MINISTER OF STATE for Special Education and Fine Gael TD Josepha Madigan has announced that she is resigning from her ministerial post, and will not stand in the next general election.
The shock announcement comes in a week when Leo Varadkar has resigned as Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach, and Fine Gael TD Ciaran Cannon has also said he will not stand in the next election.
Eleven Fine Gael TDs have now announced that they will not stand for election again, including Madigan.
This afternoon, the TD for Dublin Rathdown said she had informed Varadkar she would not be running again “in the summer of 2023″.
“We have had many conversations since that have not changed my mind,” she added in a statement.
Madigan has been a Fine Gael representative for almost ten years.
She said representing people has been an “enormous honour”.
Madigan said that she will be voting for Simon Harris to be the next leader of Fine Gael and Taoiseach.
There has been speculation that Simon Harris, who is currently standing for Fine Gael leader unopposed, would be speaking with current ministers to ensure that they would be running in the next election – but it’s not clear whether Madigan and he had spoken prior to this afternoon’s announcement.
Today Simon Harris said his message to those who believed that Fine Gael had become “tired” during its three consecutive terms in government was: “You ain’t seen nothing yet”.
Madigan’s resignation, however, is the latest in an exodus of well-known TDs from the party, raising questions over which candidates will be at the forefront of its next campaign.
Madigan’s standout moments
A former lawyer, Madigan first entered political life as a local councillor for the Stillorgan ward on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in 2014.
She was first elected to the Dáil in 2016, and she quickly became a central player in Fine Gáel, as then Taoiseach Enda Kenny appointed her to the Fine Gael team negotiating a government formation.
Between 2017 and 2020, Madigan served as Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.
She was the first Cabinet minister to have been selected as a candidate in the general election under Fine Gael’s gender quota policy.
Madigan went on to bring forward a successful proposal for an amendment to the constitution on waiting times for divorce, which passed in a landslide referendum.
She also tabled a contempt of court bill, and acted as the campaign coordinator for Fine Gael during the Repeal the 8th referendum.
Her career has also seen her at the centre of controversy on several occasions. These included a role in the so-called Swing-Gate debacle, through her processing of Maria Bailey’s personal injuries claim application against the Dean Hotel. In July 2019, the Irish Independent reported that a Fine Gael probe later cleared her of any wrongdoing, with a source telling the newspaper her involvement was “minimal”. In a statement issued through Fine Gael after that internal report, Bailey said that the report’s author found that her claim was not a fraudulent one, and that she had acted on legal proceedings during the entire process. Bailey also said that the report found “it would be unlikely that a court would conclude that there was any attempt to mislead on my part”. Subsequently, in November 2023, Bailey received an apology from Mirror Group Newspapers in relation to its coverage of the story.
In 2021, while serving as Minister for Special Education, she had to withdraw remarks she made in the Dáil about “normal children” in a debate about special needs education classes being closed, acknowledging her words were “not appropriate”.
While she was still a councillor, she sent out a leaflet claiming that Traveller accommodation on a site in Goatstown was a “waste” of taxpayer resources, and later stood by the comments, and said they came from an economic perspective, not an “anti-Traveller one”.
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