Mick Clifford: The house of Healy-Rae has fallen victim to 'The Split'

The smart money isn’t looking too smart of late, but it says there will be no coming back from this, writes Mick Clifford

Danny Healy-Rae (left) and Michael Healy-Rae (right) outside Leinster House last year. Now we hear it was his brother Danny, his own kith and kin, that drove Michael from office. File photo: Alan Rowlette / © RollingNews.ie

The smart money says there wasn’t a cow milked in neither south nor south-west Kerry last night. The streets of Kilgarvan were reported to be “quiet”, but all leave has been cancelled in fear that a schimozzle could break out at any time.

The shock reverberated across the whole county, and indeed the national consciousness, but it has been felt most keenly in the heartlands from where the dynasty was sprung. The Healy-Raes, that most astute of political entities, have succumbed to the curse of Brendan Behan. They are the latest victims of 'The Split'.

Mr Behan opined that the first item on an Irish organisation’s agenda is 'The Split', but he was wide of the mark as far as the Healy-Rae political dynasty was concerned. Since its inception under the tutelage of Jackie, father of all the Healy-Raes, this outfit has been tight. 

They have spoken, campaigned, roared at successive Taoisigh, as a single voice down all the years. There will be no more of that. Who knows what tomorrow brings but following yesterday’s news of 'The Split', anything is possible.

Danny Healy-Rae and Michael Healy-Rae outside Leinster House last year. Michael claims Danny had cost him his job as a government minister. File photo: Alan Rowlette / © RollingNews.ie

The world, or at least south and south-west Kerry, awoke to the sound of Michael Healy-Rae baring his soul across the airwaves. He told Jerry O’Sullivan on Radio Kerry that his brother and fellow TD, fellow scion of the dynasty, Danny, had cost him his job as a government minister.

This occurred in the wake of the fuel protests in April, on the day before a confidence motion in the government. At that time, Danny went on the same Radio Kerry and told the same presenter that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael should get rid of their respective leaders.

Michael, who as part of a deal with the government parties — that included Danny’s vote — had been serving as junior minister for agriculture. And if truth be told — and he’d tell you himself anyway — he was doing a damn fine job of it.

Nobody should have been surprised. He is a highly successful businessman and a highly astute politician. He may have been dizzy from actually doing executive work rather than lambasting it from a height, but he was showing himself to be to the government born.

Then Danny tells Jerry O’Sullivan that the governing parties should get rid of their leaders. Man dear, on such a declaration the whole house of Healy-Raes came tumbling down.

On Tuesday, Michael raked over the embers with Jerry, who wasn’t at all disappointed with the landing of a mighty scoop. He said:

With those words that were issued, that’s what cost Kerry a ministry in agriculture, that is an absolute fact, it is very disappointing.

“It’s not the place of an independent to go telling a parliamentary party what they are supposed to do,” Michael added.

He tried to fix things in the wake of this insubordination, but it was beyond repair. He had no choice but to walk. The brief flirtation of a Healy-Rae exercising executive power on behalf of the nation was at an end.

To be fair to Danny, his belief that it was okay to talk out of both sides of his mouth had its origins in a nod from the leaders of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. 

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The party leaders did all they could at the outset of this Dáil to allow Danny and a few others both support the government and act as opposition when it came to speaking rights. 

So Danny might rightly claim that when he was on Radio Kerry he was talking out of the opposition side of his mouth. What’s wrong with that?

Perhaps it was the deep sense of shock Michael was experiencing at the time, but he gave a very different excuse for his leave taking in its immediate aftermath. At the time he referenced a landscape lifted from Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptical novel, The Road.

He told the Dáil about how he observed the fuel crisis biting as he drove around among his people:

When I see people begging on the side of the road, when I’ve seen grown men cry. 

This was why honour forced him to hand in his badge and return to the opposition where he can empathise with the weeping and the wailing that he said he saw.

Now we hear it was not the dangerous buffoonery of Trump’s war on Iran that drove Michael from office. It was not the Imams with their weaponising of the Strait of Hormuz. 

It wasn’t even Micheál Martin and Simon Harris adopting a “let them eat Mars bars and walk instead of driving” positioning. 

All along, it was Danny. Danny, his own kith and kin, his confederate, his co-pilot, his capless big brother. Danny, for whom first preferences were thicker than blood, not to mind water nor fuel.

The smart money isn’t looking too smart of late, but it says there will be no coming back from this. No reunion tour, no Oasis-like reconciliation in the name of a few bob. 

The Healy-Raes are not the Gallagher brothers. This world of ours keeps getting crazier.