DUBLIN — Ireland’s new parliament has picked an ex-trucking boss and its first woman to be its speaker — a move that signals the next government is taking a turn to the right.
The election by secret ballot of independent lawmaker Verona Murphy — a tough communicator who once infamously branded immigrants as Islamic State terrorists — sets the stage for a new government reliant on support from rural mavericks like herself.
Murphy, a 53-year-old school dropout who became a trucker and ultimately president of the Irish Road Haulage Association, lost her first parliamentary by-election in 2019 after claiming that Islamic State supporters were “a big part of the migrant population” who represented a security risk and would need to be “deprogrammed” to fit into Irish society.
Murphy quickly apologized. But she was sidelined and quit the government party Fine Gael as both it and the rival centrist party Fianna Fáil dismissed her views as ignorant and racist.
Undeterred, she since has built a poll-topping base in her native southeast county of Wexford as a blunt-spoken independent — the very kind of politician that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil now are courting to form a parliamentary majority.
On the eve of Wednesday’s secret vote, the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael leaders, Foreign Minister Micheál Martin and Prime Minister Simon Harris, told their newly elected lawmakers behind closed doors they should vote for Murphy, not anyone from their own parties — a sure sign that both leaders are negotiating a deal to recruit rural conservatives to the government benches.
Their decision reflects Ireland’s straightforward parliamentary arithmetic following the November 29 election: Together, Fianna Fáil (48) and Fine Gael (38) have fallen only two votes short of wielding a governing majority in the 174-seat lower house of parliament, Dáil Éireann. They need to win loyalty from only a few more lawmakers, known as TDs, in a chamber full of loose-cannon independents.
Harris and Martin have ruled out forming a coalition with Sinn Féin’s 39 TDs, leaving the Irish republicans stuck as the main opposition for potentially another five years.
First woman in the speaker’s chair
Reflecting that power balance, Murphy on Wednesday was elected speaker with 89 votes versus Sinn Féin’s candidate, Aengus Ó Snodaigh, with 67.
When the result was announced to cheers in a side room of the parliament’s upper house, the Seanad, Murphy hugged several of her fellow independent lawmakers and, eventually, Ó Snodaigh.
Her election makes Murphy the first woman to gain the speaker’s chair following 20 men dating back to the first sitting of the rebel Dáil in 1919.
While Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have governed together since 2020 in alliance with the environmentalist Greens, that party was decimated in the election, losing all but one of its TDs. Two other left-wing parties that gained at the Greens’ expense, Labour and the Social Democrats, are wary of joining forces with Ireland’s parties of perpetual government for fear of suffering a similar fate in the next election.
As a result, Wednesday’s outcome shows that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil now are eyeing Murphy’s loose grouping of nine independents as the best option for junior coalition partner. Most are rural conservatives who rebuffed or resigned from Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael for various acrimonious reasons.
As speaker, Murphy will be expected to bite her lip in a role that requires tact and neutrality — and she won’t vote except to break an unlikely tie. She’ll be missed by those who admired her grilling of civil servants on the parliament’s most powerful committee, Public Accounts.
In exchange for donning the speaker’s diplomatic handcuffs, she’ll gain a powerful role behind the scenes in setting the parliament’s agenda and a salary topping €255,000, more than the prime minister.
But potentially two of the other eight lawmakers in Murphy’s “Regional Group” of independent TDs may be in line now to negotiate seats at the Cabinet table, either as full ministers or “super juniors.”
Within that Regional Group are lawmakers who, like Murphy, have generated headlines by criticizing immigration from Africa and the Middle East. That issue leaped to the top of the political agenda in Ireland over the past year following Dublin riots, a string of protests and arson attacks against refugee accommodation sites, and a struggle to stem an influx of asylum seekers from Britain.
The Dáil won’t sit again until January 22, by which time Martin and Harris expect to have agreed a formal written program for government that includes Murphy’s nine independents and, possibly, others as insurance.
Martin, as leader of the biggest party, is expected to succeed Harris as Taoiseach, the “chief” of the government — at least for the first half of the coalition’s potential five-year term.
In their previous program for government, the two parties agreed to share the top post. Martin went first, serving as Taoiseach from mid-2020 to the end of 2022 before giving way to Leo Varadkar and, earlier this year, his successor as Fine Gael chief, Harris.
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