Fine & Dandy
Barring a last-minute meltdown, Fine Gael are favourites to head the next government. But can they really renegotiate the bail-out, fix the banks and tackle public sector overspend without sparking industrial strife? Front-bencher Simon Coveney tells us what we can expect from an FG-led administration.
Valerie Flynn, 22 Feb 2011
With the formation of a new government only weeks away, you could do worse than put your money on Simon Coveney for a position in the next cabinet. Indeed, when Hot Press catches up with Coveney, the 38-year-old Fine Gael TD seems quietly confident.
It’s his last day in Dublin before he heads home to Cork to fight his third general election since 1998, when he became one of the youngest ever TDs at just 26. That was in the by-election that followed the tragic death of his father, the popular former Fine Gael Minister Hugh Coveney, who drowned while out walking his dogs along cliffs on the Cork coast.
During his 13 years on the Opposition benches, Simon Coveney has also spent a term in Brussels, double-jobbing as an MEP.
These days, he’s one of the members of Enda Kenny’s front bench most often sent out to bat on TV and radio. Less theatrical than his right-wing colleague Leo Varadkar, and less adept at condensing complex questions of policy into snappy sound-bites than Michael Noonan, Coveney cuts a serious, slightly dry figure.
The impression of a clever but ascetic young man was compounded by his infamous tweet last September, when he accused the then-Taoiseach Brian Cowen of sounding “half way between drunk and hungover and totally disinterested (sic)” during an RTÉ radio interview.
Face to face, however, the Corkman is chatty and personable. He’s definitely most at ease when discussing abstruse matters of policy: Fine Gael’s economic stimulus policy is his baby, and he’s obviously terribly proud of it. But when the interview, conducted in the Dáil canteen, runs way over time, Coveney doesn’t so much as hint that I should take my tape recorder and piss off. Which is very nice of him, really. Here’s hoping he’ll be as gracious when he’s sitting on the other side of a mahogany Ministerial desk.
What kind of hours will you work during the election campaign?
I’ll be in the office at seven every morning trying to get media comment out early to be first with it and certainly three or four days a week we’ll be on bridges in Cork City meeting people on their way to work, trying to convince them that Fine Gael is the party to vote for. Really, it’s about trying to meet as many people as you can in your constituency and give them reassurances as to what the next government can do to improve things. The primary role of the next government is to give people cause for optimism and confidence. It’s not a hopeless situation, despite the fact that 300,000 people have lost their jobs in three years and a lot of people are having to emigrate – the kind of people who’d be reading Hot Press actually. That is something that I cannot accept and we shouldn’t accept as a society and any new government needs to have answers as to how we’re going to stem that flow of talent. There are a number of frauds, quite frankly, in politics at the moment, who are promising easy solutions that revolve around isolating ourselves from the rest of Europe, and defaulting on all of the bank debt…
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