There is now a deep sense of fear within Government about the trajectory of the Zappone affair and the continuing toxic fallout for the Coalition.
At one level, the controversy is doing what every political storm does – it commandeers the political agenda and prevents the Government from talking about the things it wants to talk about. Ministers are peppered with questions from reporters and interviewers about the latest twist and turn in the saga, often on points of detail about which they have no idea and on an issue on which they are privately furious. Eventually press officers can’t find any TDs or Ministers for interview and the Government crouches in the corner until the storm blows over, or a resignation deflates it.
Few people in the Government can bring themselves to believe that the almost comically botched appointment of a former government minister to a low-profile – and hardly lucrative – role will cost Simon Coveney his job. The reverberations through Fine Gael and by extension the Coalition as a whole would be seismic. There is, at present, no essential force in Government of the view that Coveney should resign. (Though bear in mind that no taoiseach or party leader ever sacrifices a government to save a minister.)
Explanation needed
But the view around Government on Monday night is that while Coveney's survival is in his own hands, it requires him to come through what looks like a potentially very difficult encounter at the Oireachtas foreign affairs committee on Tuesday morning.
Coveney must explain why – despite all appearances and significant circumstantial evidence to the contrary – this was not a job made up for an old colleague. Bear in mind that Coveney will be insisting he imagined and defined the role and then – in a separate decision-making process, mind – decided to appoint Zappone to it, months before his officials had scoped out the appointment.
He will also have questions to answer about his insistence that she did not lobby him (despite multifarious contacts) and about the deletion of messages and security issues on his mobile phone.
Damaged coalition
Above all, Coveney must convince the members of the committee – and the members of the public and the media watching him – that he did not mislead the committee when he spoke to it last week. And he must draw a line under the affair. The worst thing he could do is give evidence which prompts more questions.
Even if Coveney emerges intact from the interrogation, however, the events and handling of them in recent weeks have caused the Coalition significant and sustained damage, internally and externally.
Sure, controversies usually blow over, and often they’re never as serious in the public’s eye as they are in the media’s eye. But the Zappone affair has opened separate, deep wounds within the two largest parties of government, which will continue to fester.
And it has reinforced one of the central opposition critiques of the Coalition – that it likes nothing better than to look after its elite pals. However the controversy ends, that is the message that many voters will take away from it. On the face of it, it’s hard to blame them.
