Gavan Reilly: Helen’s greatest danger wasn’t the Dublin riots - it’s this fortnight

Never was there greater proof of how a week is a long time in politics. This time last week I was writing about Leo Varadkar’s speech in the White House - now he’s already been replaced as Fine Gael leader and is on his official wind down as Taoiseach.

I say ‘official’ wind down because, while nobody thought the departure would come quite so swiftly, there were definite hints that Leo Varadkar was a bit checked out. This year the White House schedule was different to most; usually there are only a few hours between the meeting in the Oval Office and the subsequent presentation of a bowl of shamrock, this year there were two days.

It can sound like an exaggeration, but it’s not: on St Patrick’s weekend, if you’re the Taoiseach, and you’re in Washington D.C. with 48 hours to fill, there is nobody who won’t take your call or your request for a meeting. Yet, with a couple of weeks’ notice that there would be a 48-hour gap in Leo Varadkar’s schedule, there was no eagerness to fill it: on the Friday, he held a private reception at Blair House (at which, purportedly, many of his personal staff were told of his plans) then went out for the night; on Saturday afternoon he held a stand-up press conference and, that night, tagged along as a guest of Joe Biden to a private event at which the President was the guest speaker. Otherwise, the schedule remained empty. On St Patrick’s Day itself, a press conference had to be delayed because the Taoiseach took up Biden’s invitation to be shown around the residential quarters of the White House.

The impression given was that Leo Varadkar was stopping to smell the roses, knowing he would not be Taoiseach by next March. Little did we know he wouldn’t be Taoiseach by next month.

And so we enter the Simon Harris era, after a blitzkrieg campaign in which the Taoiseach-in-waiting understood that it was possible to pay public homage to Varadkar (by not entertaining any public talk of leadership aspirations on Wednesday) while still working behind the scenes to choreograph his colleagues’ endorsements the next day. Any rival who thought the campaign could wait until Thursday was already beaten.

Both the old and new Fine Gael leaders know their party is institutionally jaded after thirteen years of unbroken government – and in fairness it’s hard to imagine how anyone couldn’t be a bit worn down after so long at the tiller. Simon Harris admitted as much in his accession speech in Athlone, addressing both the party and the public, when he said he could “feel the desperate need for hope”.

Changing the guard a year out from a general election, in which the party is looking for a fourth consecutive term of office, is perhaps not a bad thing – but it will, and has already, prompt some soul searching on what FG’s true niche is. A certain amount of introspection is healthy, especially when it comes after the overwhelming defeat of the two referendums. (Remember them? They weren’t even three weeks ago!)

It’ll be two weeks before Harris takes over as Taoiseach, when the Dáil returns from its Easter recess. In the meantime, in lieu of a leadership campaign, he’s off on a ‘listening tour’. One might expect someone taking over as Taoiseach to already have a strong vision of what they want their party to be, and where they want to lead their country, but needs must: at this stage in the game Harris is better off giving his voters what they want, instead of trying to placate others who’ll never vote for him.

One notable refrain from senior figures like Charlie Flanagan (who’s retiring at the next election) and Michael Ring (who says he’s not) was that the party has been “too left for too long” and, with twelve months to the next election, should focus on some core projects and ditch the extraneous ones. Commonly singled out as expendable are plans to allow “all night drinking” and the contentious bill against hate speech.

All of that spells some bother for Helen McEntee: it’s hardly a great sign that two of the elder figures within the party, which prides itself on the preservation of law and order, have singled out two flagship projects being undertaken by the Minister for Justice.

The moniker of ‘all night drinking’ is a lazy one for the reforms of our Victorian-era licensing laws. The same laws which would create formal nightclub licences for the first time (and invigorate a sector which is dying in plain sight), would also remove the ‘extinguishment’ clause where a new pub can only open if it buys the licence from an existing one. Surely anyone aspiring to revive rural Ireland can appreciate the central role of country pubs as a community asset, and how those laws would benefit both urban and rural Ireland.

While the Incitement to Hatred Bill is a little more contentious - especially in its failure to define what ‘hatred’ is - McEntee has already set her stall out clearly. Only last month she told TDs of the DPP’s view that the current incitement laws created too high a threshold for prosecuting people who encouraged arson attacks on accommodation for asylum seekers.

It would be a tactical concession from Simon Harris to drop the latter, especially given he was the interim justice minister who brought the legislation through the Dáil Justice Committee during McEntee’s first period of maternity leave. But were it to be dropped now, it could only be seen as a repudiation of the landmark things McEntee has taken on in Cabinet – and would hardly bode well for keeping the brief in the reshuffle.

Gavan Reilly is Political Correspondent with Virgin Media News and Political Columnist with the Meath Chronicle. Column appears first in Tuesday's paper!