Paul Hosford: McEntee 'was never interested in Fine Gael leadership'

The last year has seen Minister for Justice Helen McEntee go from Simon Harris’s equal in the race to be the next Fine Gael leader to being the first minister to endorse him publicly. Picture: Niall Carson/PA

Helen McEntee was never interested in the Fine Gael leadership. So she says, at least.

The day after Leo Varadkar had created a vacancy for which Ms McEntee had once been tipped as a certainty, the Justice Minister told LMFM yesterday morning that her mind was made up long ago.

She told host Michael Reade: “This is a decision I suppose I probably made a year or two ago, that if this was to come up in the near future or the immediate future, that it’s not something that I’d be putting myself forward for.”

However, she was also quick to say that she wasn’t ever going to be interested in the leadership of Fine Gael at this time.

While it is true that Ms McEntee was never considered to be “on maneouvres” as such, there is a definite feeling within the party that she is ambitious and would have relished becoming the first female Taoiseach.

But for the Meath East TD and another minister who has previously been a contender — Simon Coveney — the idea of disrupting Simon Harris’s coronation was never on the agenda, a sign of how the political cycle had shifted.

For Ms McEntee, the last year has seen her go from Mr Harris’s equal in the race to be the next Fine Gael leader to being the first minister to endorse him publicly.

In February 2022, this newspaper asked every member of the parliamentary party for their view on the next leader and Ms McEntee was only marginally behind her cabinet colleague and soon-to-be Taoiseach.

But within the hours of Mr Varadkar’s decision to stand down, Ms McEntee did not feature in much speculation. One member of the parliamentary party who had previously backed her said that “times had changed” significantly in the 24 months since that poll.

Within Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, there is a sense that Ms McEntee had become too focused on the social aspects of her Justice portfolio and a bill aimed at tackling hate speech has become a handy go-to for criticism of the minister, regardless of the truth.

The bill is the first specific legislation that would deal with hate crime in Ireland, and would update existing hate speech laws, which the minister called “ineffective and limited”, but has attracted mass opposition online, including from X owner Elon Musk.

Leo Varadkar stands with party colleagues Hildegarde Naughton, Heather Humphreys, Simon Harris, Simon Coveney, Paschal Donohoe, and Helen McEntee. Picture: Nick Bradshaw/PA

The bill’s mere existence is pointed to as the reason for anything from garda shortages to antisocial behaviour. If it didn’t exist, critics say, Ms McEntee would be able to solve those other issues. Indeed a coalition colleague and former Justice Minister Willie O’Dea said that “the public want her to focus more on delivering safe streets than on playing to the woke gallery” instead of working on a “flawed hate bill”.

But it was the Dublin riots in November which crystalised that criticism.

Amid disquiet over the policing of anti-migrant protests, the stabbing of a five-year-old girl by a foreign national lit the touch paper.

However, Ms McEntee was characterised as being absent and aloof, her insistence that Dublin is safe in the days after only serving to raise the ire.

One party colleague says that the riots were “the moment (Simon) Harris won it”, but asked by this writer if she felt they had played a part in her not running, Ms McEntee was adamant they did not and that her decision not to run had predated them, in any case.

Even if that is true, Ms McEntee has seen her star wane in the party and in the eyes of the public to the extent that she was not really considered a viable candidate in a pool of just five people.

But she is young, she is an active minister, and she has a chance to reverse her political momentum.

On the flipside, Simon Coveney on Wednesday admitted that his chance had come and gone.

“I made a decision quite some time ago that I wouldn’t stand in another leadership contest, I had my chance, I wasn’t successful the last time, I think there’s a lot of talent in the party,” he said.

Mr Coveney contested the 2017 leadership election that saw Leo Varadkar become Taoiseach but lost despite taking 65% of the votes of ordinary members, losing in the party’s electoral college system.

He would later become Tánaiste as well as Foreign Affairs Minister and was highly praised for his work during Brexit, but his handling of some issues, most notably the controversy around Katherine Zappone’s botched appointment as a UN envoy, saw him slip down the internal charts.

When his constituency colleague Micheál Martin moved from the Taoiseach’s office to the Tánaiste’s, he took with him the Foreign Affairs portfolio, with Mr Coveney moving to Enterprise, a place where he has found it hard to maintain his profile.

But he retained allies within the party and a number of Harris supporters on Wednesday said that their first loyalty would have been with the Corkman had he decided to run.

While the two senior ministers might now wonder what Taoiseach Harris has in store for them, Ms McEntee may look at Mr Coveney’s example and wonder if her chance has gone too.