Story of the Week
The Dáil returned on Wednesday but it seemed the attention of Irish politicians was mostly focused on some fields in Screggan, Co Offaly, where presidential election hopefuls donned their wellies and sought to win support at the National Ploughing Championships.
Before he even got to the ploughing, Fianna Fáil’s candidate, former Dublin football manager Jim Gavin, had to respond to reporters’ questions about his rural credentials after one of his campaign videos depicting him on a farm showed him leaving a gate open – a major no-no if there’s livestock around.
He said he is “a proud Dub born on the east coast but my parents are from the west”, and he spoke of holidaying on a farm as a child.
“I feel at home on a farm and it is part of my DNA,” he added.
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But why didn’t he close the gate?
“These things happen,” he said.
When he made it to Offaly, Gavin dismissed suggestions made by opponents that he was a Fine Gael supporter.
Mr Gavin acknowledged he was approached by Fine Gael to stand in a European election but had declined the offer.
Gavin and Fine Gael’s candidate Heather Humphreys inevitably bumped into each other at the event and our video of when Heather met Jim is here.
At Ms Humphreys’ doorstep interview with reporters she was asked about weekend newspaper reports that she had attended an Orange Order parade in Co Monaghan a little over a decade ago.
Ms Humphreys insisted the event, held in the Co Monaghan village of Drum, was an annual picnic, not a parade, and that people from across the community and from both sides of the Border went to it.
“If we’re ever going to get anywhere, we need to bring people together,” she said.
Meanwhile, Independent candidate Catherine Connolly was at the ploughing championships for the first time.
She told reporters she would not be making an apology for her decision to nominate controversial figure Gemma O’Doherty for the 2018 presidential election.
“I made the best decision I could at the time,” said Connolly, who added that Ms O’Doherty was “an award-winning journalist”.
“I have never supported her [O’Doherty], but I nominated her,” she said.
Meanwhile, Tánaiste Simon Harris said “even Mystic Meg does not know” what is happening with Sinn Féin’s process to select a presidential candidate.
Sinn Féin is set to reveal all after its ardchomhairle meets on Saturday.
Party leader Mary Lou McDonald dropped some hints during her visit to the ploughing on Thursday.
As Harry McGee reported, her cryptic comments have meant the focus of speculation on who Sinn Féin will endorse as a presidential candidate has narrowed to Pearse Doherty and Catherine Connolly, both of whom are fluent Irish speakers.
This is because McDonald said the chosen person had “plenty of Irish”.
But could Sinn Féin be putting forward someone else?
We should know what McDonald means by Sinn Féin’s decision being a “game-changer” by lunch time tomorrow.
Bust Up
He has almost two months left in office and President Michael D Higgins is showing no signs of tempering his outspoken nature. Higgins has made numerous statements on the horrors taking place in Gaza, and on Tuesday he suggested that Israel and countries which supply it with armaments, including the US and UK, should be excluded from the United Nations.
The Government subsequently distanced itself from Higgins’s remarks, saying that his views do not represent Government policy. A spokesman for the President later gave no indication Higgins was in any way resiling from the remarks, saying: “The President was speaking in response to the clear conclusions of genocide made in the report chaired by Navi Pillay. He was suggesting that such an action is among the options which could be considered by the international community, in line with previous precedent.”
As Political Editor Pat Leahy reported, previously, it was the convention that the President did not express views in public that were in conflict with Government policy. However, Higgins has occasionally deviated from this norm, especially in recent years on foreign policy matters. Though many people in Government have resented his interventions, they have refrained from any criticism of the President, at least in public.
In that sense Higgins’s remarks this week and the Government’s reaction should not be overstated; rather the incident marks the latest in a number of low-level tensions that have arisen between the Áras and Merrrion Street from time to time during the Higgins presidency.
That’s all very well but does any of this affect me?
The Opposition has spent the week turning the screw on the Government over its plan to drop the once-off cost-of-living measures that have been a feature of recent budgets.
Senior Coalition figures have insisted there will be targeted support in Budget 2026 to help those that need it most, as well as permanent measures that may benefit people more widely.
However, Sinn Féin in particular has seized on the expected absence of electricity credits for households at a time when energy bills are still rising.
Party leader Mary Lou McDonald told Taoiseach Micheál Martin on Wednesday: “You’re effectively telling households, ‘Tough, you’re on your own.’
“You can’t leave households high and dry, and you must include energy credits in the budget.”
Martin said the Government “will be targeting resources towards those who will be impacted the most by the increase in energy prices”.
The following day Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty said families are being “absolutely hammered” by soaring prices, while arguing that the Government acts as though “everything is rosy in the garden”. Tánaiste Simon Harris said the cost of energy was a matter of “real concern” and insisted the Government had taken action to help.
He cited 28 weeks of fuel allowance payments starting on Monday and how more people than ever before were set to qualify for these due to changes in the means testing system.
Harris also mentioned how the lower VAT rate for gas and electricity has been extended. Harris said moving away from once-offs was “not the same thing” as refusing to take actions to help families.
Still, with winter energy bills set to come through letter boxes in the coming months and electricity credits seemingly for the chop, the Government will have a tough job to persuade people that other measures in the budget will make up for it.
Banana Skin
Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns returned from maternity leave with some slippery fruit peelings lying right in her path. Those peelings came in the form of the emergence of Dublin Bay South TD Eoin Hayes’s ill-advised Barack Obama Halloween costume from 16 years ago.
In advance of a news story on the incident being published in The Irish Daily Mail, Hayes apologised for the incident in an online post on Monday night. He had only been readmitted into the Social Democrats parliamentary party in July after a suspension due to misleading information he gave about when he sold shares in Palantir, a company linked to the Israeli military. Hayes has also apologised for that and had since donated more than €43,000 to aid organisations working in Gaza.
Cairns returned to the political frontline to preside over her party’s pre-Dáil think-in meeting in Dublin on Tuesday morning and was confronted with the fresh headache involving Mr Hayes. That morning’s press conference was, unsurprisingly, dominated by questions about Hayes.
Cairns confirmed the party did not plan to take disciplinary action, citing the context that the incident happened 16 years ago. She said: “There is no circumstances where blackface is okay” but also that she was glad Hayes had “issued an unreserved apology”. She stopped short of saying she had forgiven Hayes, but said: “I think he deserves an opportunity to work hard now and to try to regain people’s trust.”
At the press conference Cairns listed the party’s priorities of disability rights, housing, Gaza, healthcare and childcare, adding that it would be “dogged in holding this Government to account”.
Hayes subsequently took his seat with the rest of his party in the Dáil chamber on Wednesday and dueled with Taoiseach Micheál Martin over child poverty.
Hayes’s party will be hoping for no more controversy involving their beleaguered Dublin Bay South TD.
Winners and Losers
This week’s winner is US president Donald Trump, who got absolutely everything he wanted out of the lavish reception for him during his state visit to Britain, between a royal banquet and military flyovers.
Perhaps the big loss this week is the UK government’s dignity in all the slobbering over Trump. But they might console themselves with a £150 billion package of US investment into Britain that was unveiled during the trip.
The Big Read
Political Editor Pat Leahy has had a look at the first real week of the presidential election campaign, how the candidates currently in the race - Jim Gavin, Heather Humphreys and Catherine Connolly - have fared, and the chances of Independents Gareth Sheridan and Maria Steen getting on the ballot paper. You can read the piece this Saturday.
Hear Here
Leo Varadkar speaks his mind on reunification, Covid, Eoghan Murphy and Phil Hogan
Monday’s podcast was an interview with former taoiseach Leo Varadkar upon the publication of his new memoir. He spoke about why he and Phil Hogan still don’t speak, why a Covid inquiry still hasn’t happened and why the question of Irish reunification may need serious consideration more quickly than some think.
