Floundering Government has taken its eye off the political ball

TWO political crises on a Monday morning. Isn’t that great!

Isn’t it amazing how the bread and circus that politics can dish up is usually enough to distract us from such petty concerns as paying the electricity bill or meeting the mortgage payments.

First of all, Patrick Nulty. I’ve met him a few times in the past, and he always seemed like a decent enough chap. I never understood how he could run in a by-election, in the full knowledge of the kind of difficult decisions that current politics demanded, and then resign from his party at the first opportunity. That never struck me as particularly mature, or even principled — why would somebody with such deep convictions run in the first place for a party he couldn’t agree with?

But clearly, he carried around some deeper difficulties. The revelations at the weekend suggest a lot of emotional problems. His private behaviour was completely unacceptable in anyone, let alone a public figure, and the signs would suggest that he resigned essentially because he was caught, having first tried to pretend that his phone had been hacked.

Having said that, I believe he needs sympathy and help rather than condemnation, and I’d hope that he gets the space to put his private life in order now.

The immediate consequence of his actions will be a by-election. And it could be a by-election of reasonably historic import. The question it will address is simple. Are Fianna Fáil on the way back?

When Nulty won the last by-election back in 2011 it was a bit overshadowed by the fact that the presidential election, itself a highly contentious and turbulent contest, was held the same day. But it was an extraordinary result — the first time in around 30 years that a party in government had won a by-election.

But it bucked another trend as well. There’s a kind of unwritten but normally immutable law of politics when it comes to by-elections. I call it the law of natural succession, because the electorate almost always fixes on the person who has some kind of emotional call on the seat — maybe someone who came really close the last time, or was closely related to the person whose death caused the by-election.

In the Dublin West scenario in 2011, which was caused by the untimely death of the highly respected Brian Lenihan, the natural successor was undoubtedly David McGuinness, the Fianna Fáil candidate. But Labour and Fine Gael between them had enough votes to beat him off.

So he, McGuinness, should win the by-election this time. The Government parties will not have the same support at all as they did then.

But there is another candidate. Ruth Coppinger, the Socialist candidate, did remarkably well the last time. She was fewer than 200 votes behind McGuinness on the first count, and actually ended up with exactly the same number of votes as he had.

Assuming both run again, this by-election will be a two-horse race, effectively, between Coppinger and McGuinness — between Fianna Fáil and the Socialist Party. In that sense, it will be a sort of mini-referendum on whether or not Fianna Fáil has made a sufficient recovery to begin to think of itself as a serious party of government again. If they don’t win the seat, and remain without a single TD in Dublin, Michael Martin will face an immediate crisis.

I watched Michael Martin’s presidential address to his ard fheis at the weekend, and I must say I thought he was really struggling. The speech was lame and platitudinous, and I thought I saw more than a few delegates nodding off. He has got to throw a lot of energy into this by-election — in fact if I was advising him I’d be urging him to move the writ next week, and throw down the gauntlet to the Government. It may be his last chance.

And there’ll never be a better moment. Because in some entirely unaccountable fashion, the Government has got itself into a right mess over the whistleblower controversy. It’s a classic piece of political mismanagement. The Government as a whole just don’t seem to get it. This has been going on for months now, it seems, and increasingly the public are wondering what the hell is going on. I’m even meeting members of the Garda force who are bemused and (to coin a phrase) disgusted at the behaviour of their own leadership.

There’s a deep tradition in the gardaí, as we all know, that reacts badly to criticism, and an overwhelming tendency to circle the wagons when any surfaces. But the widespread acceptance that there’s a culture of laxity and “looking after their own” when it comes to things like penalty points has undermined confidence in the gardaí and also within the force.

Many of them are fed up with what they see as the tribal and ill-considered responses of the Commissioner to the revelations of the whistleblowers. And it’s pretty clear that the public regards the two policemen who blew the whistle as credible and serious people who are trying to change a culture.

They have been victimised for doing so, and now the Government is split down the middle as a result. I can’t ever remember a situation where the taoiseach of the day called for his Cabinet to stop offering their views on a controversy in public and was so instantly ignored by a succession of his ministers. That fact alone elevates the row over the whistleblowers into a full-blown political crisis.

BY THE time you read this the Commissioner may have issued another “clarifying” statement, and Cabinet members may be issuing soothing noises. But they’ve allowed a serous situation to escalate into a disaster — one of those situations that could easily spin into the undermining of the Taoiseach’s authority.

And he can’t reassert his authority, it seems, by simply telling everyone to shut up. This matter must be resolved — or at least, the Taoiseach is going to have to take a firm position on it. The Commissioner described the whistleblowers as disgusting, Leo Varadker called them distinguished. What word would the Taoiseach use? If he sides with the Commissioner, isn’t he in a minority in his own Cabinet? If he slaps the Commissioner down, what are the repercussions? If he dithers, what are the ultimate consequences for himself? Could this turn into what Albert Reynolds once famously called one of the little things that trip you up?

Every now and again in the lifetime of a government you can see signs that the eye has been taken off the ball. Government deals with complex and difficult issues and choices on a daily basis. Occasionally, unplanned things happen — “events”, they’re often called. The art of political management is often to be seen in how a government pursues its programme effectively. But it’s much more crucial when “events” happen. Right now, the absence of political management on the part of the Government may be the best thing that Fianna Fáil has going for it. Now there’s a disaster!