Daniel McConnell: Dáil tantrums will hand the advantage over to opposition

Turf saga escalates Coalition woes

The proposed turf ban caused huge controversy. Picture: Larry Cummins

In politics, when you are explaining, you are losing.

The Green Party has had to do an awful lot of explaining in relation to its botched plan to ban the sale of turf in recent days.

To be frank, it has not been a week for the Irish political system to be overly proud of itself.

The convulsions within the Dáil this week over the issue of turf, using and selling, has led to a series of unseemly episodes which has left Green Party leader Eamon Ryan reeling, the Government under fire again for incompetence and increased tensions between the coalition parties.

On one side, we had Ryan and his Green Party argue that the ban is necessary to prevent 1,300 deaths linked to poor air quality every year annually and that this ban is years overdue.

On the other, you have rural TDs, opposition and government alike, who have raged that this ban will place poor, older, and rural people “in danger” because of fuel poverty and, because of the mishandled attempts to find a compromise, people are left bamboozled and the public confidence in the environmental cause has been damaged.

Despite the pressures of the pandemic, housing, health, Leo Varadkar’s leak saga, and now the war in Ukraine, the Coalition has looked pretty solid and stable.

However, the speed and ferocity of such tensions also belie the outwardly calm impression given by the political landscape, and point to more significant tensions bubbling away within the coalition.

With a succession of ministers using the increasingly common phrase of “things could have been handled better” (remember only two weeks ago they were all using that in relation to the botched secondment of Tony Holohan to Trinity College Dublin), the proposed ban on the sale of turf, put plainly, was yet another mishandled debacle by the government, which has only served to underscore a sense of incompetence at the top.

Forced into a hasty retreat

Tensions ran high and Ryan already a bete noir for rural TDs who see him as being on a one-man mission to destroy their way of life, was forced into a hasty retreat.

Ryan was by all accounts subjected to “robust” criticism at the hands of Fine Gael TDs and senators, according to reports on the meeting.

He was accused by the Deputy Government Whip and Kerry TD Brendan Griffin of threatening the stability of the Coalition at the private meeting with Fine Gael TDs.

Eamon Ryan: On the receiving end of robust criticism by rural TDs. File Picture

Former minister Michael Ring accused Ryan of trying to put him off the road, of ceding votes for the Coalition parties to Sinn Féin, of taking away people’s livelihoods, and of allowing the public service to run the country into the ground.

Clare TD Joe Carey challenged Mr Ryan by asking if he had ever “saved” turf — the practice of turning turf in order to dry it — to which Mr Ryan said he had not.

Another former minister, Charlie Flanagan, said the ceiling of 500 people in small rural communities who will be exempt from the ban will set small villages against each other and were a recipe for division and strike.

The ban as proposed was unworkable and unenforceable and extinguishing legal rights of turbary and legally held licences to cut and remove turf will prove complex and costly, Flanagan said.

Ahead of the vote on Wednesday night on a Sinn Féin motion seeking to scrap the ban, there was a high degree of nervousness in Government ranks that TDs would “go missing” when the vote was taken.

Government whips Jack Chambers and Brendan Griffin were contacting TDs to see if pairs could be arranged to avoid a government defeat.

The Dáil at Leaders Questions on Tuesday descended into farce with Taoiseach Micheál Martin being accused of “drinking too much green tea” by Mattie McGrath after he told the rural Independents to “relax” and that cycling and eating salads are good for you.

Martin, responding to Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s charge that the ban was “map cap and half-baked”, jokingly told her “don’t sue me”, in reference to her latest legal action against RTÉ.

At his parliamentary party meeting, just before the vote, Martin again moved to assuage his backbenches saying that there will be no proposal that affects traditional turf practices or the sharing of turf in rural Ireland.

"There will be no proposals which affect traditional turf practices or the sharing of turf in rural Ireland.  The rights people currently have will be protected in rural areas. There is a pragmatic and sensible way to resolve this,” he said.

People will not be stopped from using their own turf, I don’t know how many times I have to say it.

In the end, the Sinn Féin motion was defeated and all potential rebels ultimately stayed on board.

But reflecting on the week, several senior Fine Gael people have conceded their own TDs had not excelled themselves in how they conducted themselves.

The sense is that the fury is not just about turf but a building sense that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil were “dancing to the Greens’ tune”.

They spotted a gap in which to give the Greens a kicking and they did so with relish in order to create a bit of space between them to their constituents back home.

From within Fianna Fáil, despite Martin’s position now seen as unassailable, there is a lot of tension lying beneath the surface and the turf issue became a lightning rod.

Many rural TDs and senators complained that they went out and sold the transition away from turf on the basis that it would happen over eight years, only for Ryan to seek to do it in two.

“We already took a lot of heat over eight years. There was no way we could do it over two. We might as well have given up if we did that. Ryan is so unpopular now and we will carry the can for it,” was the assessment from one Fianna Fáil TD.

For example, at the Fianna Fáil meeting on Wednesday night, Ryan was also slammed for what was described as “fresh messing” with the road in Limerick, which was the subject of a major stand-off with the likes of Willie O’Dea, Cathal Crowe, and Timmy Dooley previously.

Ultimately, the issue will be fudged and a pragmatic solution will be found, which will mean some humble pie for Ryan in the short run.

Energy crisis

But a word on Sinn Féin. The party has quite brazenly been speaking out of both sides of its mouth on energy.

Since Christmas, the party has sought to make hay with the cost of living crisis, raising it again and again at Leaders’ Questions.

It has railed against the carbon taxes but at the same time sought to retain it as pointed out by Ryan in exchanges with Pearse Doherty on Thursday.

“Sinn Féin will, therefore, retain the carbon tax?” Ryan asked, to which Doherty replied “We are not going to increase it,” conceding that it is not for abolishing it.

Sinn Féin has shown that smart messaging and slick social media communications are vital in the modern political world, and has been very successful in deploying such tools.

The difficulty is that they are no substitute for serious policy agenda, which from Sinn Féin’s perspective is sorely lacking.

However, if the Government keeps messing up in the way it has done, it won’t matter. They will simply keep handing the advantage over to their rivals.

 

 

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