EDITORIAL: Ring lays it on the line to Harris

They say a week is a long time in politics, and that certainly was the case over the last seven days. Leo Varadkar’s dramatic announcement last Wednesday that he was stepping down as Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael took everyone off guard.
Less than a week later, Simon Harris is now in place to become the next leader of Fine Gael. He will become the youngest Taoiseach in the history of the State when he is sworn in in the Dáil after the Easter break.
Understandably, the opposition parties issued numerous calls for a general election, but that was always going to be very unlikely, with the local and European elections just over two months away.
Instead, Harris must now press the reset button on the current Coalition government as it seeks to run out its full-term up until March 2025.
The scale of the task facing Harris was summed up in typical fashion by Mayo’s own veteran TD Michael Ring over the weekend when he spoke to local and national media about the path forward for Fine Gael.
The party really has to try to figure out how it can strike a chord with the electorate before the elections, and Ring was unequivocal when asked what the new leader must do.
He told RTÉ’s This Week programme: “We are not a left-wing party, we are a centre party and Fine Gael has to move back into the centre again, and more to the right. We need to go back to core issues, law and order, we need to be doing more on law and order. We need to go back to small businesses and farmers and we need to forget about a lot of these social issues we have been raising over the last few years that have been annoying people and upsetting people.
“Simon Harris has an opportunity now, and if he doesn’t take that opportunity Fine Gael and Simon Harris will pay a big price over the next couple of months if we don’t move back into the role that we always held.”

Drastic action needed
Some senior ministers including Simon Coveney and Helen McEntee distanced themselves from Deputy Ring’s comments, but the reality of the situation facing Harris is that he must take some drastic action to ensure that Fine Gael are not facing huge losses in the local and European elections.
The result of the recent referendums has shown that there is certainly a large disconnect between the current Government and the electorate, and while that might not be shown to the same extent in the June elections, there must certainly be a fear among Fine Gael members, and indeed those of Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, that seats will be lost, especially in the local elections.
If that happens, it will have a knock on effect for the next general election, when a lack of ground troops on local authorities could impact on a party’s ability to get their message across to the public in general.
Simon Harris will sit down and talk to his ministers this week, but in order to put his own stamp on things, he needs to reshuffle his cabinet – and that will probably mean demoting some of his close colleagues.
At just 37 years of age, he has some job of work to get done in a very short space of time. The lack of challengers for the position of Fine Gael leader is very indicative of the scale of the task ahead. Taking over the party at this moment in time is seen by most as a poisoned chalice, but Harris is now the chosen one, and he must get straight down to business after the Easter break.