Soldiers of mutiny rattle blunt sabres as the good ship FF drifts out to sea

A WONDERFUL moment in a wonderful play. It’s the point in A Man for All Seasons where Thomas More faces the evidence trumped up against him to get him beheaded and rid Henry VIII of a turbulent priest who will not countenance the monarch divorcing his wife.

Blinking in unaccustomed light after months of incarceration in the Tower of London, More watches as his former servant, Richard Rich, played with vile venality in the movie by John Hurt, swaggers into the courtroom as More has never seen him, dressed in brocade and wearing a chain, to give the testimony that will end More’s hopes of survival.

When the deed is done, More politely asks permission to approach Rich and, touching the gold chain around the witness’s neck, asks him its significance. Rich defiantly says that he’s been given regal authority over Wales. The inference is inescapable — this is the payoff for his treachery. More smiles sadly.

“Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world,” he reminds him, and starts to turn away. “But for Wales?” he adds, in ironic question.

A version of the same question applies to Fianna Fáil this week. It profits a political party nothing to give its soul for the whole world. But for Labhrás Ó Murchú?

I’m sure Senator Ó Murchú has countless virtues and that it’s an unfortunate accident that none of them — including loyalty to the leader and concern for the survival and health of his party — are obviously in play at the moment. This, rather, is about Labhrás’ rights. It’s also about older senators who deeply resent Micheál Martin’s attempt to get them pensioned off and give younger candidates a clear run at the Seanad.

Labhrás’ chances, even if nominated, of beating Sean Gallagher or Mary Davis to the Áras, are slim. His chances of beating Sean Gallagher, Mary Davis, Gay Mitchell, Michael D Higgins and Martin McGuinness, never mind David Norris if the latter gets enough votes to get him onto the electoral ladder, are somewhere between slim and skeletal.

Yet he has precipitated yet another crisis within Fianna Fáil at a time when it has hardly enough elected members to mount a split, never mind organise a crisis. Sort of like navel gazing without a navel. Tunnel vision without a tunnel.

Micheál Martin must be sorely tempted to throw his hat at it. If he had a hat. Just when he should be leading the opposition in tossing ordnance at the Taoiseach, members of his tiny party have replaced his weaponry (which wasn’t up to much in the first place) with boomerangs. No matter what he says to the Taoiseach this week in the House, the Taoiseach can rubbish his authority, based on the chaos within Fianna Fáil over the last week.

And while Labhrás is champing at the bit for a chance for a run the Áras (even though, at the risk of offending Barnardos, it would be more of a Big Toddle than a run) Éamon Ó Cuív is sabre-rattling about setting up a new party. I use the analogy advisedly. Come in, be honest. How often in recent years have you come across a sabre? Sabre-rattling about setting up a new sanitised version of Fianna Fáil is like promising to set up a new company based on the Telex.

The notion, currently clutched to a number of Fianna Fáil chests, that the brand is toxic and must be abandoned, is a profound misunderstanding of the science of branding. “The Brand” is not a separate, discrete entity that can be blamed and cut loose. You can’t take a political brand, shove it in a plastic bag, drop it into a thrift shop and appear the next day with a new logo, a fresh focus-group-approved slogan and expect the people who believe you impoverished them and exported their children to opt for the make-over.

Ó Cuív’s great strength is that he knows who he is and what he stands for. His great weakness is that while this is a wholly admirable trait in any individual, it does not necessarily add up to leadership capacity.

One of the easy certainties of the uninvolved (us commentators) currently applied to Martin is that he DOESN’T know who he is or what he stands for. This tends to be presented as a fundamental character deficit, rather than a result of finding himself in the bombed-out basement of the Big Tent in which he and the lads used to live, with the few remaining lads stabbing each other (and him) using the redundant tent pegs, while Gay Byrne passes overhead and poops on him from a great height, the poop thereafter recycled by commentators as definitively indicative of Martin’s lack of judgement.

When Brian Cowen took out Bertie Ahern, he was regarded as a hero. When Martin took out Cowen, no such kudos accrued. Instead, the pitch cap previously at home on Cowen’s head shifted to Martin’s head and the received wisdom now is that he is a cowardly wimp, incapable of making and sticking to a decision.

Now, given the fact that for some considerable time my company has served Fine Gael, it might be expected that I would gleefully confirm this portrayal. But truth matters. Even those who condemn Ahern make reference to the fact that he worked on the Good Friday Agreement through a time of personal bereavement.

Those who suggest Martin lacks courage might remember that he has worked through grievous personal loss in a department where harsh reminders of his loss were a daily inevitability.

SIMILARLY, when it’s said that he can’t make a decision and stick to it, it should not be forgotten that he took one decision — banning smoking in the work place — which he knew would crease Fianna Fáil’s strong supporters among the publicans, and stuck to it in the teeth of ferocious and sustained opposition.

It was a lousy political decision, but a good public health decision. It undoubtedly saved and will continue to save lives, but they are unmeasurable, anonymous and non-specific, those lives, whereas the hardship visited on pub-owners is easy to measure and to protest, complicated, as it has been, by the downturn in the economy and the strengthening of drink-driving laws.

The other trope in current received wisdom is that Fianna Fáil haven’t come to terms with becoming a tiny party. True. And this does go back to the leadership issue. Arguably the best parallel example of a bunch of privileged authority figures suddenly stripped of role, trappings and troops was what happened during the mutiny on the good ship Bounty a couple of centuries back, when the captain and a handful of officers were put into a long-boat with inadequate provisions and abandoned to the sea. Captain Bligh got that boat crew across hundreds of miles of open water to safety, because he was a good navigator, a great disciplinarian, and the interests of all on board were the same.

Fianna Fáil’s problem isn’t their captain. It’s that the interests of the few remaining in the boat are so widely divergent.