Not for reproduction or resale. All rights reserved by Gill & Macmillan Publishers. 1 Extract - Chapter 4 - Fine Gael’s Dysfunctional Kilkenny Cats may yet let Gilmore into the Taoiseach’s Office Through the Cat Flap There is one moment that captures the farcical nature of the most curious political organisation in Irish life it is the little-known Battle of Baggot Street. The spectacle of two groups of drunken middle-aged men almost coming to blows at 3am in the centre of Dublin was odd enough. But when the personnel consist of the distinguished front-bench members of the nation’s top Opposition party, then we are in the territory of Swift. Sadly, though the initial cat-calling was quite vigorous, age and the portliness of the combatants meant we were spared any headlines about the Fine Gael front bench ‘arrested after late night brawl’. Instead, as is so typically the case with FG, after a short bout of the ‘hold me back’ stuFF both sides embraced the politics of Slattery’s Mounted Foot and ran away to fight another day. Coming as it did, shortly after the second heave against John Bruton, it was, however, yet another example of business as usual amongst the fighting Kilkenny cats of FG. When it comes to the status of being the most dysfunctional party in Irish politics, one would have thought Fianna Fáil, with its vast retinue of corrupt leaders, would be the favourite for that role. However, outside of noting that like the Mafia FF are quite at ease with the corruption ‘thing’, the success of the party has fireproofed their members from any such concerns. Instead, like all natural born aristocrats, they are so insouciant that if Mr Cowen were to race around Dublin setting cats on fire, the most that FF would concede is that their leader had become a little eccentric. Labour, meanwhile, are so at ease with their lack of success the faction fighting resembles some cunning plan that has been devised to keep the brethren safe from having their vestal consciences disturbed by responsibilities of any sort. The madness of FG man is all the more curious for one would have to go back to the Ottoman eunuchs to find a body of men so at ease with impotence. FF’s contempt for these courtly fops is summarised by one scathing comment: ‘Carlsberg don’t do Oppositions but if they did they’d choose Fine Gael.’ However, if you are to truly understand why FG is mad, we must explore the soul of the petite bourgeoisie. It might be expected FG’s designated status as the representatives of middle Ireland means they should embrace the politics of normality. But history alone suggests no other class of society does dysfunction better than the petite bourgeoisie. Our aristocrats and the working classes are at ease with their existence, for one class exists without hope whilst the aristocracy know nothing of fear. But, caught as they are by envy and unfulfilled desire, those members of a petite bourgeoisie that drove such disparate movements as the rise of fascism and Marxism need the exhilaration of secret vices to escape the tepid chains of respectability. By day the petit bourgeois tries to understand the tumescent prose of Kevin Myers as he commutes and his Stepford wife chooses icy colour schemes of the ‘antique white would be nice’ variety. However, once the curtains close then the swinging and the opium pipes begin. Of course, the same petite bourgeoisie are the Not for reproduction or resale. All rights reserved by Gill & Macmillan Publishers. 2 main cheerleaders of all our moral furies but heir anxiety to join the mob is informed by middle class man’s hatred of the self, which means he is always keen to fashion the whip with which he can beat his own back. As with so many things the fault for FG’s current status lies with Garret FitzGerald. Up to the arrival of Garret the Good, FG was the unimaginative voice for those solicitors, accountants, small shopkeepers and big farmers whose existence was informed by the desire to spoil the party for FF rather than any real desire to rule. Occasionally they accidentally gave FF a breather from the excesses of power and though nothing much changed during these brief interludes it did at least take the one-party gloss off the state. It was a limited existence but at least FG knew where they stood. But under Garret suddenly the party became a riddle of contradictions as it attempted to graft an alien social democratic petit bourgeois liberal mindset onto the old blueshirt roots. It was, to put it mildly, a struggle to keep Oliver J Flanagan and Michael McDowell in the same tent. For a while the charisma of FitzGerald meant the Knight of St Columbus could walk, hand in hand, with the liberal secularist lion of the Bar Library. Inevitably, however, the departure of Garret to the sanctity of an Irish Times column meant FG splintered into a rump as the brains of the party took flight to the pds and the Greens. It was bad enough that the party was neither right, left, nor centre or that they have never, since Garret, secured a sufficiently charismatic leader who might unify the unlovely collection. Ultimately the greatest problem for FG was that under FitzGerald, they became the party of the petite bourgeoisie, and from that moment the madness of that class insinuated itself into the dna. In their case the bourgeois vice they picked was murder. The decision of FG to engage in a frolic of political infighting was also a classic case of how the devil makes work for idle hands, for when it came to the main theatre of political warfare these plankton stood no chance against a benevolent whale called Bertie. Seeing as, even during the age of Bertie, the FF theory of governance resembled Christy Moore’s famous man on the surfboard after 15 pints of stout, one would have thought FG might have put up a bigger fight. That, however, would have required application and the one element of their core ethos FG remained true to is their dilettante instincts. So it was that they were reduced to playing the preying mantis upon themselves. Initially the war was between the Bruton and Dukes factions but they then split into the Kenny, Dukes, Mitchell, Noonan and Bruton clans. Ironically the more intense the fighting became, the less clear it became as to what they were actually fighting for. But like the Kilkenny cats that fought and fought until the only thing left was a tail, FG fought and fought until all that was left was a rump. In fairness, during this ‘family at war’ era FG were at least entertaining. This was epitomised by one leadership crisis where four of their finest burst into Bruton’s office to tender their resignations. Sadly before they uttered a word, Bruton, who had already been informed of the incipient coup d’état, beamed broadly and said, ‘Aw, you’ve no need to resign, lads, you’re already sacked.’ Such was the asinine nature of the internecine warfare on another occasion the Noonan faction leaked an internally commissioned profile to the media that had said that Bruton needed to get his teeth cleaned and lose 2 stone. Subsequently when Noonan replaced Bruton it was noted with some 14 cute hoors and pious protesters merriment the same could be said of the bright new leader. Not for reproduction or resale. All rights reserved by Gill & Macmillan Publishers. 3 Ironically, despite all his faults, the worst thing that happened to FG was the loss of John Bruton, for this was the moment FG finally lost its soul. You see, the one thing real FG man wants is to be on solid ground and Mr Bruton was the living representation of that desire. Like a sort of old-style Captain Mainwaring, the Brut was a stolid, unimaginative soul who sat in the office pondering great thoughts and bothered little with the necessary evils of meeting the people. He was, if you like, the political equivalent of a thick meaty steak. Enda, in contrast, is a soufflé. Of course, by the time he left they were well fed up of ‘the Brut’. But when one considers his successors consist of the man who brought us ‘the Baldy Bus’ and a nodding, winking caricature of Bertie, it was hardly an improvement and the party is, alas, still in a right old mess. For a time after 2007, the party that does not know what it stands for, under a leader it has no faith in, managed to hang together. However, in the aftermath of the failed coup of the innocents, FG are now led by a man who failed to take out Bertie when he was political road kill and Michael Noonan, who visibly blanched at the prospect of taking on a Bertie who was admittedly at the peak of his curious powers. It is, when one adds in Cute Oul’ Phil Hogan and James ‘Bottler’ Reilly, a gristly sort of dream team that has left FG dangerously exposed to yet another Nightmare on Kildare Street. On this occasion the threat is not that FF might slip in through the back door. Instead, the even greater horror is that whilst the FG cats are yowling on the Leinster House lawn, pink but perfect Mr Gilmore will become the first Labour leader to enter government buildings through the front as distinct from the servants’ entrance.