Less than three years ago, at the beginning of Covid, I was sitting in my grandiose ministerial office on Dublin’s Leeson Street.
was at my pompous worst. There was yet another crisis in the sporting world, part of my portfolio. Then junior sports minister, Brendan Griffin, was working from home in faraway Kerry. I asked one of the many mandarins in the Department to invite him to a Zoom meeting. As inevitably happens, a squad of them sat in on the call.
It was a formal encounter. Brendan joined us in his jeans and jumper. He was operating from upstairs in deepest Kerry because of the poor broadband. The atmosphere was sombre.
Brendan, as always, was relaxed; I, as always, was being self-important. The mandarins were stuffy as ever. The meeting began very conventionally, without any hitches at our end.
Suddenly from Kerry, after a short period of happy background noise, an uninvited participant surfaced.
A four-year-old child crashed chirpily into the meeting. Brendan, instead of hastening the departure of his younger child, Breandán, from this exalted gathering, smiled, picked him up and proudly plonked him in front of the camera, pointing him in my direction: “Say hello to the transport minister,” he instructed.
Breandán Óg, in high spirits with a wicked smile, promptly stuck his tongue out, straight at me, the transport minister. Everyone burst into laughter. Even the mandarins melted. The atmosphere relaxed. Breandán Óg chatted to us for a while and defused the tension. Crisis over.
Last week Griffin, one of Fine Gael’s finest, made a decision: he was going to spend more time with his young family in Kerry rather than continue to pursue a political career in Dublin. Brendan, aged only 40, opted for Kerry and family. Breandán Óg’s father is heading home. He could soon be a trendsetter in Fine Gael.
Of course, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar made the decision easier for the Kerry TD. As the outgoing deputy chief whip Griffin had been hot favourite to take the chief whip’s job, on merit. It would have fulfilled his ambition to sit at the cabinet table, but geography — and maybe even gender — conspired to frustrate him.
On Friday, he told me Leo had done him a favour. He felt liberated. I can vouch for that; I well remember him telling me one night when we were colleagues in the Department of Sport how much he missed his family as he was spending endless nights in Dublin when he longed for Kerry.
Brendan’s decision has signalled a real problem within politics, but particularly within Fine Gael. Last year, distant Donegal’s former education minister Joe McHugh, aged 51 with three children, announced he would retire from the Dáil at the next election. Joe also offered his young family as the reason for his exit.
He is married to Olwyn Enright, a talented former Fine Gael TD who also left politics to spend more time with her children.
A pattern has developed within the Fine Gael party as rural deputies are getting a bad deal. Recent ministerial changes have favoured Dublin TDs, especially those loyalists seemingly created in the leader’s modern, urban, free-market image. If the aspirants are media-friendly they have an added head start.
Fine Gael’s hesitance to advance rural TDs was evident before the Christmas reshuffle. When today’s coalition Government was formed in 2020 Leo discarded proven rural members of his first team including Charlie Flanagan (Laois-Offaly), Joe McHugh (Donegal), Michael Creed (Cork North-West), Paul Kehoe (Wexford), Michael Ring (Mayo), Ciarán Cannon (Galway East), John Paul Phelan (Carlow-Kilkenny) and David Stanton (Cork East).
One Dublin minister, veteran Richard Bruton, was jettisoned at the time, although he was compensated with the chair of the parliamentary party. In a surprise move, Dubliner Colm Brophy from South-West was actually elevated for a two-and-a-half-year stint as a junior minister.
Today, five out of Fine Gael’s nine Dublin TDs hold either senior or junior ministerial posts, yet in Cork only one out of four — deputy leader Simon Coveney — has been deemed worthy of a seal of office.
Today’s 34 Fine Gael TDs now contain a rump of 15 former ministers. No less than 13 of those 15 — deemed disposable — live outside Dublin.
Rural Fine Gael ministers have taken a big hit, relegated back to the humdrum work of an ordinary TD.
The result is that Fine Gael has no full cabinet minister in Donegal, Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Clare, Limerick, Kerry, and many other counties. The Western seaboard has been downgraded by the Blueshirts. Junior minister Hildegarde Naughton from Galway sits at the top table but has no vote.
Yet it was Leo’s choice of junior ministers in the recent reshuffle that really raised eyebrows. His refusal to promote Griffin to chief whip was bad enough, but to deny Galway’s Cannon, Clare’s Joe Carey and Cork’s Stanton preferment was considered by some as a snub to rural Ireland.
He rewarded Peter Burke from Longford-Westmeath and Kieran O’Donnell from Limerick City with junior ministries but the appointment of two South Dublin TDs, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, and Neale Richmond (to replace a rural minister Damien English) revealed his instincts.
Both Richmond and Carroll MacNeill are superb media operators. Richmond batted masterfully on Brexit. No one who watched Carroll MacNeill on RTÉ’s Upfront with Katie Hannon last Monday could fail to be impressed. She never flinched in the face of constant attacks on the Government. Yet both TDs are from similar South Dublin stables, middle class, privately-educated, the kind of upper-crust citizens who occupy Leo’s comfort zone.
His weakness for South Dublin politicians was further underlined by his rejection of expectations that junior minister Josepha Madigan should make way. She survived.
Strangely, North Dublin, Fine Gael’s urban poor relation, remains ignored. Ask not only Richard Bruton but Alan Farrell, the forgotten Fine Gael TD for Dublin Fingal.
Leo’s tendency to promote his star media performers has provoked further resentment from many of his overlooked rural TDs. They say he weakly defends this stance by insisting those who have protected Fine Gael on sticky wickets must be rewarded.
Unhappy rural deputies are adamant his defence is a smokescreen for his urban prejudice, pointing out RTÉ and Virgin Media studios are far more accessible to Dublin deputies. Only nearby residents, like Carroll MacNeill or Richmond, can at the drop of a hat pop over to Montrose, located a few kilometres from their home turf.
Both first-time TDs have enjoyed meteoric rises, leapfrogging equally able deputies like the long-serving Griffin, Carey, and Kehoe. Their favoured status raises suspicions of an urban snobbery, an unspoken prejudice that rural TDs cannot be trusted to deliver such polished media performances. They are becoming underrated lobby fodder, travelling long distances, but often unrecognised by the Fine Gael hierarchy.
Fine Gael’s recent poll numbers indicate a shrinking base whose only common objective is the defeat of Sinn Féin. Many rural Fine Gael TDs are now rethinking their careers.
They anticipate a future with a deteriorating lifestyle, absences from families and fewer political rewards than their urban colleagues. The premature exit of Griffin, McHugh and now probably Stanton is ominous for a party increasingly seeking shortcuts to success.
There are likely to be many more Brendan Griffins.
