Leaving the stage – Rabbitte the most political of animals

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

As exits go, Greece may claim the bigger headlines – but Yanis Varoufakis wasn’t the only larger-than-life politician to announce his departure from the political stage this week; we’re losing one of our best known political animals too….a Rabbitte to be precise about it.

The former Labour leader – a graduate of NUIG and former president of the Students Union – announced earlier this week that he will not be standing in the next general election, either early next year or very late in 2015.

It’s clear Pat Rabbitte’s decision was resisted by party headquarters. Its handlers released some internal polling figures over the weekend that showed that he was the party’s strongest hope of winning a seat in Dublin South West, the new five-seat constituency encompassing working-class Tallaght, and middle class Templeogue and Rathfarnham.

Labour did exceptionally well there in 2011, winning two seats out of four with Eamon Maloney taking the second seat for Labour.

Now as an expanded five seaters, Sinn Féin and the Paul Murphy of the Socialist Party look strong and well placed to take three seats out of five, with the fourth seat going to Fine Gael.

As for the fifth? Well Fianna Fáil’s John Lahart is not showing up and fine TD as he is, Maloney is a very understated guy – and being understated is not an attribute you normally associate with a politician .

Rabbitte is the third former leader of the Labour Party to announce in recent months that he will not be contesting the next election – following the announcements of Ruairí Quinn and Eamon Gilmore.

Already in the corridors of Leinster House there are whispers that with its support struggling (and failing) to get out of single-digit figures, we might see older and more established Labour Party TDs doing the same thing as a legion of Fianna Fáilers did in the run-up to the 2011 general election, when they saw the writing on the wall.

Virtually the entire Cabinet put up the white flag including outgoing leader Brian Cowen, Dermot Ahern and Noel Dempsey. In fairness, some of the outgoing TDs were willing to stand but were told in no uncertain terms that they couldn’t.

The reason? There was more than one outgoing Fianna Fáil deputy in those constituencies and the blunt reality was the party had no chance of retaining any seat in those areas if it did not run a single candidate.

So the second (such as Noel O’Flynn in Cork North Central) was told to take one for the team.

It’s a little different for Rabbitte. For one, he is not resigning because he has been reading the tea leaves and sees little chance of winning a seat.

His reasons are more to do with his ministerial career having come to an end and the ennui that would come to a life on the back benches of Dáil Eireann.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.