While it would be unfair to say Brian Cowen has risen without trace, his track record is one of caution, not courage, says Fintan O'Toole
THE OFFICE of Taoiseach is not normally to be found under the Christmas tree. You have to knock Santa off the roof with a sly elbow in the ribs, offer Rudolph a lifetime's supply of carrots, whisper in Prancer's ear that Rudolph is losing his shine and won't be guiding the sleigh forever and mutter a quiet threat about the knacker's yard to Donner. Unless your name is Brian Cowen, in which case you rub the sleep from your eyes, and there it is, sitting at the end of your bed, neatly wrapped in red ribbons.
We've known for so long that Brian Cowen was going to be the next taoiseach that it's easy to forget how strange his ineluctable rise has been.
No Fianna Fáil leader has ever got the job so softly.
Éamon de Valera got there through a death sentence, a civil war and an acrimonious split with former comrades. Seán Lemass had to wait for more than 30 years. Jack Lynch manoeuvred himself brilliantly into place as the compromise candidate between warring factions.
Charles Haughey clawed his way back through the most extraordinary comeback since Lazarus and was ousted by Albert Reynolds in a dramatically stage-managed coup.
Bertie Ahern got the job only after a humiliating dry run against Reynolds in which his private life was used to force him out of the race.
Brian Cowen's coronation is thus unprecedented in itself. It is also oddly out of synch with his record.
In a month's time, he will be the first politician in the history of the State to have held all four of the most senior posts in government - foreign affairs, finance, tánaiste and taoiseach. Yet, even if he cannot be said to have risen without trace, it is hard to pin down a single significant achievement in office.
His distinction is almost entirely internal to the political system - as a very effective media debater, an issuer of party rallying cries, a scourge of Fine Gael and an embodiment of the core value of tribal loyalty. As an office holder, his record is underwhelming.
If there were any innovations during his period as minister for transport, energy and communications in the early 1990s, they must be hidden somewhere in the archives.
He was a very poor minister for health, apparently intent on avoiding damage to his political reputation by doing very little to tackle any of the long-term problems.
In the Department of Foreign Affairs, he did important work on Northern Ireland, but presided over the shamefully mealy-mouthed Irish response to the invasion of Iraq and lost the first Nice Treaty referendum.
In the Department of Finance, he was extraordinarily lucky, enjoying massive revenues from the short-lived property boom, but getting out before the real downturn in the public finances. Beyond a combination of innate caution and very mild egalitarianism, his budgets told us little about his vision of Irish society.
All of this might seem like a charmed political life, and an ideal accession to the top job. He has few real enemies and has given no hostages to fortune. He has a deserved reputation for being very bright and a proven ability to side-step disasters. (No one blamed him for the Nice debacle, for example.) But these assets also now define the immediate challenge he faces.
As top dog, he needs not just the loud bark he's always been known for, but the real bite that has been so conspicuously absent. Staying out of trouble and rallying the tribal troops won't be enough to make a taoiseach.
He needs, in fact, to make some trouble for himself. The manner of his rise means that he lacks the authority either of a general election victory or of a party contest, and if he wants to see what that means in practice he has only to look across the water at the floundering of another finance minister who acceded without these victories, Gordon Brown.
He has to establish his authority, and he won't do that by playing safe.
There is, as his extraordinary luck would have it, a very quick way to make a fundamental statement that, with hard times coming, he has the guts to be a leader. It is to sack Mary Harney as Minister for Health.
She should have gone after the Fitzgerald report into the Portlaoise cancer crisis pointed to systemic weaknesses of governance, management, and communication in the Health Service Executive, a stunning indictment of the way she set up the most important public body in the State.
After such a failure, any taoiseach would be perfectly justified in offering the responsible minister a less critical job.
In this case, Cowen could achieve a great deal more. He could signal to the public that he actually understands the depth of anger over the health services. He could electrify the Fianna Fáil back benches by marking a return to the party's core values from the wilder shores of what Ned O'Keeffe called "confrontation, privatisation and Americanisation".
And he could show that, behind the tribal belligerence, there is a man with real political bottle.