The Sad Tales of John McGuinness

All the times McGuinness has annoyed the Fianna Fáil leadership.

There is a certain kind of politician who does not so much serve in a parliamentary party as haunt it. John McGuinness is one of these; some would say John Deasy was another in Fine Gael. For nearly almost 30 years, McGuinness has been TD for Carlow–Kilkenny, a veteran backbencher, former Public Accounts Committee chair, and now Leas-Cheann Comhairle, (a job he’s doing quite well), yet the only thing that has made him memorable is not office but insubordination: the Fianna Fáil TD has become the party’s most durable internal irritant, with a persistent refusal to accept Micheál Martin’s leadership as anything other than a bureaucratic seizure of the party’s soul. Fianna Fáil, in McGuinness’s account, has not merely drifted into irrelevancy but been found wanting at every turn.

This is not the story of a one-off rebellion. It is a long feud, punctuated by bursts of public contempt, in which McGuinness repeatedly returns to the same accusation: Martin has built a party that mistakes control for competence, consultation for inconvenience, and loyalty for the measure of one’s political worth. The phrases change, but the complaint remains the same. It is the complaint of a man who thinks the party has become a machine for telling its own members what has already been decided.

2009–2010: the Cowen prehistory

Before Micheál Martin became the target, Brian Cowen was the weather system. In the wreckage of the financial crisis, McGuinness was part of the wider backbench muttering that accompanied Fianna Fáil’s collapse into self-loathing and electoral doom. The significance of this period is not that McGuinness made a single grand intervention, but that he was already there, already suspicious of leadership as performance, already treating party discipline as a useful fiction. The future feud with Martin did not begin from nowhere; it grew out of the party’s earlier collapse, along with the financial crash. From 2007 to 2009, in the lead-up to the crash, McGuinness served as a junior minister at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. After the crash, McGuinness was demoted when Cowen, eager to show he was acting decisively, reduced the number of junior ministers. I can’t recall whether McGuinness challenged the Fianna Fáil leadership during his years as a junior minister, but he did blame Calamity Coughlan for his demotion and said she had threatened to resign if he stayed in office. McGuinness survived the great Fianna Fáil 2011 general election extinction event, which is a testament to his ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth. Fine line between contrarian and opportunist.

2014: “I want your job”

The first truly unmistakable crack in the wall came in April 2014. During a private meeting with Micheál Martin, reportedly about European election ambitions, McGuinness delivered the sort of sentence that sounds like it has been lifted from a gangster movie: “I want your job, I wanna be the leader.” There is something almost innocent in the bluntness of it. No laundering, no preamble, no fake collegiality. Just the raw, primitive, naked political ambition. The remark signalled that McGuinness was not merely complaining about the direction; he was imagining himself as the corrective action. He was looking at Martin and seeing not a leader but a placeholder.