A wobble within Labour but full-scale mutiny not on cards

BACKGROUND:A GOVERNMENT with a huge majority can sometimes find itself in a more perilous place than one defending a wafer-thin majority. In 1977 Fianna Fáil returned to government after winning a landslide general election. Instead of stability the party was riven with instability.

Two years later, there was a change of leadership. Four years later, the party was voted out of government.

The fault-line back then was Charles J Haughey. The potential fault-lines of this Government are, by nature, in its very composition.

Tensions between Fine Gael and Labour – be they motivated by personality or ideological difference – will be inevitable, particularly as both parties struggle with harsh policies.

Early on in the Government, both Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore accepted that there would be, at the very least, setbacks and mini-mutinies along the way and that some of their respective ranks would bail out in protest at a Government decision.

Eight months into Government, there have been two acts of dissent that have borne consequences – one in Fine Gael and one in Labour.

There will be more during the lifetime of the Government. How many is impossible to predict but it likely that the bulk will come from the junior partner.

Given the local and parochial nature of Irish politics, it is not altogether surprising that the issues that triggered both resignations were constituency ones. Denis Naughten has left Fine Gael over the party’s U-turn on Roscommon hospital. And yesterday, as he has threatened for quite some time, Willie Penrose stepped down as Labour’s “super junior” in protest at the decision to close Mullingar barracks. He also resigned from the Labour parliamentary party.

Yesterday, there was considerably less sympathy for Penrose among his party colleagues than there was for the unfortunate Naughten, who at least could point to a shift in his party’s stance on the hospital.

“Look, we are facing five years of tough measures,” said one Labour TD. “It’s going to be rotten and we are going to be put to the pins of our collars. And here’s Willie Penrose on the first hurdle, getting wobbly about an issue that is very local and is very minor in the context of the national cuts.

“By the time the term is over there won’t be a constituency in the country that is not affected by cuts. It will be a barracks here or a hospital there or a school elsewhere,” added the TD, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

It is also apparent that Penrose got little support from Labour colleagues around the Cabinet table and was isolated in his opposition to the decision by Alan Shatter to close the barracks.

“There was amazement and wonderment to be quite frank at how a Minister could resign over such a minor constituency matter,” said a senior partner figure, who also pointed out that no jobs had been lost. Gilmore had spoken to Penrose over the past few weeks but had not sought a compromise or any sweetening of the pill.

Penrose is popular and respected within the party and has a formidable constituency operation in Westmeath. But to get the position as the super junior, others who were seen as more senior were overlooked. In the run-up to the Cabinet being appointed, Penrose had held a long and intense meeting with Gilmore and some colleagues believed he had cajoled his way into Cabinet.

Uncomfortably for the party, its East MEP Nessa Childers complained of bullying over her outspoken comments against Kevin Cardiff’s nomination to the European Court of Auditors. But among the party’s TDs, these are seen as isolated incidents and not redolent of any larger discomfort among the party’s spear-carriers with the thrust of national policy.