Asserting your core values is grand but Varadkar can’t afford a bad local election

It was a subtle enough dig, all the same. The current Minister for Health was pointing out the contract for the new children’s hospital wasn’t written on his watch. He’s just cleaning up the mess.

“I don’t think this was set up properly. I don’t think it was contracted properly and I think that’s partly responsible for some of the overruns that we are seeing,” he said.

“I don’t believe this was set up in the right way and I think as a result of that, the final price will be more than it needed to be,” he added to Claire Byrne on RTÉ Radio 1.

The children’s hospital was supposed to cost just under €1bn, €983m to be exact, when the development was approved in 2017. Now the bill is heading for €2bn and beyond, give or take the odd billion, really.

And who, pray tell, was the Minister for Health when this dastardly deal was signed off on?

It’s hard to tell who Stephen Donnelly was specifically pointing the finger at but it was firmly in the direction of Fine Gael. In the wake of Fine Gael’s decision to undercut Fianna Fáil on budget negotiations with their tax plan, it seems to be fair game for ministers to take a pop at their Coalition partners. Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue is also criticising a lack of leadership from Fine Gael on environmental issues.

Leo Varadkar was Minister for Health when the St James’s Hospital campus was selected and Simon Harris was Minister for Health when the sod was turned on the new hospital. Harris was certainly the minister when the costs started to spiral out of control as the initial €1bn figure hit €1.3bn by 2018. And that was well before the Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns, shortages of goods after the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, construction inflation, energy costs and rainy days in October or whatever else can be randomly blamed.

When the children’s hospital finally opens, allegedly next year, but you can take that time with a pinch of salt, it will be the end of a 30-year process to build a health facility that is worthy of treating the nation’s children. It’s crass to call it a vanity project. Anyone who’s made the panicked dash to Crumlin Children’s Hospital will tell you the jaw-drops when you witness the antiquated state of that building. It is, however, a legacy project for the Taoiseach and therefore vital for him to have it open before his time runs out.

After a dozen years in power, Fine Gael will point to the economic transformation from basketcase to recovery to prosperity, overflowing surpluses that could never be dreamed of, and a rate of full employment that eclipses even the best days of the Celtic Tiger. The previous boom did leave behind a motorway network that shrunk the country, the Luas and airport terminals, but this time around the development of infrastructure has been that bit more laboured.

However, the manifestation of the housing crisis as the country’s greatest social, political and logistical challenge was also on their watch. A large chunk of bricks and mortar helps to illustrate there’s something to leave for generations to come. We’re still a sucker for the old line about cherishing the children of the nation equally, even if we have fallen down as a society on multiple occasions.

Heading into the next general election, Fine Gael has realised that merely promising competent management of the economy is not enough. The party tried that in 2016 and 2020 and got a solid kicking from the voters, who want tangible results on the society front.

The reiteration of some of its core values points to a change of tack for Fine Gael as the party asserts its authority. Varadkar followed up the rolling out of his three junior minister to talk about tax cuts with a statement from the mount about home ownership.

The facts got in the way of the rhetoric as the Census 2022 figures showed home ownership falling, with the proportion of owner-occupied dwellings has continued to fall between 2011 and 2022, down from almost 70pc to 66pc. And over the previous six years, the number of households who rented their accommodation from a private landlord rose by seven percent.

The aspiration is noble. Over the coming 18 months, expect to hear plenty more about income tax, property ownership, inheritance tax, farm succession and a bit about law and order, but the latter seems to have dropped down the priority list. From the almost catch-all party days of Garret Fitzgerald and Enda Kenny, Fine Gael is morphing into a niche party, hoping to target one in four of the electorate – and that 25pc would be on a good day.

The sudden realisation that the party needs to tell people what they stand for doesn’t seem to be based on a plan for a snap election after the budget in October. But after the redrawing of the electoral map in the summer, the state of play for the next outing will be known. Languishing in the opinion polls in a time of plenty – economically – is not where the party leading the Government expects to be.

Yesterday’s Ireland Thinks poll in the Sunday Independent put Fine Gael remained on a fairly lousy 20pc. Hitting next June’s local elections in that territory would result in significant losses of Fine Gael councillors and a probably drop in the the number of MEPs. Varadkar will have gone through another election campaign where he has failed to show any semblance of an electoral benefit. Sections of the party are already less than enamoured with his leadership. There will be a question mark over whether those remaining backbenchers and even ministers will want to go into a general election campaign staring defeat in the face.

Varadkar knows this is business. He royally stuck the knife into Enda Kenny in the infamous 2010 leadership heave – eight months before Fine Gael won 76 seats.

“It’s not that I have lost confidence in him, it’s that the public doesn’t have confidence in him and, unfortunately, that’s the truth, and that’s something that we all know, that you know,” he told Miriam O’Callaghan on RTÉ’s Prime Time.

Those words might yet come back to haunt him once again.

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