Hubris?

Mentioned in comments last week, and again in the SBP at the weekend, but there’s something oddly enjoyable about some of those in FF who are so overtly attempting to run for the leadership of that party while very vocally claiming to be doing anything but.

For example:

A senior backbench Fianna Fáil TD has said “now is not the time for a change in leadership” in the party.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne, Jim O’Callaghan said Taoiseach Micheál Martin has his “full support”.

He said he will not “be seen to undermine the Taoiseach” by discussing his own leadership aspirations.

That’s some level of support, isn’t it? To in the same breath back the Taoiseach while placing his own ambitions over to one side.

Elaine Byrne in the SBP (behind a paywall) had some amusing thoughts about all this and others in FF…

You would wonder what Micheál Martin did in a past life to deserve backbenchers like Marc MacSharry and Éamon Ó Cuív, two grand old Dukes of York who march up to the top of the hill and march back down again. The huffing and the puffing of all this marching and self-importance is a sight to behold.

And:

It must surely be a strategy by the opposition parties to sit tight, say nothing and wait for the two sons of rural Ireland to attack for them. The MacSharry and Ó Cuív Show is Fianna Fáil’s own Trojan horse, attacking from within.
In 2013, MacSharry accused Enda Kenny of acting like a clown and said Fine Gael senators had allowed the then taoiseach to “urinate” on the Seanad. In 2018, the Sligo TD likened the Fine Gael minority government to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, in a row over funding for his constituency. And in July of this year, he accused public servants of laziness and of using the Covid-19 crisis as an excuse to “lie on the couch and watch box sets”.

And:

Earlier this month the calm, thoughtful and considered opinions of the grand old Duke of Sligo were once more on full public view. The Covid-19 regulations on the pub sector were denounced as “Stasi-like”, a reference to the repressive secret police of East Germany.
MacSharry is on a roll these days. The qualified auctioneer told the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party last Wednesday that Dr Ronan Glynn, the Acting Chief Medical Officer and a medical doctor with a PhD in surgical oncology and postgraduate training in both surgery and public health medicine, was “scaring the bejaysus” out of people.
It is fair to say that almost 2,000 Covid-19 deaths in a six-month period would – and should – alarm any sane and logic-minded person.

She recalls to mind one occasion when Pat Rabbitte in 2015 gave the irrepressible (and not in a good way) FF TD a flea in his ear at the joint committee into the banking crisis.

But Byrne makes a more substantial point when she discusses the politics of all this, that being that given FF’s parlous polling figures in recent times this sort of rhetoric from those worthies mentioned above is political poison. And that O’Cuiv and MacSharry are hardly the answer to Fianna Fáil’s problems. Intriguingly she doesn’t mention O’Callaghan. But one has to wonder if his all too evident appetite for the top job will count against him should the opportunity arise.