forced a burden of debt on us that we may find unsustainable.

Yet Fianna Fáil re-endorsed the leader they had not voted for in the first place. It may or may not make much difference come election day but it was an opportunity for Fianna Fáil to publicly acknowledge its role in the destruction of the last five years. Sadly, it is entirely predictable that this opportunity was scorned and tribal instincts were put before the country and the future once again.

Though no more than a five-day wonder the exercise might, if the statements made by Mr Cowen and Mr Martin accurately convey the mood of the meeting, be seen as a small turning point in the party’s culture.

You do not have to have a long memory to recall that challengers to a previous Fianna Fáil leader — Charles Haughey — were assaulted in the grounds of Leinster House. If the openness and willingness to debate issues shown by both sides becomes the norm then the party might have a better future than the polls suggest.

Yesterday was a victory for power and doggedness over performance but it cost Fianna Fáil an election trump card. It has taken Fine Gael’s equally unsuccessful leadership challenge off the election agenda.

And despite all the hullabaloo the only vote that matters to the future of Ireland has yet to be announced.