Cowen and Fianna Fáil fiddled while Ireland burned

The resignation was the only dignity of the week. A week of blunder, chaos and finally pathos, writes Vincent Browne.

Last Thursday morning, I received an e-mail from Brian Cowen. Nice and personal, starting off with ''Dear Vincent''.

He was in great form, celebrating his triumph over Micheál Martin last Tuesday and his triumph over Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore in the Dáil on Wednesday.

He confided: ''I now have a renewed focus and determination to bring our message to the people. We want to fight for this country, and set out our plan for its future."

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And - nice touch - he appended a link to the Dáil clip of his performance the previous day, the bit where poor Enda fell into the trap of feeding him the best line of the day, saying the Labour motion of no confidence was ''ill-timed'' and ''ill judged''.

''I couldn't agree more," Cowen had roared. He ended his message with: ''You can help me today by watching this video, and sharing it with your friends: www.fiannafail.ie/LabourNegativity." I did watch and would have sent it to my friends.

Well, to the Fianna Fáil ones. Sorry, come to think of it, the Fianna Fáil one.

Things seemed to go a bit downhill after Thursday morning and culminated in capitulation yesterday.

Cowen had had a meeting with John Gormley, Eamon Ryan and Dan Boyle on Wednesday evening, and the issue of rotating ministers had come up.

It might have been reasonable to suppose that the Greens would have had no objection to it since they wanted a bit of that themselves.

However, in their decisive and unambiguous style, the Greens said: ''It's not a good idea'' and ''It would send out the wrong signals." Oddly enough, the Greens didn't say 'No' in the vernacular, as once memorably articulated by the late James Gogarty: ''You will like f***." Anyway, Cowen didn't get the message.

Later last Wednesday night, Mary Harney, Dermot Ahern, Noel Dempsey and Tony Killeen said they were resigning their ministerial positions. Batt O'Keeffe did so early the next day.

The next morning, Thursday, Mary Hanafin arrived in Cowen's office and, as she self servingly disclosed to all and sundry later in the day, she did none of the dithering she had done two days previously. She made it bloody clear she was entirely opposed to the appointment of new ministers to replace the six ministers who had resigned.

Maybe she had heard the rumour that Barry Andrews, her constituency colleague, was one of those to be promoted to the cabinet, and that wouldn't have done a little bit of good in her bid to cling on to her seat in Dun Laoghaire.

Or maybe not. And then all hell broke loose.

The Greens had found a way to say 'No', and the plan to promote all of 12 Fianna Fáilers (six junior ministers to become senior ministers and six backbench TDs to become junior ministers) fell through. Mortification.

The amazing thing is that neither Cowen nor anybody in Cowen's entourage - not Brian Lenihan, not Tony Killeen and presumably not Batt O'Keeffe nor a few others - appreciated that the electorate was in no mood to appreciate what would have been the most flagrant piece of jobbery and abuse of power we have seen since . . . since . . . since . . .well, for a few weeks anyway.

It would have heaped even more odium on the odium-encrusted corpus of Fianna Fáil.

This is Michael McDowell like self-immolation, the destruction, not just of one political career - Brian Cowen's - but, during the week, the destruction of the political careers of Brian Lenihan and Mary Hanafin.

We are talking here of the self-destruction of Ireland's party-of-government, Fianna Fáil, the party that has been in office for more than three quarters of the last 79 years. And, boy oh boy, they surely deserve it.

I had thought they would be far from gone, that they would get maybe 40 seats or more, even though I know many others have been saying fewer than 30 seats.

But now? Is there a chance they might get no seats at all?

I'm a pessimist when it comes to Fianna Fáil and therefore I think the party will win some seats. Even after all that's happened, it might get up to 30 seats.

But they have destroyed the country, ably aided and abetted by Mary Harney and, previously, the Progressive Democrats.

They wrecked the economy - an economy they received in great shape in 1997 - through a budgetary strategy that could have been designed to wreck the economy.

They have wrecked this society by the promotion of deep and insidious inequalities. And they have wrecked the lives of hundreds of thousands of people whom they have driven into unemployment, destitution and emigration.

None of that mattered when it came to the party leadership though. It was a bungled reshuffle that did in Brian Cowen, but it will be the damage to the country that will do in Fianna Fáil.

PS: The e-mail from Cowen was sent to anyone who logs on to Fianna Fáil's website.