Cabinet reshuffle presents opportunity for Sinn Féin to sharpen attack on Government strategy

Predictably, the changeover in the Taoiseach’s office has sparked plenty of discussion about Government strategy in the run-up to the next general election.

It also presents an opportunity for the Opposition to sharpen and intensify its attacks. Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s speech on Saturday morning indicated the party’s direction is to drive with ever-increasing ferocity at the same weak underbelly it has been targeting for years.

She charged that crises in health and housing have got worse: “Surely you cannot count this as a success,” she said. “There are no easy answers, but there are answers ... you chose to ignore them.”

“To dress up your failure as progress is to insult ordinary people who live with the consequences of those failures,” she railed, with her finance and housing spokesmen Pearse Doherty and Eoin Ó Broin nodding – sometimes in unison – next to her.

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Her speech was full of the sort of intensity that has, Sinn Féin sources concede, ebbed away from Leaders’ Questions exchanges in recent weeks – a “sham battle”, one TD says.

The party expects some of that vigour to return with Varadkar in the top job – indeed, privately, some say they are banking on him biting down on any attempts to goad him. “He doesn’t have a good temperament for politics, he is very easily rattled and riled and he takes things personally in a very silly way,” says one front bench TD.

Ó Broin agrees, citing a recent ill-tempered Dáil exchange between Varadkar and Social Democrats co-leader Róisín Shortall. “People want a Taoiseach to be Taoiseach-like, statesmanlike. They don’t mind bruisers in Cabinet, but they want a Taoiseach to rise above that,” he says.

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The overall thrust of Sinn Féin’s attacks is unlikely to change. The party’s recent polling strength probably derives from the simplicity of its message: that overlapping crises in health, housing and service provision are not unavoidable, but the product of political choices betray the values of an insider political class. They estimate that the planned handover of the Taoiseach’s role is proof positive of this and that in Varadkar, a more polarising figure than Martin, the choice is made all the more real.

“Fine Gael and Leo Varadkar’s policies are writ large” across public policy challenges, McDonald said in the Dáil. Expect, too, to see regular references to Varadkar’s leaking controversy. While a settled matter from a legal perspective, it remains a political target on his back.

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Nonetheless, as last week’s confidence motion and the margin of the Dáil vote for Varadkar’s nomination as Taoiseach show, he assumes the position with the Coalition stable and enjoying a large effective majority in the Dáil. Sinn Féin, boasting a polling lead, know that they must begin to erode this.

Ó Broin believes, unsurprisingly, that housing is a weakness. “We saw in off-the-record comments to the media and in parliamentary party meetings a growing discomfort (within Fine Gael) with where housing is going,” he said. Sinn Féin is watchful of the potential for discord within and between the Coalition partners if faith or momentum seeps away from the Housing For All strategy. It will be telling, Ó Broin says, “if it continues to get worse, what (Varadkar) and his party say about Darragh O’Brien”.

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Setting aside the ever-present danger that an unforeseen scandal or row could destabilise the Government, Sinn Féin is to try to make life as uncomfortable as possible for Green Party backbenchers on housing – or if the party has to tolerate any awkward shifts in its position on things like planning, Ceta or environmental issues. Likewise, the pressure will be brought to bear on Independents supporting the Coalition at constituency level and also if they are seen to be prolonging the lifespan of the Government while housing and health crises worsen.

The first half of the Coalition’s lifespan was about emergencies – the second looks to be about its capacity to make headway on chronic policy problems. For the Opposition, emergencies are tricky – especially ones like Covid, which gave a primacy to the advice of experts, presenting little angle for substantive attacks (will anyone be voting on what the Government did or didn’t do on ventilation, or rapid testing?). The politics of housing and health are much more traditional, much more straightforward, and much more potent. With the countdown now on to the general election, the Opposition will double down.

“The touchpaper has been lit,” McDonald said on Saturday in the Dáil, before receiving a timely reminder from Fine Gael’s Michael Creed that it won’t be all one-way traffic, and that her own party has plenty of weak points to take aim at: “You mean the Hutch paper?,” he shot across the floor of the Dáil.