Kettle's Boyled: Why not elect a woman Taoiseach?

There is an inevitability in politics that where a mistake is made, somebody’s head must roll. A politician or a public servant, it doesn’t matter as long as it satisfies the mob. Politics can be unforgiving at times.

The recent referendum debacle, where most politicians completely misread the mood of the electorate and tried to ram through some poorly considered changes, was always going to have political fallout. You can’t get things so badly wrong and expect ‘business as usual,’ and the only question was the timing of it. The looming Local and European elections might have forced people to hold their fire, but there was a lot of grumbling in the ranks about the sheer incompetence of the project and the unnecessary waste of resources.

Leo Varadkar’s position as Taoiseach was by no means assured. Although it was more likely that the Minister involved, Roderick O’Gorman, would be the one to have to fall on his sword, Varadkar could still have been damaged in the wake of O’Gorman being forced out. The scale of the defeat was such that merely sacking the Attorney General would not have satisfied the rank and file either; somebody at ministerial level would have to go, sooner or later.

In the event, having had room for reflection during his trip to the USA, Varadkar took decisive action. He must have often asked himself if it was all worth the effort, given the abuse hurled at all public representatives in this age of unfettered social media, and packing it all in must have crossed his mind more than once. Timing is everything, and he timed this one well. Before anyone got a chance to organise a revolt against him, he neatly dropped the guillotine and called it a day. In one stroke, he quashed all dissent in the ranks while also drawing a tidy line under the referendum debacle. It was deftly done.

As I write this, the decision around his successor seems to have been made in favour of Simon Harris, but he is not widely known outside Dublin circles. I offered the opinion in 2021 in these pages that Heather Humphries, a competent and able woman and a politician from a border county, would be the best person to lead Fine Gael, and I still hold that view.

Fine Gael believes otherwise, but it is also true that those heading for a cliff tend to rely on groupthink and can’t see the bigger picture. Looking through party eyes instead of taking the voters’ view, Fine Gael is using the same thought process that believed Gay Mitchell would beat Michael D Higgins in the 2011 Presidential election, when in fact his support tapered off west of Lucan and he brought up the rear of the field. Didn’t somebody once say the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?