Gavan Reilly: So when is a SocDem not actually a SocDem?
As you can imagine, in the 12 years I’ve been working around Kildare Street I’ve built up relationships with people from across the political spectrum. They’re a varied bunch, with political leanings ranging from outright freemarketeers to unabashed Marxists.
So, when they’re all of similar mind about something, you know something has really gone down badly. And that’s how it turned out last week, over some of the backroom chicanery that’s been going on in Leinster House.
Their universal view is this: the Social Democrats have pulled a stroke.
There’s a good chance you’re already over the details of this, but just in case you’re not: the SocDems suspended one of their TDs, Eoin Hayes, only a couple of weeks after the election.
He had previously worked for Palantir, who have subsequently become a major supplier to the Israeli military, including providing tools for the war in Gaza that Hayes’ party so publicly opposes. As part of his pay, Hayes inherited stock options in the company – stock which has become significantly more valuable given Palantir’s high-spending client.
Then Hayes ran for Dublin City Council, and then for the Dáil, partly on an anti-war platform, raising questions about his ownership of those shares. He said he’d sold them before running for the first election. That was a lie. The SocDems suspended him.
Hayes is the only one of the 174 members of Dáil Éireann not to have spoken in the chamber. He has lodged 16 questions for written reply from ministers. The seat he’s been assigned for votes in the Dáil chamber is nowhere near the rest of the SocDems – in fact, it almost couldn’t be further away. To all intents and purposes, he’s an independent. Not only that, but SocDems frontbenchers have even said he’s “not a SocDems TD’.
Except he is. Last week the party realised that, if it had 11 TDs, the formula used to dole out €11k-a-year roles as Oireachtas committee chairs would result in them having two chairmanship roles. If they were considered a batch of 10, it would only be one.
On one level I have some sympathy with the idea: every Dáil sees some TDs losing the whips from their parties for some disciplinary infraction or other. The idea that the party would face permanent degradation because of an almost-certainly-temporary falling out is nonsense. It’s a five-year Dáil and Hayes will, in all likelihood, be a SocDem for about 4.5 years of it. They should in principle have the entitlements that go with that.
But the timing, frankly, stinks. There has been no material effort to bring Hayes back into the fold – I’m told the only time it has formally come up at a party meeting, they agreed to come back to it, and did no more than that.
The SocDems reclaimed him simply to justify getting a second committee chair. And the proof of it: when actual committee seats are being filled, Hayes will reportedly not be among them. The party will claim him when it suits, yet seemingly still doesn’t want him.