Fianna Fáils Zombie Heave

The heave is neither dead nor alive

It begins not with a bang, but with a low-frequency hum, the slight static of a tribal body politic turning on its own nervous system. The Heave: that most Irish peculiar form of political regicide - half pantomime - half scenes of deadly seriousness. A time-honoured national blood sport in which trembling hands, slick with ambition, delicately try to peel a leader’s fingers from the throbbing machinery of power.

This is no Ides of March, no grand opera of betrayal in the Senate; Not a stabbing in the Forum, no, this is Leinster House. A much smaller, inconsequential national theatre where betrayal wears a sly grin and a well-pressed suit. There are no knives anymore, a chilling lack of steel where steel should be. The violence is metaphysical. Only emails leaking like arterial blood, briefings disguised as concern, whispers scuttling through WhatsApp groups like rats under the creaking floorboards of Leinster House. The daggers are digital now, honed to a pixel-perfect, finely edged screenshot. And yes, the Heave happens often. Ireland loves its gentle and cyclical coups. Like celestial events, every few years, some malcontent starts to get shifty eyes and thinks: I, too, could be Taoiseach. And the rest, sensing weakness, start to heave, an ancient political reflex, as natural as breathing. Our youthful Republic has registered many such tremors; each its own self-contained apocalypse within the political party, ending not in death but usually in a press conference. The once-sanctified leader is usually left standing alone in a room, listening to the echo of their own authority draining away along with their reason for existing, because once you’ve reached the pinnacle of politics, what else is there? Every other thing you do for the rest of your life will always be a consolation prize. Your sinecured appointment to the PR company or lobbying firm, your personal assistant with the gravity-defying breasts, the late-night phone calls from party members seeking advice, as you’re now an elder statesman. All will be irrelevant and pale in significance to your once exalted status. You’ll never be as relevant or as powerful again.

Something is stirring in the petri dish of Fianna Fáil politics, a vague and formless agitation. The scientists, in their divine innocence, have a name for such a thing: Sukunaarchaeum, named after a Japanese deity; recently discovered, it’s an organism that refuses the binary terror of being either dead or alive. It simply persists, an existence of metabolic ambiguity. And now, the same spectral shudder has taken hold of Fianna Fáil. This is not a leadership challenge; it is a possession by a political zombie, a heave from the undead that lacks the courage to be corporeal or a corpse…..