McKinseygalitarian no more - Village Magazine

March/April 2022 41

Then a very terrible thing happened. In February

2017, he announced that he was joining Fianna

Fáil which had: “the best team most closely

aligned with my politics”. It was Roger Waters

leaving Pink Floyd to join Foster and Allen. The

young man with the enormous brain who had

come racing in to rescue us from the Banks, the

IMF and Fianna Fáil had decided that the only way

you solve the problem of Fianna Fáil was by joining

it. Donnelly’s idea of the “best team” now included

Willie O’Dea and Pat ‘the Cope’ Gallagher.

Donnelly seems really to be one of those people

who thinks you can transcend ideology by being

the smartest person in the room. The problem

with Ireland wasn’t a structural one – our gross

disparities of wealth and fanatical adherence to

low corporate tax rates.. The real problem was

that Stephen Donnelly wasn’t on the committee

running the country. A man of enormous

importance in his own mind, he genuinely

believed back in 2008-11 that the solution to

Ireland’s banking crisis would have been to have

himself in the room when the big decisions were

made.

When he joined the cabinet as Minister for

Health in 2020, all that was solved.

Given this mentality, it’s no surprise he stepped

forward to lead our health service through the

Covid apocalypse or that he appears unlikely to

be the one to deliver the free universal health care

which everyone now pretends to be in favour of.

He has given us many amusing moments, though,

for which we must thank him. My personal golden

Stephen Donnelly moment was when he told a

television journalist that children were more likely

to catch Covid on a trampoline than they were at

school. I think that’s what he said.

Even were he to be forced to ﬂy into political

exile in a second-hand helicopter it wouldn’t

knock o a ﬂitter o his granite opinion of himself.

His political career probably won’t ﬁnish in exile

unless it’s the sort where some international think

tank or European institution pays him to think

important thoughts in Brussels or New York. But

the thoughts won’t be of us.

just one of twenty TDs to vote for Clare Daly’s

early bill proposing a referendum to repeal the

8th Amendment. The entire Labour Party voted

against, while Sinn Féin abstained because

their Ard Fheis had not yet voted – though it

soon afterwards did – for repeal, but Donnelly

voted yes.

When the Social Democrats were formed in

2015, Donnelly was announced as one of the

party’s three co-leaders. He easily retained his

seat in the 2016 general election but bizarrely

told the media in early September 2016 that he

was leaving the Social Democrats to again sit

as an independent. “Some partnerships simply

don’t work”, was all he had to say. It’s the sort

of thing withered male academics tell friends

over bottles of good red wine after their wife

has found them naked with their students in

the hot tub.

One guessed that there had to be more to it.

I mean, he’d only been a member of the Social

Democrats for a little less than fourteen

months. One imagined perhaps some vicious

internal Social Democrat power struggle? I

picture two very well-mannered people, both

with the weekend Irish Times rolled up under

their arm, racing to get the last of the anchovies

in Sheridan’s, Galway. Around that time he was

interviewed in this magazine by egalitarian

Niall Crowley who found yes Donnelly was sort

of egalitarian too. “Are we short of political

vision? Yes. Do we need more political vision?

Yes. Would the public respond positively to

this? Yes… politicians need to get better at

laying it out”. He seemed aﬁre at the end of the

interview. McKinseygalitarian was the

headline.

hen management consultant

Stephen Donnelly strode

majestically onto the Irish

political stage just before the

2011 general election I was

impressed.

I particularly remember an appearance on

Tonight with Vincent Browne during which he

was asked if there had ever been an example,

in the history of the world, of a country which

had cut and taxed its way out of an economic

slump. Donnelly answered without a blink:

England during the industrial revolution, in the

immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

By the time of this television appearance – I

can still see the brothel-red background which

was just one of the things which made that

show so memorable – Donnelly had been

elected as an independent TD for Wicklow in a

campaign directed by his protégé and acolyte

Niall O’Tuathaill, who in the last two general

elections was the Social Democrats candidate

in the Galway West constituency. It was aided

too by paid PR consultant Conor Dempsey who

years later got into a little trouble over too

assiduously, and unpaid, promoting Donnelly’s

interest on Twitter.

Donnelly’s smartness appeared to be part of

a refreshing political reset after the years during

which Irish politics had been dominated by

Fianna Fáil, a party which during Brian Cowen’s

Taoiseachship often gave the impression that if

its IQ dropped one point it might turn into a

piece of hairy bacon. Donnelly continued to

impress during his ﬁrst Dáil term when he was

McKinseygalitarian

no more

The Enormous Mind of Stephen Donnelly at work for

Fianna Fáil and the country in time of post-Covid

By Kevin Higgins

POLITICS

The young man with the enormous brain who

had come racing in to rescue us from the

Banks, the IMF and Fianna Fáil had decided

that the only way you solve the problem of

Fianna Fáil was by joining it