Parnellite qualities now required of Irish leader

This has been a tumultous week in Irish politics with Taoiseach Brian Cowen securing a vote of confidence in his leadership by the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party on Wednesday evening and then stepping down as leader of the party by the weekend. The decision of the Greens not to accept Mr. Cowen's plans to revamp his ministerial team in the run-up to the general election was the straw that finally broke the camel's back of this Dáil and hastened an already declared general election. Fianna Fáil are now engaged in selecting a new leader with former minister for foreign affairs Micheal Martin and Finance Minister Brian Lenihan the two front runners. The opinion polls indicate that Fianna Fáil will be consigned to the opposition benches in the forthcoming ballot and whoever is selected will not be in charge of government in the immediate future. However, the Fianna Fáil leadership race does focus public attention on what is required of a national leader. Both Mr. Martin and Mr. Lenihan possess an obvious affability as well as undoubted ability, attributes which should help the party reconnect with the ordinary voters. But are there not other requirements for Irish political leaders in government, such as the qualities possessed by the late Charles Stewart Parnell? The Irish Home Rule leader was a master of the political chess game and even though he was a member of the landed class, he was unsentimental in his attitude to the political vested interests who ran Westminster at that time. Whether it was ‘Ireland's friend' Gladstone or the arch Tory Disraeli, he played one off against the other to pursue his quest for Home Rule. That he wasn't successful due to issues in his personal life was tragic for Ireland. While the parallel with the present is somewhat different - (we don't have the level of numerical clout in Europe that Parnell had in Westminster), it is now apparent that we must build up alliances with other states if we are to avoid being trundled over in economic terms by the big states who remain blithely on course while we are buffeted by the four winds. Like Gladstone, the EU Commission and the Germans may be ‘our friends' but we must now take a hard look at this relationship and be careful to ensure that our interests, short-term and long-term, are served in the policies emanating from Brussels. The forceful, some would say emotive, response of Commission President Barrosso to Irish Socialist MEP Joe Higgins that we are fully responsible for the economic debacle that we find ourselves in and that the European banks have no responsibility for fuelling the situation has raised eyebrows but it does emphasise the current thinking of the European elite that it is hard luck on us but we must carry the can Surely it must now be the task of a new government to map out step by step how the economic collapse occurred and the role played in that by reckless lending by international banking. Irish citizens who must now pay for years for this folly at least deserve that explanation.