Leo will do fine as Taoiseach – but he may not see second term

World of Politics

The fine art of political prediction is a skill some of us utilise almost every day – and we get it wrong about as often as a person who always calling black on a roulette table. Maybe even more! The consolation is that even in the age of the information superhighway (I haven’t used that term for a while) there are next to no consequences for calling something wrong.

If you go back to Fianna Fáil’s disastrous election of 2011, there were a few commentators afterwards – Noel Whelan foremost among them – who expressed doubt about the party surviving.

Back in 2002, when Fine Gael had a black day, there were people expressing the same concerns. In both cases they were wrong.

Both parties had enough grass roots or foot soldiers – the Irish term is the lovely ‘cosmhuintir’ – to bring them through the bad terms and help rebuild the party. You could justifiably argue that neither party has come back with the same strength it had possessed in the past. But I think that’s the longer term decline of the big two we are witnessing rather than solely attributable to a woeful election.

I think the same can be said for Labour.

The party will recover and will not be wiped out. But it will struggle to have the same reach as it had when at its strongest.

So last year, when the succession game started, the first thing that was on the table was Enda Kenny’s departure date. If you go back to the cuttings you see confident predictions he will be gone by summer, by the autumn, by Christmas and by spring.

In Kenny’s own mind, he thought he might have seen out 2017 but as time went on his control of that ‘narrative’ would inevitable have loosened in any instance. After all we knew that he himself had said he could not lead the party into another election. Besides, nobody was sure when an election might occur.

In the event, he determined his own political fate with a kind of reverse brain freeze – in an interview he thoughtlessly blurted out an account of a conversation he had with Minister for Children Katherine Zappone before her meeting with Garda whistleblower Sergeant Maurice McCabe.

There was one slight flaw with the account; the conversation never occurred.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.