OPINION: It’s never that simple, Simon

There can hardly have been a more hapless occupant of a Cabinet seat in the Dáil as that filled last week by the Minister for Enterprise. Simon Coveney looked like a man who wished he was a thousand miles away from Leinster House.
The source of his discomfort was plain enough to see. All around him, the scuds and missiles of withering criticism aimed at his brother, Rory, were falling like hailstones. Rory Coveney, the RTÉ executive who masterminded the ill-planned ‘Toy Show, The Musical’ – which made a loss of €2.2 million – was the target of universal ire from all sides of the house, not least from the Fine Gael colleagues of his brother.
Meanwhile, the party deputy leader, Simon, had no choice but to sit forlornly and soak up the lambasting directed at the brother, who had refused to attend PAC meetings and who, it was freely admitted, had ‘deliberately circumvented’ the process of obtaining clearance for a project that turned out to be a fiasco.
Worse still, the brother had walked away with an exit package, having stepped down in ignominy. The cost of this package has yet to be revealed, but it may spell the career death for Kevin Bakhurst, the sheriff who, it was hoped, was going to clean up the town.
If Simon Coveney hoped to be cut a little slack by his party colleagues, he was in the wrong house.
The leading lights of Fine Gael could sense – as all politicians do – which way the wind was blowing, and they were only too happy to hunt with the hounds even if the target was the Deputy Leader’s brother.
Nor could the minister expect much sympathy from his fellow coalition colleagues on the Fianna Fáil side. There are many in the ranks of the Soldiers of Destiny who have long memories, and Coveney’s beheading of the beleaguered Brian Cowen back in 2010 has not been forgotten.
That decapitation came after Cowen, then Taoiseach, gave that infamous interview on Morning Ireland, when he came across as hoarse and ‘under the weather’, even confusing the Croke Park agreement with the Good Friday agreement. In jig time, Coveney had issued a tweet accusing Cowen of being ‘half way between drunk and hungover’.
Cowen’s reply was to describe the tweet as political muck throwing, but the damage was done, and the unravelling of Cowen’s coalition government was underway. The tweet was, much later, deleted by Coveney, but that was not enough to mollify Cowen’s followers, who have not been slow to hide their glee at the current Coveney travails.
Fair being fair, Coveney should not be cast as his brother’s keeper, but in Irish public life, guilt by association is a familiar currency. In the world of politics, Simon Coveney is regarded as a decent egg – he was, after all, the choice of 65 percent of ordinary Fine Gael members when he lost the leadership contest to Leo Varadkar.
He does, however, have an unfortunate penchant of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. When he appointed his friend and racing-yacht co-owner, Paul Hyde, to the board of the Marine Institute, he was hardly to know that the latter would go on to become the spectacularly discredited deputy chairman of An Bord Pleanála.
In 2021 came the botched attempt by Coveney to secure a position for a former Fine Gael Minister, Katherine Zappone, as a special envoy to the United Nations. He proposed the appointment at a shocked Cabinet meeting without any prior discussion. The bizarre idea was shelved when Zappone herself called halt to the fiasco after a torrent of controversy.
Just now, Mr Coveney treads the tightrope between fraternal loyalty and going with the flow. But this time, he is on his own.