General Election 2024: Micheal Martin raises potential for rotating Taoiseach to return in next government
“I've taken a certain degree of satisfaction out of the fact that I enabled all that to happen as Taoiseach"
Tániste Micheál Martin has said that he has “no threshold” for how many extra seats Fianna Fáil would need to win over Fine Gael to not facilitate a “rotating Taoiseach” arrangement.
In an interview with the Irish Mirror, Mr Martin said that the option of switching Taoiseach is “on the table for any future coalition”.
The Government formed in June 2020 was not only the first time civil war foes Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael entered government together, it was also the first time there was a “rotating Taoiseach”. Mr Martin became Taoiseach from June 2020 to December 2022, with Leo Varadkar taking over in December 2022. He was later replaced by Simon Harris in April 2024 when Mr Varadkar stood down as Fine Gael leader.
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In an interview with the Irish Mirror, Mr Martin was asked if he would pull the rotating Taoiseach arrangement if his party won far more seats than Fine Gael. He argued that the agreement had worked well and that the option would be on the table when the next government was formed.
“I don’t have any particular threshold. We’ll see how it works out," he said. He continued: “We have to maximise our seats and see the results. I think what we did last time, myself and Leo Varadkar, we put that option on the table for any future coalition government of any kind. It's an option.
“Most people in Europe thought it wouldn't work. I remember when I was coming to the end of my time as Taoiseach, a lot of European leaders were coming up to me kind of going, ‘What will happen?'. As if I wasn't going to go ahead. I was kind of going: ‘Look we have a deal. There’s no issue there. The agreement is going to happen’.
“I've taken a certain degree of satisfaction out of the fact that I enabled all that to happen as Taoiseach and that I facilitated the transition into Leo Varadkar becoming Taoiseach. These things look easy when they're done, but believe me, when I've seen governments change in the past, anything can go wrong in a Dáil vote, stuff like that.
“We managed it well, I thought, and navigated that well. It's now an option for future coalition governments. It may not always be the option that is used and that will depend on the kind of things you're talking about [where one party gets far more seats than the other].”
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