Enda waves bye-bye to seat

It started off as the by-election the Coalition could not lose and ended-up as the bye-bye election for the Government’s majority in the Seanad.

And all because Fine Gael tried to make it a buy-election by clumsily attempting to buy their candidate some cultural credibility by hoisting him onto the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art days before Enda Kenny just so happened to nominate him to the cultural panel of the upper house.

Indeed, at the start, Kenny probably thought he was being as clever as that devious fixer played by Kevin Spacey in House Of Cards, but almost immediately this house of cards collapsed and the Taoiseach was left looking like the joker in the pack.

The ensuing uproar saw this piece of political theatre plunge into the depths of political farce as Fine Gael’s John McNulty pleaded for people not to vote for him. Mr Kenny accepted the blame for everything, which really meant he accepted it for nothing as he never actually spelled out what he was taking responsibility for and then tried to insist it was all the fault of a Fine Gael flunky whom he refused to name.

To make matters more ridiculous, it then began to look as if Mr McNulty might win the seat he had said he did not want.

Given that only the 223 sitting TDs and senators actually have a vote in this most undemocratic of elections it was anyone’s guess what would happen after Labour’s deputy leader Alan Kelly flatly refused to vote for the Fianna Fáil-backed Independent candidate, and ex-British soldier Gerard Craughwell, and insisted he would vote for Mr McNulty regardless.

And then the drama shifted to the little drinks room next to the Oireachtas canteen where the votes were being totted-up by the bar.

On the first count Mr Craughwell stood on 87 votes to Mr McNulty’s 84, so it would be up to the 22 votes redistributed from the Sinn Féin candidate that would decide the matter.

Eleven of them went over to Mr Craughwell so in a deeply ironic twist on the party’s most infamously lurid slogan it would appear Sinn Féin went into this election with a ballot box in one hand and a British ‘armyite’ in the other.

Despite constantly lecturing the rest of us on our democratic duty, 16 Oireachtas members did not even bother voting while another 14 spoiled their ballot papers.

Given the mess they made of the whole saga, speculation was rife on Mr Kenny and Arts Minister hapless Heather Humphreys being among the spoilers.

Phil Hogan was still eligible to vote as he does not become a European Commissioner until October 31 — yes, one of the Government’s most accident-prone ministers takes over the €60 billion agriculture budget on Halloween which is enough to frighten any farmer.

So, the Coalition no longer has a majority in the upper house just as it tries to push through the budget. But as the Government ignored the clearly stated call from voters to reform the Seanad, any bills knocked back by it will just be passed through — on the nod — by the Dáil anyway.

But as the old majority depended on the 11 nominees of the Taoiseach voting with the Government, and because Mr Kenny chose a number of independently minded senators in his first days in power, an awful lot of legislation may start swinging back and forward between the two houses.

But, surely the Taoiseach would not actually have spoiled his ballot paper, would he?

Well, he did spoil the whole election for Fine Gael after all.