Rebel Keaveney may not be the last of the disenchanted to join the Soldiers of Destiny

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

Colm Keaveney’s decision to join Fianna Fáil last week was – to put it at its very mildest – took us all by surprise. The first I heard about it was about 8.50am on Tuesday morning when RTE’s Morning Ireland phoned me to say that the story was trending on Twitter and would I mind coming on to talk about it.

I made a few frantic phone calls to senior Fianna Fáil people I knew but none were able to confirm. Twitter is grand but it’s not the Oracle and I wasn’t going to go onto national radio and confirm it on the back of a couple of tweets. So it was a very conditional interview…full of ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ get out clauses.

I did say that if it were true it would be intriguing and almost sensational.

Five minutes after the programme went off air, one of the Fianna Fáil people came back to say it was true, and Keaveney would be joining the party that very day and he and Micheal Martin would be appearing on the plinth of Leinster House at lunchtime.

“Alea iacta est,” Keaveney had said when he decided to vote against his own party when the vote on social welfare measures came up after Budget 2012.

Its meaning is the die has been cast. It referred to the decision by Julius Caesar to cross the Rubicon, giving notice he was challenging the authority of the Empire to which he had sworn allegiance.

And now for a second time, Tuam’s own legionnaire was crossing the Rubicon, this time to rejoin the party with which he was associated as a young man.

Within minutes of the announcement, his former colleagues in the Labour Party were busy foraging through the archives, finding juicy comments by the same Colm Keaveney slating Fianna Fáil. They didn’t have to search too hard. There were many, including a few choice YouTube clips, and boy, did Keaveney go in hard on Fianna Fáil, accusing it of corruption, graft and the divil and all.

He stuck to the argument that Fianna Fáil had changed and was the only party to have learned from mistakes of the past. Did it sound hollow? Well, a little. You just couldn’t escape from the impression that for each party in the transaction, the other was a flag of convenience.

That said, Keaveney was a Fianna Failer in his youth, and even when he was involved in student politics. It could be that he is returning to the roost but he will need to show, in the immediate to medium term at least, that he is a party person first and foremost and is not likely go go on a solo run every time the ball is passed to him.

So what are the issues? Well, on a national level will it make a difference and is it the beginning of a trend? On a local level, how is it going to play in Galway East, both within Fianna Fáil and in the wider constituency?

Keaveney is a capable politician and there is no doubt that he is more interested and involved in policy than many of his fellows. He has also shown a high degree of skill in building up a base in Galway East from nothing that brought him a Dail seat in the 2011 election.

In the past few days, there have been rumours that other TDs and Senators may follow Keaveney into Fianna Fáil. Those who have been mentioned include the Meath West TD Peadar Tóibín – who is out of favour and out of sorts with Sinn Féin – and two independent TDs Peter Mathews in Dublin South and Stephen Donnelly in Wicklow.

The over-loquacious Mathews tends to dominate every meeting he goes and has rubbed a lot of his fellow colleagues up the wrong way by not being able to know when it is more politic to be silent. That said, he has a political cache, and would be a credible candidate for Fianna Fáil in the European elections. If he won, the party would have a fighting chance of winning the bye-election.

Donnelly is a very bright and articulate Deputy – and, yes, he’s not shy about letting you know about that – but he would be a big prize for Fianna Fáil who would elevate him immediately. The party has no seat in Wicklow at present and that would be an extra bonus.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.