More funeral cortege than political campaign, Jim Gavin’s presidential bid shuffled into life with an official launch at East Wall’s Exo Building on Sunday. The former GAA star turned politico owes his nomination to a Martin-led cordon sanitaire against the resurrection of Bertie Ahern, but he is already on the backfoot thanks to a viral storm of malicious smears that spread through boomer Facebook last week.
Banking on transfers through the tacit uniparty pact with Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys, Gavin offered little to mark his own ground at the hour-long launch relying instead on platitudes about “uniting communities” instead of the national populism his party used to embody.
Forgettable in of himself, Gavin’s campaign nevertheless serves as a telling snapshot of Micheál Martin’s iron grip on the Fianna Fáil backbenches, a grip that looks shakier each time right-wing populism flashes into view. The potential spectre of Maria Steen running electoral circles around a Martin loyalist like Gavin would likely be enough to rattle Áras de Valera into an early vacancy.
Since dragging the party from the wreckage of 2011, the Martin–Seán Dorgan axis has reshaped Fianna Fáil through a mix of polite purges and weaponised gender quotas. In the rush to shed the boom-year legacy of Cowen and Ahern, Fianna Fáil has sprinted to the centre, leaving its grassroots thirsting for something more traditional.
Unfairly written off by some for his political blandness, Micheál Martin’s real political genius has never been in vision but in control. Since inheriting a shattered Fianna Fáil in 2011, he has operated less like a party leader than like a master tactician, constantly reshaping the field of play so that he remains indispensable.
Where others tried to reinvent Irish centrism, Martin perfected it as a survival machine: quiet purges of the Ahern-Cowen old guard, a merciless grip on candidate selection, and just enough ideological drift to keep the party viable without allowing any true insurgent challenge from within.
In this, Martin belongs in the company of figures like Spain’s Pedro Sánchez or France’s Emmanuel Macron, leaders who thrived not by embodying a grand popular project but by choking off populist pathways and narrowing the political imagination.
Sánchez pulled off improbable resurrections by stitching coalitions that always left him as pivot; Macron built an entirely new vehicle to collapse France’s old order and then governed by attrition, ensuring no rival could occupy his space. Martin, by contrast, never needed to build or resurrect anything glamorous.
The irony is that Martin’s very success in holding back populism has hollowed Fianna Fáil’s identity. By turning the party into a vessel of pure management, he blocked the rise of a domestic Le Pen or Vox, but at the cost of estranging his own grassroots.
Fianna Fáil’s problem is that Martin’s genius may only have bought time, not stability. The tremors are already visible: Maria Steen’s snappy moral conservatism cuts through to voters that party centrism cannot reach, while Peter Casey’s brief but explosive rise showed how quickly resentment can be weaponised outside the party system. Across Europe, once-dominant Christian Democratic machines from Germany’s CDU to Spain’s Partido Popular are buckling under the twin pressures of secular liberal hegemony and insurgent populist energy. Fianna Fáil now sits in the same perilous posture: drained of identity by Martin’s managerial triumphs, yet increasingly vulnerable to populist challengers as its gombeen grassroots infrastructure rots and goes independent.
The question is not whether the dam holds forever, but how spectacular the flood will be when it finally breaks.
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