The Gist: Who Will Lead FF Next?

Fadó fadó in Éirinn, becoming the leader of Fianna Fáil was the same thing as becoming the Taoiseach. If you got one job, you were going to get to do the other. Every Fianna Fáil leader has ended up as Taoiseach, no exceptions.

But Fionn Mac Cumhaill no longer sprints through the forests of Ireland from Howth Head to Dún Aonghasa without bending a blade of grass, so light is his tread. No more does the wisdom of the salmon of knowledge hide in his thumb, wanting only to be sucked on to solve any problem. Similarly, the Fianna Fáil of the past is gone. Nonetheless, one day (soonish) Micheál Martin will resign and a new leader will rise.

Let's have a look at the two frontrunners.

Jim O'Callaghan

Jim O'Callaghan holds Fianna Fáil's most marginal seat in Dublin and one of the most consequential Ministerial roles as Minister for Justice. He has long considered himself as the obvious next choice to become leader of his party and hasn't been shy about letting everyone know just how obvious it is.

He has a particular style. He loudly sets out an extreme position well beyond what his predecessors might have taken (on surveillance, on immigration etc) and then he blusters unpersuasivly in the face of any counter-argument. At the start, when the people effected were powerless, this could give the impression of working. His Department's motto may as well have been "Bad Legislation and Plenty of It".

But, when you start to apply the same impulses to balancing competing interests- the very thing that being a Taoiseach requires the ability to do- the wheels fall off that paddywagon very quickly.

His response to the fuel protests- threatening to call out the army on them- was immediately seen as counter-productive. Firstly, it revealed that he didn't politically recognise that the bulk of the protesters were basically a bit of Fianna Fáil's electoral constituency annoyed they weren't getting the benefits of the patronage they felt they deserved. Secondly, he's not in charge of the army and he hadn't checked this plan with the actual Minister for Defence. And thirdly, it was dumb as a bag of rocks.

He took the most extreme position (the army has never been deployed against civil protest in the history of the state) and discovered he hadn't understood where the lines of actual power lay in his party, or how people would react to being threatened with the army. (Badly.)

More recently, he has embroiled himself in a row with criminal legal aid solicitors over paying them for their work. Again, his impulse has been to take an extreme position and bluster on as his various justifications for it meet the reality of the consequences of those actions. He's the Minister for Justice who's ground the criminal justice system to a halt.

Bluntly, the solicitors he is fighting with have every incentive to hold their breath longer than he can survive just asserting it will all end in a minute.*

Not for the first time, the Minister has mistaken saying things for being able to do things. Of course, his profession as Senior Counsel has no division between the two.

But while saying things is an effective way to win cases, it isn't a great political reputation to have if you want to win elections.

Outlook: Blustery, gathering clouds.

Jack Chambers

Jack Chambers, at 35, has held both halves of the government's financial portfolio, as Minister for Finance and current Minister for Public Expenditure. He opposed the repeal of the 8th Amendment and then, after that turned out to be at odds with the majority of the country, he 'evolved' his position to support it. He came out in a public statement in 2024.

I mean, you'd think, with all that, you might be able to summon a mental image of him speaking in your head. But, and this may be what has made him so appealing to Micheál Martin as a cabinet colleague, he has the rare talent of erasing himself from your memory even as he speaks. This auto-amnesia is effective in not creating avoidable problems (see: Jim O'Callaghan above) but does pose the question- Do the people yearn for a Taoiseach blander than creamed rice?

However, as your eyes slide off Jack Chambers, as off a block of frictionless lard, it is easy to miss his actively bad policy ideas. For example, he recently made a statement to the Dáil which set out a more extreme version of Government power than anything Jim O'Callaghan has ever come up with. Here he is, explaining how much he rejects the very idea of citizens using the courts when the state acts illegally;

"I am against all judicial reviews whether it is environmentalists, landowners or anybody in the economy....We have seen the enormous deference to allowing this system and industry of judicial reviews to build up. It is undermining delivery systems right across the board. I am against landowners taking judicial reviews, I am against developers taking judicial reviews, I am against anybody taking judicial reviews"

Not great on the Constitutional power of the courts to hold the Government to account then. How about the legal duties to take action to reduce climate change and environmental damage?

Wait, we're getting some news just in...

"The Minister maintained that by disapplying elements of the Climate Act it would reduce the potential for judicial reviews against particular projects going ahead.
He criticised excessive use of the courts “when we have an elected Government”.

Outlook: Chilling.

Circling the talent drain

As illustrated above, the problem for the Fianna Fáil party is that, despite its years of grumbling about Micheál Martin as leader, it has never been able to find anyone with a comparable set of skills. He knows the weight of his words, and the role the leader has to play in predicting and balancing competing interests. He knows his party's membership and elected representatives are mostly out of kilter with the general voting public and he makes efforts to hide it. He even knows when to give up on an unwinnable fight. I don't think he makes good choices, but I think he knows how to make choices.

The post-crash collapse saw the party lose its status as the default party for people with ambition to power (that became Fine Gael). It also lost its self-image as the voice of the Irish people, as the majority of its Oireachtas representatives chose the wrong side on one social and political issue after another. (see: Jack Chambers above)

Neither Chambers or O'Callaghan have displayed any ability to do the job of being Taoiseach. But that's not the job they're trying to be hired for. They're auditioning to be the leader of the Fianna Fáil of today. And maybe complaining that the Constitution is interfering with the triumph of your bloodless technocracy's will or cosplaying as a Temu-delivered inflatable Pete Hegseth is the way to appeal to that electorate. The Conservative Party picked Liz Truss as leader. Who knows what madcap decisions an old, out of touch conservative party membership might make?

The thing is, the days when being leader of Fianna Fáil led automatically to becoming Taoiseach are as firmly behind us now as Fionn and the salmon of knowledge.

The next leader of Fianna Fáil could make decisions that destroy the party with an electorate already restlessly casting about to dump the 100 years government. Just being offputting could be enough to start a stampede. And, as the fuel protests showed, the party's past power bases aren't willing to put up with even the smallest gap in receiving the benefits of patronage.

What does Jim O'Callaghan say about solving housing (nowt)? What does Jack Chambers say about what he'd change about Ireland (nowt)?

What does that say about Fianna Fáil's future? Lots.

*I'm a solicitor, but my firm doesn't do criminal legal aid work. The people who do are the rocket scientists of the profession, with the widest gap between the skills needed to do the job and the pay provided for that job already. The proposed changes to paying them are indefensible and would require them to be exposed to an unlimited and open-ended obligation to work without being paid. They would also further disincentivise the best solicitors to work to defend accused people. You might not care about that today, but you really would if you ever found yourself being prosecuted for something you didn't do.