The Irish Times view on Fine Gael’s early campaign wobble: the curse strikes again

For the third time in a row, Fine Gael has wielded the starting pistol for a general election. And for the third time in a row, the party has managed to shoot itself immediately in the foot.
At the outset of of the 2016 campaign, Enda Kenny tied himself in knots and never fully disentangled himself over the meaning of the words “fiscal space”. In 2020, an unexpected controversy blew up in the party’s face over a long-planned commemoration of the Royal Irish Constabulary.
Now, in the opening rounds of this general election, Simon Harris has been forced on to the defensive over comments made at a Fine Gael event in Mullingar by Michael O’Leary. Pointing to the high proportion of teachers in the Dáil, the Ryanair boss pronounced that he “wouldn’t generally employ a lot of teachers to go out and get things done”.
The line itself would hardly make anyone’s top 100 list of provocative O’Leary statements. More embarrassing for Fine Gael was probably the guffaws and applause of the audience, captured on video.
Michael O’Leary’s views on teachers are unlikely to have much bearing on the ultimate outcome of this election. But in a short campaign that has only 17 days remaining, every slip means a precious news cycle has been lost.
With all parties rolling out policies and promises across a range of issues, and with manifestos either being published or imminent, there is a risk that voters will be overloaded with information. That is a perfect environment for a viral meme like the O’Leary clip to have an impact, particularly if it feeds into a particular narrative.
Fine Gael’s opponents, who now include not just the mostly left-leaning parties of the Opposition but also erstwhile Government colleagues in Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, now have a shared purpose: to paint the party as uncaring and less committed to social or climate justice than they are. If the party wished to rebut such attacks, then inviting Michael O’Leary to speak off the cuff at its campaign event might not have been the wisest strategy.
It is a peculiarity of Irish electoral politics that since the demise of the Progressive Democrats none of its major parties wishes to be described as centre-right. In other countries, a robust defence of free-market economics and a preference for a smaller state would be unremarkable. Fine Gael is the natural inheritor of that political tradition yet seems uneasy about acknowledging it. Hence the awkward gap between the cheers for O’Leary’s comments in Mullingar and Harris describing them as “crass and ill-informed”.
There is, of course a simpler explanation. Three weeks before an election is the worst possible time to insult a large bloc of voters. Fine Gael’s curse strikes again.