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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
26 April 2023
Marc MacSharry’s departure from Fianna Fáil and his
steadfast refusal to entertain a return may in fact be
a harbinger of things to come
M
ARC MACSHARRY comes from a
distinguished Fianna Fáil
political family with some 20
years of experience in Leinster
House in his own right. In my own
experience of him he can, like his father Ray,
be a caustic and very direct critic when he
thinks things are going wrong or are being
mismanaged. This outspoken quality has
often got him into controversy and may
ultimately have been used by the Fianna Fáil
leadership to get rid of him from the party
altogether.
The party’s decision to go into coalition with
Fine Gael in 2020 together with ‘policy drift’
and Micheál Martin’s autocratic approach has
sparked an active group of opponents to the
Tánaiste’s leadership. The narrative has been
that Martin has been in too long as leader,
neglects to consult front-bench or any other
Mac the Knifed
CONOR LENIHAN talks to MARC MACSHARRY about Fianna
Fáil’s policy betrayals of its roots: on housing, corporate
taxation, the EU, neutrality, party loyalty and Leo the leak
colleagues and was only ever focused on his
own personal ambition to become Taoiseach
and beyond – in short that he is preventing an
actual revival in the party’s fortunes on its
own terms. This seems to be borne out by the
opinion polls where Fianna Fáil have
essentially solidified their position in third
place. Fine Gael are almost always ahead of
them and Sinn Féin are now 10% clear of both
of them from a position where all three were
broadly at or around the same support levels
in 2020 at the time of the general election.
Indeed the ascendancy of Sinn Féin is being
advanced by the Fine Gael-led termination of
the eviction ban which saw one poll put them
on 37% with Fianna Fáil 16 points behind and
Fine Gael collapsing to 15%.
In his interview for Village, MacSharry
consistently refuses to be drawn into further
criticism of Micheál Martin. “My views are well
known and cover issues of policy, integrity
and core principles. In any event my views on
this topic are now irrelevant given that I am no
longer a member of the parliamentary party
and have resigned my membership of the
party itself. I have no intention of returning to
POLITICS
Llike his father Ray, Marc MacSharry can be a caustic critic
when he sees things mismanaged. This outspoken quality
generates controversy and may ultimately have been used
to get rid of him from the party altogether
April 2023 27
others, not just MacSharry, believe the party
is short-changing its own history in pushing a
sanitised version of the goal of a united
Ireland.
MacSharry is very adamant that he is “his
own man” and, in a strange way, given his
strong footprint pedigree in Fianna Fail, he
may in fact be better o being outside of the
party.
He has surfaced a very real issue in policy
terms for the party he once belonged to — the
precise nature of the actual difference
between it and Fine Gael.
Marc MacSharry is very vocal in his criticism
of the absence of real policy discussion in the
party he has left. “Historically within the party
policy was very much bottom up. Members
shared their concerns, as did constituents,
and these policies or other concerns were fed
directly to the top table of the party via the
party’s elected representatives and Leinster
House team”.
Now he sees only top-down management
and a tendency to punish or remove possible
dissent or debate. One suspects that
MacSharry, like others in the party, has tired
of a race to succeed the current leadership and
has given up on changing both the leadership
and the policy direction.
The fact that he cites the absence of anyone
in the party prepared to change the
management style of Micheál Martin means
that he may silently believe that the party is
on the edge of electoral insignificance. In this
sense the Marc MacSharry departure from
Fianna Fáil and his steadfast refusal to
entertain a return may in fact be a harbinger
of things to come.
Marc MacSharry has much wider concerns
about the direction of Irish politics, as distinct
from developments in Fianna Fáil, where he is
the Fianna Fáil ranks. My future is as an
independent for the Sligo-Leitrim
constituency”. He profoundly believes that the
style of leadership exhibited by Martin is likely
to be continued by any of his current potential
successors and he does not wish to have any
part of that.
His disillusionment with Fianna Fail
culminated with the controversies involving
Leo Varadkar leaking a confidential document
as Taoiseach to a lobbyist friend and the
failed attempt by the then Minister for Foreign
Aairs Simon Coveney to appoint another
friend and former cabinet colleague
Katherine Zappone as an Envoy to the UN on
LGBT+ issues. MacSharry’s objection was a
principled one where he resented the “buddy,
buddy” aspect to it all leaving, as it did, “a
bad taste about politics”. He resigned from
the parliamentary party rather than
“hypocritically vote confidence in Coveney…
Our cabinet people such as Dara Calleary and
Barry Cowen were shown a lot less mercy”. At
a deeper level he feels that the government’s
policies have little by way of “Fianna Fail
fingerprints on them and essentially the
policies are set and a continuation of existing
Fine Gael policies”. MacSharry, known to be
outspoken, dislikes both the policies and the
arrogance of Fine Gael in oce.
The surprise in Fianna Fáil circles is that he
not only took himself out of the parliamentary
party, the frequent resort of unhappy rebels,
but went further and resigned altogether from
the party following Micheál Martin’s
opportunistic delaying of MccSharry’s return
to the parliamentary party in a strange
departure from practices followed for the
rehabilitation of senators Aidan Davitt and
Ollie Crowe who were suspended in the wake
of GolfGate some months earlier.
What is more surprising from his interview
with me is that he regards his exit from the
party as “permanent”. In one of his statements
on the way out he defined himself as a socialist
republican and positioned himself on the left
of the party. “My involvement with the party
was on the basis that we were a party of
republican-mindedness, looking after the
people in the terraces, in business and
enterprise and in small farming families”. He
makes it abundantly clear he does not see
those values as existing in the party anymore.
To amplify his distance from the party he
mentions the Taoiseach’s notion of a “shared
Ireland” as something with which he does not
agree. MacSharry believes that the party’s
previous ethos was one of unambiguous
support for a united Ireland. He says “there is
nothing in the Good Friday Agreement about
a shared Island”.
Both he and his father always brought a
strong sense of republicanism to the table of
the party’s debate on these matters. Many
ready to share his anxieties. “I see policy
generally being dictated from Brussels with
little or no dissent from this at a domestic
level”. In this he instances the ease with which
the current government jettisoned our
commitment to tax independence over the
proposal from the EU and the OECD for a
harmonised 15% corporate tax rate”. The
bigger powers are pushing their agenda and
we don’t get to call the moves”. This move
poses a direct threat to Ireland’s ability to
continue luring Foreign Direct Investment
(FDI). The ease with which this article of faith
was abandoned surprised many. There was
such an overwhelming consensus of dierent
and successive governments of its importance
it appears to have been disappeared in the
blink of an eye. “Our policy is being developed
out of Europe. We simply rolled over to the
pressure. There is also a deeper concern on
my part that our traditional support for peace
and neutrality is being eroded in the context
of the unfolding events in the war in Ukraine”.
MacSharry has huge sympathy for the
Ukrainians but, like many members of the
public, is mystified how quickly the public
authorities and local authority figures can set
about speedily providing accommodation for
them “while Irish people find it impossible to
get a foot on the property ladder or access
public housing”. 24 emergency-build modular
units are being brought into commission in
Sligo to faciitate refugees from Ukraine while
there are 1,500 on the Sligo housing list he
mentions to emphasise the public unease over
this.
“We need to be generous to the Ukrainians
in their terrible plight but we also need to be
as applied and ecient in providing for the
general needs of the wider population when it
comes to our own home-grown challenges”.
My involvement with
the party was on the
basis that we were a
party of republican-
mindedness, looking
after the people in the
terraces, in business
and enterprise and
in small farming
families
Mrtin’s Finn Fil: dictted to by EU nd OECD
