Gerard Howlin
THE IRISH TIMES appears to have offered itself as a surrogate platform for internal political and leadership debate in Fianna Fáil given the absence of same inside the once Republican Party.
The muttering inside FF for a long time – although not in the presence of Micheál, his minders or supportive ministers – is that he has built a high profile for himself by appealing to both FF and FG voters simultaneously and, even worse, equally. He has also presented as the most belligerent, pro-western warmonger in order to ingratiate himself with such as Ursula von der Leyen and create an alternative career path to an EU sinecure should he need it.
He has, of course, also thrown out the party’s long-held constitutional republicanism.
This line of argument has now become a major talking point via two recent columns in the IT penned by a most unexpected source, namely, Gerard Howlin. Once a PD man, Howlin returned to FF under Bertie in the 1990s. He now has a weekly column in the IT and he recently lit a fire under Martin’s leadership in a piece describing how Martin was flourishing politically but, at the same time, “offering negative returns for Fianna Fáil”.
Not content with tweaking Martin’s tail in a once-off column, Gerard Howlin penned another lovingly crafted article more recently headlined, “Micheál Martin may be Sinn Féin’s greatest accidental cheerleader”.
This provocation was ignored by Martin and his team, although reports speak of incandescent fury on the Tánaiste’s part, but support for the Tánaiste came from various quarters. Former IT political editor Stephen Collins wrote a riposte a week later in which he argued that “Martin is easily the strongest weapon in the Fianna Fáil armoury”.
Then, emerging like some soldier from a Pacific island in the late 1940s, the loyal Eoghan Harris also got involved, tweeting in conspiratorial terms that Howlin was part of a group of “ex-FF apparatchiks, Howlin, Mandy [Johnson, one presumes] & Derek Mooney” who want to “replace Martin with Jim O’Callaghan”.
Also disconcerting was the IT’s own Ipsos poll last week showing that Mary Lou McDonald was the voters’ first choice for taoiseach at 32%, ahead of Martin and Leo Varadkar at 18% each. A sober IT editorial the next day referred to the “insipid” support for Martin and Vlad’s parties.
However, what should really alarm the newspaper’s pundits and columnists is that their own poll shows FF and FG each have the “insipid” support level of 20% of the ABC1 social class (professionals, captains of industry and the like) – 90% of which would read the IT. But SF is now supported by 30% of those polled in that social category.
Does the IT editor’s office care that most of the newspaper’s opinion and even its news reportage is a million miles away from the now consistent attitudes prevalent among the nation’s young as well as the biggest section of its own readership?
