The End of Jim Gavin and Probably Michéal Martin

Fail to Prepare - Prepare to Fail.

Jim Gavin’s presidential campaign didn’t end so much as it imploded in slow motion, like an expensive fireworks display doused with a bucket of damp sand. It began with lofty talk of “lifelong public service” and “love of country” and ended with the words “failed to register a tenancy”. The whole thing was Fianna Fáil’s grand celebrity gamble—Micheál Martin’s hand-picked champion, the fresh face to outshine the party stalwarts—and it collapsed into a swamp of €3,000 teneancy repayment scandal to a Sunday World journalist who was his tenant at the time. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the rental debacle that brought down Jim Gavin as Fianna Fáils presidential nominee. This story isn’t over yet.

The surest sign that Michéal Martin’s leadership is in trouble is when party insiders start using words like “mortifying” and “complete and utter fuck up” in conversations with the press. Michéals funeral rites have begun early. When Fianna Fáil sources are bluntly saying they “poured money down the drain,” “stuck their necks out” for the leader, and it now feels “like the party is a laughing stock”, we’re not just witnessing a candidate withdraw—we’re watching Micheál Martin’s political judgment being fed through a shredder.

Martin’s insistence that Gavin’s withdrawal was “the correct decision” reads as a belated act of damage control and containment, the kind where you try to sound statesmanlike while discreetly backing away from the wreckage. But even his choice of candidate is now a millstone. Billy Kelleher, the veteran Fianna Fáil safe bet, was passed over for Jim Gavin, a man whose campaign lifespan could be measured in weeks and produced nothing but embarrassment. Party TDs are openly wondering “how long did they know” about the tenancy fiasco, suggesting this wasn’t so much an unforeseeable accident as a ticking time bomb left under the party’s desk, and it’s not like Sinn Féin left it there. This political bomb was all of their own making. Fianna Fáil’s director of elections for the presidential campaign, Jack Chambers, says the rental dispute was never disclosed. But surely Jim Gavin knew this would come out?

Jim Gavin is a former army officer, a man who managed a high-performance and very successful football team, but apparently, he was unable to spot a stray €550 every month or over three grand wandering into his bank account. This was a time when he said in his own words that he was under huge financial pressure. He claims ignorance, but then in the same breath, he claimed he was tax compliant, on the mystery cash, which he wasn’t aware of. There’s a word for that.

What this whole episode reveals, aside from Fianna Fáil’s capacity for self-sabotage, is that Martin’s bid to inject personality and celebrity into the party’s presidential pitch backfired spectacularly. Gavin was supposed to be the well-liked outsider who could rise above partisan bickering, a respected leader in sport turned statesman. Instead, he became a case study in how a nearly 10-year-old financial issue, combined with clumsy crisis-handling, can annihilate a campaign before it even gets going.

For Micheál Martin, it’s a personal humiliation. Gavin was his pick, his political project, sold to a sceptical party as the latest in a long line of “trust me” manoeuvres. They trusted him, grudgingly – and he delivered a fiasco. The revelation that a candidate could be derailed so easily didn’t just expose poor judgment; it undercuts one of Michéal Martin’s few remaining selling points: political competence.

Inside Fianna Fáil, the mood has turned introspective, which is to say: mutinous, lord of the Flies-like. The whispering about Martin’s future – always faintly audible even on good days – is growing louder. One can only imagine the simmering WhatsApp groups of backbench TDs, trading gallows humour and polling crosstabs. No one now expects Michéal Martin to still be leading by the time they face voters in a General Election again, and the process of anointing a successor – that peculiar Fianna Fáil ritual of smiling daggers and loyalist insurrections – has almost certainly begun.

Meanwhile, in Fianna Fáil HQ, the calendar has started to close in. The Coalition deal keeps Martin as the Taoiseach until 2027, but after the events of the past 48 hours, that looks less like a swansong and more like a prison sentence. The last two years of his leadership may be spent fighting not the opposition, but his own disillusioned party.

Gavin’s withdrawal isn’t only a campaign mishap – it’s the first real sign that Micheál Martin’s remarkable 40-year career in politics might be coming to an end. Every leader’s luck runs out eventually. The only question now is whether his career will end with a bang or will the men in suits politely hand him the metaphorical loaded gun and bottle of whiskey and ask him to do the decent thing for the sake of the party. But this Fianna Fáil and they're like the fucking Kardashians, it’ll be pure drama, albeit all fur and no knickers. Will it be Jim O’Callaghan or Darragh O’Brien? It won’t be Jack Chambers; he owns this debacle as much as Micheál. He’s damaged goods now.

And as for the party’s reputation? Fianna Fáil has delivered a subplot worthy of a TV show: a candidate spoofing his way through debates while the tenancy question circles him like a cartoon vulture, the party leader conspicuously silent for “five or six days,” on social media and party members begging for the excruciating ordeal to be over.

You couldn’t call Gavin’s exit dignified—he said he didn’t want to “bring controversy” to the office—but dignity isn’t much help when the narrative is already written in bold print: Fianna Fáil's own goal, leader’s judgment called into question.

This is another Irish presidential campaign that won’t be remembered for debate or vision, but for the slow, graceless sound of political boots slipping on melting ice. Irish presidential elections are supposed to be a polite waltz through civic virtues, crowned with symbolic grandeur. But in recent contests, they usually become a slow disintegration of a candidate’s character. Most people would rather take part in the Hunger Games, where any sane person would sooner smother their ambition permanently than submit to this macabre presidential pageant.

Irish presidential campaigns are not contests of intellect or substance, but choreographed spectacles of hysteria, ritual self-obliteration for the benefit of nobody at all.