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Government gender balance hands Opposition low-hanging fruit

It is the less predictable events that will present the biggest problems for the Coalition

Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris with some the newly appointed junior ministers announced yesterday. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien
Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris with some the newly appointed junior ministers announced yesterday. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien
Jack Horgan-Jones's picture
Jack Horgan-Jones
Wed Jan 29 2025 - 20:54

With the appointment of junior ministers, the preamble to the Government taking office is certainly over - but there is a lot to take away.

Firstly, to the appointments themselves: it is clear that gender is an early vulnerability for the incoming Government, made real by its Cabinet and junior ministerial appointments.

”You’re very male,” Mary Lou McDonald said in the Dáil last week, after the Cabinet was announced, with the air of someone who could scarcely believe - and was relishing - the low-hanging fruit presented to her by the Government.

It is true to say Micheál Martin and Simon Harris had their hands tied, to an extent, by how many women were elected - but even within that, there are choices to be made.

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This is particularly apparent for Fianna Fáil, where the backlash internally - albeit privately, for now - is more audible.

This is a decision that Martin would have made with his eyes open - a political operator as experienced as he is cannot have missed the criticism coming his way.

Similarly, he restored Robert Troy to the ranks of the junior ministers weeks after a report from the Standards in Public Office commission found he had breached the Ethics Act on multiple occasions. Martin will know the opposition will target him over this - and that he will face criticism over appointing Troy, Christopher O’Sullivan, Timmy Dooley and Michael Moynihan over a third woman to join Niamh Smyth and Jennifer Murnane O’Connor as junior ministers. Catherine Ardagh is seen as particularly unlucky to miss out.

Both Martin and Harris have been unsentimental in demoting veterans - Fine Gael’s Colm Burke and Fianna Fáil’s Sean Fleming lost their jobs yesterday, to add to Charlie McConalogue’s downgrade from Cabinet.

The junior appointments - particularly Colm Brophy’s elevation to junior minister for migration - also shows that the incoming Coalition will have no hiding place when it comes to the thorny issues that bedevilled the previous administration.

True, migration went off the boil just in time for the election, but you will not meet a single operator in Leinster House who believes it has permanently fallen off the agenda.

The convenience of having that issue outsourced to the Greens will not be available to Fine Gael, with their man in the junior position, nor Fianna Fáil, with Jim O’Callaghan taking the senior role in the Department of Justice.

It is not necessarily predictable issues - for example, gender divides or thorny policy challenges - that will present the biggest problems for the Government.

It is in the unpredicted, volatile events or the unanticipated compromises that the true danger lurks.

And they don’t have to look far - the fallout from Storm Éowyn and the ongoing unfolding of its deal with Michael Lowry and the Independents show this well.