It had been very quiet on the political scene in Ireland. Apart from the usual dross – general and understandable disdain for Eamon Ryan, Sinn Fein whinging about something or other and rumblings in certain quarters about a desire to replace Micheal Martin (also not difficult to fathom) but nobody with the cajones to do something about it.
And then, out of the political wilderness pop Labour tonight. For the sort of reason that has them swamped in the jungle for so long. Lack of direction and internal strife. In the excellent Netflix documentary The Man Who Bought Cricket at one stage, a reporter says of the players involved “You sold your soul to devil lads”.
If you haven’t seen it, the programme revolves around American ‘businessman’ Alan Stanford who offered some of world’s best Cricketers $20M to play a game in Antigua which he seemed to more or less own. The problem was, he wasn’t a business man, he didn’t have the money but what he did have was designs on the players’ women.
A very different scenario, but, after the collapse of Brian Cowen’s Government, that Labour went into a coalition administration with Fine Gael would have been the expected course of action. In effect however, all they did was become puppets on a string for their Blueshirt overlords.
In so doing, Joan Burton (above) sold her party’s soul down the toilet and left their core voters feeling betrayed and ignored. Just the perfect coctail to decimate the Labour vote and lead to some ramshackle, disparate and frankly volatile individuals earning seats in the Dail.
Now, to see a Party leader lose their seat in a General Election must have been unheralded enough, but when it’s the Tainaiste of the outgoing Government (Burton) it gives you some indication of how far Labour had fallen out of favour with the electorate.
Against that backdrop, in fairness to Alan Kelly, when he took over as Labour leader, he inherited a poisoned chalice and a shell of a Party. The Tipperary man comes across as a fearless, combative politician who is possibly too Gung-Ho for the good of himself and his Party.
The nuts and bolts of the matter, though, are that politics is a numbers game and the numbers in the red corner simply didn’t stack up under his stewardship. Therefore, as is pitifully the case in many facets of life now, the manager must fall on his sword.
However, those who instigated the demise of the man who took the job nobody wanted ought to be careful what they wish for!
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