Deep joy in the ranks of the Soldiers of Destiny on Wednesday night when Fianna Fáil returned to the fifth floor of Leinster House for its weekly parliamentary party meeting.
This is prime political real estate – top of the world, a less than salubrious penthouse suite for parties in power.
Having ceded this territory for over a decade to Fine Gael, Micheál Martin and his troops were thrilled to be back.
But there was something not quite right about the room. Something was missing. What was it?
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As in the good old days, a gallery of honour of party leaders graced the back wall. Seven in all, neatly spaced and hanging in chronological order starting with Éamon de Valera. Six black and white photographic portraits and the last one, current leader Micheál Martin in a daring tinge of muted colour.
It’s all guns blazing for Micheál these days
Whoa, seven?
Where’s Charlie Haughey?
Gone. Airbrushed from the hall of fame, it appeared. The line on the wall runs seamlessly – Dev, Seán Lemass, Jack Lynch, Albert Reynolds, Bertie Ahern, An Taoiseach.
A concerned member of the parliamentary party secretly snapped the leaders’ portraits. And then the plot thickened when they came across a fine portrait of the controversial Charles J, the one from their old party rooms, shoved away to one side in a box.
This looked like a drastic rewriting of history. But it wasn’t.
We hear that an unnamed TD, who is not a member of Fianna Fáil, was in the vicinity for a meeting while the changeover from the party’s former office was under way. The portraits had been moved up with lots of other stuff from their basement room in the Leinster House 2000 annex.
Our wandering deputy spotted the framed image of Haughey and swiped it on the spur of the moment as a prank.
Or perhaps a mark of devotion.
Some time later, the mischievous miscreant was rumbled/stricken with remorse before the picture could be smuggled off campus and sold to a billionaire art collector on the international black market.
And now Charlie can retake his place in the gallery of infamy, eh, Fianna Fáil greats.
Minister for unannounced visits
The old joke used to be that the Queen of England believed the world smells of fresh paint.
It’s a bit the same for members of Government.
When an organisation is informed that their line minister is going to pay a visit, the mops and the buckets and the paint brushes come out as their hosts scramble to present their premises and themselves in the very best possible light.
Money and professional reputations might be at stake.
And it means that a Minister doesn’t often get to see the full picture.
Richard O’Donoghue, the Independent Ireland TD for Co Limerick, certainly believes so. During last Wednesday’s statements on healthcare – Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill’s first of the new Dáil – he offered to be her “eyes and ears” in University Hospital Limerick in an effort to identify problems and “go in there and seek accountability”.
Recent visits were flagged in advance, he said, asking Minister Carroll MacNeill and her junior ministers “to turn up in Limerick uninvited rather than invited”.
“I am willing to help you with that,” he told her. “But for you to get the full grasp of it, you’re going to have to go in there unannounced, and I believe you will.”
Richard might be right, or maybe he knows he is right, because the new Minister for Health has already turned up out of the blue at two major hospitals since her appointment last month.
On the night of January 23rd, on the way back from Áras an Uachtaráin having received her seal of office from the President, Jennifer called in unannounced on the national children’s hospital in Crumlin. And over the February bank holiday weekend, she turned up without warning at St Vincent’s hospital in Dublin.
We hear there has been some uneasy muttering in medical circles over this.
And while her subsequent visits to Mayo University Hospital and Portiuncula in Galway were signalled in advance and St Michael’s in Dún Laoghaire is expecting her next week, the surprise visits to Crumlin and St Vincent’s are not expected to be once-off occurrences.
Minister Carroll MacNeill picked Crumlin because her son is a long-term patient there. As the freshly-installed Minister for Health, she wanted to thank the staff for being so lovely to him. She visited on the eve of Storm Eowyn when they were coming in to sleep over for the night to be there for the 7am changeover.
“Actual legends,” is what she called them afterwards.
The St Vincent’s visit was different. It was all about who was on duty over the bank holiday and how the hospital was managing over this time.
During Wednesday’s debate, she agreed with Sinn Féin’s David Cullinane that there are multiple factors to be considered – not just availability of consultants – when tackling problems in our hospitals.
“One of the things I have highlighted is the bank holiday weekend precisely because that was one of my first weekends there, but this is an every-weekend problem,” she said, adding she would routinely expect to see consultants scheduled to work from 8am until 6pm on Saturdays as opposed to 8am to 2pm “thereby reducing the time when there are no senior decision-makers present”.
She added they would have to be supported by the rest of the team in the hospitals and by diagnostics.
She also talked of the “broad trends” she was seeing as she tried “to track resources and the scheduling of resources over the past number of weekends”.
Meanwhile, hospital managements around the country will be delighted to hear that most ministerial visits will come with adequate notice. However, we are told Jennifer is “nowhere near done taking notions to drop in unannounced”.
Maybe they should stick up a few photos of the Minister at strategic staff areas, the way restaurants do for food critics.
Labour and a little skit in Wexford
Wexford Labour was out in force last Saturday for a Gatherin’ and a Scatterin’ celebration.
More than 100 party members turned out in honour of their former leader Brendan Howlin, who stepped down from national politics last year after a distinguished 42 year career in the Oireachtas.
They also gathered to welcome his successor in the constituency, George Lawlor.
George, a former mayor of Wexford, described himself as spending 20 years as a curate to Brendan’s parish priest.
On the night, he regaled the crowd with a stirring rendition of Boolavogue. But then, no Labour knees-up is complete without a few bars from George, who is a kingpin of the Wexford Light Opera Society and used to perform regularly at the Wexford Festival Opera “before the Italians took over”.
A noted tenor, he playing the lead role of the Devil in a production of the Witches of Eastwick and his portrayal of Piangi, the tenor from Phantom of the Opera, got great reviews last year when the production won the overall title at last Years Aims awards in Killarney.
Saturday’s Howlin retrospective included a slide show lookback over his lengthy political career.
Former party leader Dick Spring couldn’t attend as he was in New Zealand. The crowd gave a special welcome to Brendan’s former parliamentary assistant Anne Byrne, wife of the late Pat Magnier, a former senator and party handler.
Fergus Finlay, senior adviser to Spring in the 1980s and 90s, delivered a terrific speech. Perhaps with an eye to local independent TD Verona Murphy, who became Ceann Comhairle recently after horse-trading between the incoming Coalition and the Michael Lowry-led Regional Independents, he recalled events from almost two decades ago when then taoiseach Bertie Ahern was worried about his majority.
He approached Brendan Howlin and sounded him out about becoming the ceann comhairle. Brendan didn’t bite.
Fergus was also reminded of his role in the fall of Charles Haughey’s minority government in 1989. The then taoiseach lost a vote on a Labour Party motion calling for special recognition of haemophilia sufferers infected by contaminated State-supplied blood products. Haughey called an unnecessary election and came back with fewer seats.
He was subsequently asked why he went to the country.
“Because of that little s**t in Wexford.”
