Back in the rare ould times you could always rely upon Fianna Fail’s instinct for self-preservation to kick-in and heaves against the party leadership were a reliably entertaining fixture of Irish political life. The remarkable aspect of this present crisis was that that, for a while at least, it looked as though Brian Cowen might somehow survive to lead his party to its looming Waterloo. Where, in the name of the father and all that’s holy, was the Fianna Fail of old?
So fair play to Micheal Martin, the foreign secretary, for doing his bit to wield the knife. It’s hard to imagine he’s the answer but he’s less obviously the wrong answer than poor, beleaguered, hapless Biffo. Martin confirmed today that he will vote against Cowen when a vote of no confidence in the Taoiseach’s leadership is tabled this week. Whether the rest of the Fianna Fail parliamentary party has the nous to join Martin remains to be seen. They may well be doomed anyway but almost anything, even Micheal Martin, would seem a better bet than Cowen.
They still do things differently in Ireland, mind you. Martin’s resignation was rejected by Cowen and, perplexingly, he remains Minister for Foreign Affairs even as he challenges, to all intents and purposes, Biffo for the party leadership. Cowen has spent the last couple of days rallying support but he is relying, I think, on the fact that supporters of each of his opponents will see a wounded Biffo – the Big Ignorant Fucker From Offaly – as a safer second-choice than the risk of losing the leadership to one of their rivals.
If you think this is no way to run a political party in times of crisis then you’d be entirely right. But this is Fianna Fail and they do things differently there too. Of course there have been the usual platitudes about placing country before party but the truth of the matter is that, deep down and instinctively, most Soldiers of Destiny consider these twin concerns indivisible. This helps explain both their success and their ghastliness.
It remains shocking – but gratifying – to see Fianna Fail at 14% in the polls. The wonder of that, mind you, leads one to conclude that the party has lost its mind. Knifing Biffo can’t possibly solve everything but it would at least be a start. This leaves one in a curious position: elementary politics demands a change of leader and it would be strangely disconcerting to discover that Fianna Fail has forgotten all the rules of the game; at the same time its destruction as a malign political force is decades overdue and just about anything that hastens that final reckoning has to be considered a more than half-decent development.
Fight on, Biffo, fight on…
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