“Martin prepares to be Taoiseach” read the banner headline on Monday’s Examiner, with a five-column photo of the Fianna Fáil leader beaming out at readers from the gloom. “Like the Virgin Mary!” chortled an aide.
For a politician, there is no validation sweeter than from his hometown newspaper. Donald Trump once raged at the New York Times for failing to give him, a fellow New Yorker, a break. For years, Fianna Fáilers in Cork groused that the Examiner was too keen to trumpet the political achievements of the city’s Fine Gael merchant princes. No longer. Never mind the princes now, boy. Now Micheál Martin is the king.
It will not be, of course, his first time as taoiseach. In 2020, with the socially distanced Dáil sitting in the National Convention Centre, a masked Micheál was elected to the State’s most powerful office. But it was all rather cold and perfunctory, shorn of the ceremony and sense of personal triumph for the new taoiseach and his family (Look! It was all worth it!) that usually marks the occasion.
This time, after an election in which Fianna Fáil clearly came out on top, it will be different. His family will be there, the children all adults now but still close-knit, fiercely loyal, tested and bound together by tragedy. Half of Cork will be there, in spirit. And Fianna Fáil – the party that he has dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming and often plotting against him, into the Ireland of the 2020s – will be there, pinching itself, and half-thinking, Jaysus, it’s like the old days.
It’s not of course, the old days, and they know it. But the fact that they are alive at all to see the new days – a lot of that is down to the man soon to become taoiseach.
A particularly irresponsible form of chaos
If Martin seems to have been around forever, he sort of has. When he became a TD in 1989 at the age of 28, Charles Haughey was taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil, enjoying the final, grandiose stage of his long and scandal-strewn imperium. Martin was a stout Haughey loyalist. That loyalty passed on to Haughey’s heir, Bertie Ahern, when Ahern succeeded to the leadership in 1994 after the fall of Albert Reynolds.
Ahern snatched a victory in the 1997 general election and Martin joined the cabinet as minister for education, aged just 36. He loved it so much and was such a success that, inevitably, he was “promoted” to the Department of Health in 2000. Stints in the Department of Enterprise and the Department of Foreign Affairs followed.
[ Unlikely a new government will be in place before Christmas, says Micheál MartinOpens in new window ]
When Ahern departed amid a welter of unanswered questions about his personal finances in 2008, Martin toyed with a tilt at the leadership, but Brian Cowen – who Ahern had already anointed – was unstoppable and, in the event, unopposed. Martin didn’t so much dodge a bullet as a nuclear missile.
From the time he took over in 2008 until he retired in early 2011, Cowen had scarcely a day of good fortune. He didn’t cause the international financial crash. But the Fianna Fáil-led governments in which he played a central role made it much worse in Ireland than it was in many comparable countries. The cost in human, economic, social and political terms continues to make its presence felt today.
There is little need here to rehearse the calamities that befell the Cowen government – the crash, the bank guarantee, the panic – and then, the denials, the bailout, the chaotic last days of the administration.
Still, in crisis there is opportunity. As 2010 turned unhappily into 2011, it was plain (only later to him, though) that Cowen could not continue and there would have to be a general election. In early January, Cowen came out fighting, and put down a motion of confidence in himself at the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party. Martin told him he could not support it. The Cowenites thought Martin was treachery personified; he thought they were delusional. Cowen won the motion, and Martin resigned from the cabinet.
Then Cowen botched a reshuffle and by the end of the following week Martin was leader, as the administration finally crumbled in a particularly irresponsible form of chaos. This, then, was the party that Martin took over.
Long road back proves to be shorter than thought
Fianna Fáilers joked that the 2011 election wasn’t as bad as it could have been; they only lost 57 seats. In truth, they were probably right. They could have lost more. It was brutal on the doors – some candidates were literally chased away, running from angry voters. It was widely predicted that the party would simply fade out of existence.
The new Fine Gael and Labour government, with its 50-plus seat super majority, dwarfed Fianna Fáil. But Labour’s decision to enter government proved to be Fianna Fáil’s first stroke of luck in a long time. It allowed Martin to be the leader of the opposition – and that mattered in terms of parliamentary profile and public prominence.
It was a slog for him, though. He was the party’s only real figure of national standing, and he remained tainted by his party’s legacy in government. He made a great show of apologising for Fianna Fáil’s mistakes at the 2012 ardfheis, but he was always thereafter reluctant to elaborate on what exactly he was apologising for and who exactly was responsible.
He moved to expel from the party former taoiseach Ahern after the report of the Mahon tribunal – Ahern jumped before he was pushed – putting vital distance between himself a discredited former leader. Ahern had done the same with Haughey. In both cases, it worked.
As significant at that 2012 ardfheis were the reforms to the party’s rules which transferred significant powers – over the selection of leaders and the approval of any coalition deals – from the TDs to the members. As Martin’s relationship with his parliamentary party frayed in the years ahead, this would be important. He was always able to appeal to the members above the heads of his own TDs and senators. For a party with a richly baroque history of agitation against the leader among rebel TDs, it strengthened his hand. He continued to rely, as he does today, on a tight group of senior staff who are intensely loyal to him.
The first public sign that Fianna Fáil might not, after all, be destined for the scrapheap of history was the 2014 local and European elections. Martin’s campaign was low-key. But he managed to surf a wave of resentment against the Fine Gael-Labour coalition – implementing policies that had largely been both necessitated and agreed by the previous Fianna Fáil government – and win the largest share of the vote in the local elections, and the highest number of councillors. It was the first sign that there might be a road back, after all. And that it might not be quite as long as they had feared.
There was a further, important development during that first term in opposition that helped Martin redefine Fianna Fáil’s political offering: he backed the same-sex marriage referendum. This discommoded some members of his party – more than a few, to be sure – but it enabled Martin to present Fianna Fáil as forward-looking, modernising and open to change. Think about it another way, aides said at the time: imagine if Fianna Fáil had opposed the referendum.
It was one of several internal battles that Martin fought and won, as social conservatives – both inside and outside the party – sought to make the post-crash Fianna Fáil into the vehicle for that conservative part of Ireland which, they believed, nobody else spoke for. Their analysis was simple, and for some in the party, attractive – conservatives would get a party they could vote for, Fianna Fáil would get a support base.
Martin’s view was that this would be a long-term death sentence. His key insight was that while more than a third of voters voted against same-sex marriage and would vote against the legalisation of abortion, those issues were not the most important thing for them when they came to vote in a general election. And a party that defined itself on those issues was destined to wither into irrelevance. His political judgment was right. And his personal views – like many people in the country – were changing. He won the political fight on same-sex marriage and would win it again on abortion. It did not endear him to his internal critics.
Confidence and what?
By the 2016 general election, just five years after it been angrily ejected from office, Fianna Fáil was nearly back in the game. Martin exploited the unpopularity of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition – which had fixed the public finances but at a fearful cost – with a deft touch and won 44 seats, just six fewer than Fine Gael. Enda Kenny made approaches about a possible “grand coalition” but Martin was having none of it. He reckoned that the country was not ready for Fianna Fáil’s return to government, and that his party wasn’t ready for the step of entering coalition with Fine Gael. Instead, he agreed a “confidence and supply” arrangement with a Fine Gael minority government, facilitating it from the outside. As was by now habitual, elements of his parliamentary party grumbled. As was also habitual, Martin just ignored them.
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Arch-pragmatist and levers of power
The “not in government, but not exactly out, either” phase lasted until 2020, by which time the Fine Gael-Independent minority government had run out of road. To the fury of some of his backbenchers, Martin unilaterally decided to extend the confidence and supply agreement past 2019 (it was originally agreed for three years) because of ongoing negotiations over Brexit. He backed the changes in abortion law, though most of his parliamentary party – who had a free vote on the issue – did not.
In the 2020 general election, Martin squared up against Fine Gael’s new leader, Leo Varadkar, and fancied his chances. He thought Varadkar was more concerned with spin and presentation than “substance” (then as now one of his favourite words); neither man saw the Sinn Féin surge under Mary Lou McDonald coming. It was a poor election for both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
Without the numbers for a coalition themselves, the two old rivals enticed the Greens into power with the promise of a step change in climate action, which they mostly kept. It was Martin, the arch-pragmatist, at work, making a virtue of necessity.
There were early hiccups. Barry Cowen was sacked; Dara Calleary resigned over “Golfgate”; as the pandemic closed in, Martin’s “meaningful Christmas” turned into a disaster. The disgruntled in the parliamentary party considered a heave, then retreated.
And yet in Martin’s dogged, dutiful approach to the taoiseach’s job, many Irish people saw something they approved of. They saw that he didn’t bend the rules to have his family there for his appointment as taoiseach. They saw him queue up like everyone else for his vaccine. They liked it; they thought he was “decent”. The characterisation irritates some of his critics, but you can’t please everyone.
They didn’t see his relentless working of the levers of government, the endless task of implementation of policy that few understand but is actually the great challenge of government in Ireland – bending the machine of bureaucracy to your will, so that it achieves your desired outcomes. Often during Covid he would go for walks in the evening, out from the city centre to Donnybrook, up by the Dodder and back in towards town – but he would spend much of the time on the phone to officials, walking fast, talking carefully. All that pestering of officials has given him a command of detail and a broad understanding of government that is unmatched by his rivals.
Being taoiseach put him at the very centre of things – it is like no other job – and he liked that. He could be and can be prickly, especially when under pressure, and is given to lecturing the media about its many shortcomings. In person, he is generally warm and humorous, erudite and considered. He is a bit egotistical, but less so than many politicians. In the practice of politics and in the pursuit of his goals, he has proved both cunning and utterly ruthless, but also brave and single-minded. He is never afraid of a fight; indeed, he often goes towards trouble rather than seeking to avoid it.
Adult in the room
The election strategy this time round was to be the “adult in the room” – sensible Uncle Micheál. Convinced that Simon Harris’s new energy would run out of steam, Fianna Fáil backroomers conceived a plan that contrasted their man’s “substance” (that word again) and experience with his relatively callow government frenemy on one side, and on the other, facing Sinn Féin, to be the defender of middle Ireland’s success, its economic model, its gradualist progress. He was a sort of national Centrist Dad in campaign mode, the very antithesis of a failed-stater.
Martin was convincing at this because it’s the core of his political philosophy. He believes that Ireland’s 100 years of independence has built a good and decent and successful – though certainly not perfect – State. And of course, if you believe that, you have to acknowledge Fianna Fáil’s part in it.
And that is the political tradition that Martin has sought to progress and shape for the 21st century, for a very different political age to the one in 1989 or in 2011. In a way, he is Fianna Fáil’s accommodation with modern Ireland.
He has created a sort of Fianna Fáilism that can exist in a country unrecognisable from when he started in politics – partly because he and his party have changed, but also because he has played a significant role in shaping that country too.
And so now, he starts another chapter in this long political odyssey that has variously seen triumph, disaster, change, rebirth and renewal – and now triumph again. “There weren’t enough chairs for all the TDs!” he excitedly told journalists when Fianna Fáil TDs met at Leinster House on Wednesday.
Will it be the last chapter? The presidency comes vacant next year. That rumour runs round regularly.
“Micheál doesn’t want to be president,” said a person who knows him well recently. “He wants to be taoiseach again. He loved it. And he knows he’s good at it.”
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