Reflecting on a tumultuous weekend for Fine Gael and its leader Simon Harris, one senior party member summarised the situation this way: “He dropped the ball. He f**ked up”.
Another well-known and long-time party member, speaking candidly, said the video interaction in Kanturk between Harris and the disability worker Charlotte Fallon has “fundamentally undermined the sincere image that he has put out there of himself”. There is a sense now in Fine Gael that the party has, as one strategist put it, “around 88 hours to get our message out”.
The Fine Gael general election campaign has been beset by missteps from the very first weekend, with Michael O’Leary’s comments about teachers – delivered at a party event – putting it on the back foot. While Harris didn’t let slip any major gaffes in the first televised debate on RTÉ, his defensiveness over the overspending on the national children’s hospital was seized upon by political rivals.
The Fine Gael campaign has largely been either preoccupied with picking fights with Fianna Fáil or busy making a string of multibillion promises to an already anxious electorate. Shortly after Harris left the supermarket in Kanturk, after walking away from a visibly emotional Fallon as she made the case that the disability sector was being ignored, members of the Taoiseach’s inner team knew that they had a big problem on their hands as the video of the interaction began to rack up hundreds of thousands of views.
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What followed was a frantic scramble to find Fallon and give her a full apology, followed by a jittery wait for the final Irish Times/Ipsos B&A opinion poll, which would show a six-point drop, a total evaporation of Fine Gael’s lead. On Monday, the recriminations were flowing.
The Irish Times spoke to a number of candidates, strategists and senior party members and there are clearly two schools of thought. One group believes that Harris has shown “humility” and can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Others report they think it is, in the words of one party member, “too late to rebuild the faith”.
“Something has changed. The fear is that people now think our leader is insincere,” said one party member who is close to Harris. That worry about being perceived as phoney or disingenuous was mentioned by another candidate.
Party candidates have mixed reports from the ground: one candidate in Munster said the incident with Fallon was being raised out on the campaign trail by angry voters who want the Taoiseach to stand by his promise to meet the disability worker. A Leinster candidate said it was not being raised, but their fear was that it was being discussed at the dinner table when the front door closed. “The conversations are being had quietly, not loudly on doorsteps.”
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A third candidate who has fought multiple elections took a more sanguine view. “Should it have happened? No. Do I wish it hadn’t happened? Yes. But he has apologised now, and now we try to get the morale back up again, to really redouble our efforts. We think we are, realistically, somewhere around 22 per cent. So, he owned his mistake, and mistakes happen. Realistically though, Simon probably does need to take a rest.”
A number of Fine Gael figures said they felt he was “exhausted” from trying to carry the message of a “New Energy” throughout a gruelling campaign schedule.
On Tuesday night, Harris will take part in the first and only three-way leaders debate of the election campaign. Those close to Harris say he will double down on his apology to Fallon and seek to definitively draw a line under what they say was an unguarded moment of exhaustion. “He will be putting across the message that the country needs stability,” a strategist said, as Fine Gael tries to stabilise itself first.
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