Maybe the solution for the Opposition party is to set up a Good Fine Gael and a Bad Fine Gael
IT’S REALLY very simple. You have a political institution that has every chance of success in the next general election. But toxic elements and non-performing assets threaten to destabilise this delicate operation. They could upset the grand plan and destabilise the numbers.
What to do? Set up a Good Fine Gael and a Bad Fine Gael. Just burst the party down the middle – it would be a natural sundering.
Then move Inda, Big Phil and others into one camp and lump Lucinda, Smouldering Deasy and the rest into the other. A recipe for disaster? No, and here’s the clever bit: because both sides will stand firm in their unshakeable belief that they represent Good Fine Gael. It’s the other crowd dragging the party down . . .
In reality, Good Fine Gael is under the effective control of Enda Kenny, who successfully defeated a hostile takeover bid earlier this year. However, while he insists that FG’s fundamentals are sound, he knows he has a major battle on his hands to increase market confidence.
In a reconfigured party, those who wish to remain toxic can fester away after the split. However, if any of the non-performing assets begin to show promise and repudiate Bad Fine Gael, they may eventually be rehabilitated back into the good wing.
They might even become ministers, in time.
Former party leader Alan Dukes could oversee the project. He had hoped to engineer a split of his own in Anglo Irish Bank, but the Government decided yesterday to do the job itself. So he has a bit of extra time on his hands. It was strange to see Dukes on the news last evening, back in the limelight yet again on the first day of Fine Gael’s annual think-in and after-hours slaughter of operetta. The party is in Waterford this year, Dáil constituency of the constantly fuming John Deasy.
Which incendiary note leads us back nicely to Smokey Dukes, who was centre stage in absentia at the last think-in after he had the temerity to criticise the party’s policy on Nama. At the time, members were deeply pained by what they saw as treachery on the part of their former leader. It put a slight damper on the tinkin’ and the singin’. Inda was livid.
Twelve months on and some party members were taking quiet pleasure in the Government’s rejection of Alan’s formula for Anglo. Serves him right, they snorted, happy to be discussing somebody else’s travails, rather than their party’s.
Now that the recent unpleasantness is behind them, Fine Gael is on an election footing, declared Enda.
“I sense the scaffolding may be coming down!” he told us knowingly.
So there is no talk of a Good Fine Gael and a Bad Fine Gael down here in the lovely Faithlegg House Hotel, where deputies and Senators are pointedly behaving like sugary extras in a particularly manic episode of The Brady Bunch.
Some observers felt they could divine a strained atmosphere. Others hoped the affair might go from a think-in to a thump-in once the parliamentarians retired to the bar.
John Deasy was missing for the opening photo shoot. Was this significant? Certainly not, a suspicious media was assured. He had gone to the train station to collect Richard Bruton (vanquished challenger for the leadership) and Olivia Mitchell (a lieutenant). This delighted the conspiracy theorists.
Lucinda Creighton, who found her bowl of soup in the bar more attractive than Enda, didn’t show either. She went outside eventually and regretted it, declaring that Leo Varadkar ate her sandwich when she was gone.
When news of the Anglo split broke, party finance spokesman Michael Noonan rushed straight out to the cameras to comment.
“It’s all a bit of a fudge,” he drawled.
Meanwhile, the party chief whip, Wexford’s Paul Kehoe, was proudly showing off his firstborn to a queue of cooing colleagues. Three-week-old Sinéad, safe in the arms of her mother Brigid, wasn’t too put out by her first official FG function.
We suspect she wasn’t the only one who slept through the proceedings.
Kehoe wasn’t the only member accepting the congratulations of his colleagues. His Co Clare colleague Joe Carey was also celebrating a recent happy event.
His beloved greyhound, Taco Beauty, had six pups. Three dogs and three bitches. He left them at home.
Sadly, dinner was a civilised affair. The parliamentary party – good and bad – enjoyed a choice of chicken breast salad with sherry and marinated apricot or a trio of local salmon for their starter. Then they moved on to baked fillet of hake or roast fillet of Irish beef with a marsala and balsamic butter sauce, before rounding the meal off with a mouthwatering choice of desserts. Then came the speeches and it was off to the bar and the baby grand piano for the ritual slaughter of the musical society songbooks.
And on the day Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan announced “resolution for our most distressed institution”, the men and women of Fine Gael reckoned there was only one possible resolution for that other most distressed institution, Fianna Fáil: vote Fine Gael – good, bad or indifferent.
One big happy family now. Oh yes. Honest. Really . . .