EVERY WEEK, TheJournal.ie casts its eye over events inside and outside Leinster House that have got people talking.
As the saying goes: ‘You win some, you lose some.’
So here are our political winners and losers from the past seven days:
1. Joan Burton
Congratulations to the new Labour leader and Tánaiste elect who saw off competition from Alex White to win the race to replace Eamon Gilmore. But as we wrote yesterday, the hard work starts now.
2. Ruairí Quinn
https://vine.co/v/MUWIUHJIYtV
The Education Minister may have demonstrated petulance in jumping before he was pushed but this was a politically savvy move on his part. As a result, Quinn has avoided the inevitable brouhaha that would have happened next week —- when he was likely going to be sacked.
3. Dara Calleary
Fair play to the Fianna Fáil TD and Liverpool fan Dara Calleary for crowbarring in a reference to the Luis Suarez biting controversy in the Dáil this week. We enjoyed Pat Rabbitte’s response as well:
4. Brendan Howlin
The Public Expenditure and Reform Minister has seen sense and decided to remove the €15 up front fee for Freedom of Information requests which has long been the bugbear of journalists and transparency advocates. There was cautious welcome for Howlin’s move with many waiting to see the wording of the legislation, given previous issues around the wording of the FOI Bill.
5. Alan Kelly
Completing a Labour-dominated list this week is the junior transport minister and new Labour deputy leader, whose election follows a pretty smart campaign. He said nice, soothing things at the hustings and carried out a media blitz involving events and launches connected with his government portfolio to ensure maximum exposure. Kelly will now be hoping for — and indeed expects — a seat at the Cabinet table.
1. Alex White
The junior health minister will be hoping for some salvation in the form of a Cabinet job after he failed to secure the leadership and was beaten quite comprehensively by Burton.
White’s campaign never really got going and he made a couple of ill-judged moves including suggesting that Joan Burton was the “last woman standing” from the Rainbow Coalition of the 1990s. It wasn’t a particularly nice thing to say in what was generally a well-mannered race.
https://vine.co/v/MUw2tzM3gl7
2. The banking inquiry
Once again the Oireachtas inquiry into the collapse of the Irish banking system finds itself in the spotlight after we reported on a split among members of the committee who have been critical of Fianna Fáil and its senator Marc MacSharry in particular.
The briefing against MacSharry continued this week and there is a clear frustration among some members – both opposition and government – with his conduct. But for the senator his aims are simple: “The one thing I want to see is the whole truth based on the facts not a version of the truth based on some of the facts.”
3. The Dáil
The Dáil can be a frustrating place at the best of times but this week it got slightly farcical during questions to the Taoiseach when first Gerry Adams was restricted in what he could ask and then amazingly Enda Kenny himself was stopped as he was about to give Joe Higgins some information on housing.
Rules are rules and the Ceann Comhairle has to enforce them but there’s something clearly wrong with those rules.
4. All the politicians who released statements about Garth Brooks
We wonder how many of them have tickets? But was it really necessary for every Tom, Dick and Harry of the political world to say their tuppence worth on the issue? Fair play to Timmy Dooley for proposing actual legislation to fix the problem, but the rest of them shouldn’t have bothered in our view.
5. Unionist parties
As arduous as it was and as long as it took, the North managed to get where it is today by politicians and interested parties sitting down, talking and eventually ending years of conflict. That the five Unionist parties walked out of talks on the contentious issue of parades this week does little to bolster the prospects of any meaningful progress on all the outstanding issues in the peace process.
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