Tribalism is leading us to instability - Fianna Fáil in conference

WHEN he was asked about leadership options in Fianna Fáil late last year, the venerable Willie O’Dea declared: “And I say this with the greatest respect to my colleagues — I respect each and every one of them — I look around the [parliamentary party] table in my mind’s eye, and I don’t see the messiah and when I look in the mirror I don’t see him either.”

If Mr O’Dea looked around the RDS over the weekend for an original, game-changing, party-reviving idea, he would have been just as flummoxed. Like a man — in Fianna Fáil it more or less always is a man — looking for a defibrillator to save a stricken colleague, he would have been frustrated and disappointed. Like a once-powerful Anglo-Irish family forced to make do and mend because of the impositions of the Land Commission, coping with radically changed circumstances does not seem to have provoked radical, fortune-restoring thinking or ambition.

Rather, the pathetic image of delegates posing for photographs beside old posters of the crook Charles Haughey are redolent of banners seen when Russia’s old and bewildered carry posters of Stalin, Lenin, and even Beria as a way to criticise today’s Kremlin leaders. None of us can deny our past but it is sometimes best to look forward with determination rather than backwards with never-to-be-satisfied longing and regret. Better to plan than bemoan a lost past.