Stephen Donnelly emerged on the national scene in 2011 as a white-hot ball of suburban middle class indignation. With his shiny suits and technocratic, apolitical style, he won followers for his ability to give our ruinous old establishment a bougie-common sensical dressing down.
A couple of years would pass where he let his ego lap it up, before gradually the sheen started to come off. He notably voted for the Austerity Treaty and also to close the loophole stopping banks from opening the evictions floodgates we see today. It was Eamon Gilmore who first managed to cut a very public strip off him, suggesting in the Dáil in 2013 that Donnelly would be a FFer before long. Ste definitively ruled it out. He had, after all, built his entire shtick on denigrating FF as longtime bearers of “serious incompetence”.
For #GE16, he clubbed with Shortall and Murphy in the new Social Democrats group in the hope of maximising their combined leverage for cabinet positions for themselves. He called for citizens to vote for a “new politics” and fresh projects with their unique ability to “think outside the box”. When things didn’t quite fall that way, he unceremoniously dumped it in favour of another vehicle. In among the most cynical of political ploys in recent times, he junked all that new “change” baloney and joined… Fianna Fail.
Yeah, the same shitebag party he repeatedly and publicly insulted over a period of years, in exchange for pocketing a cabinet seat in their next government.
An arrogant move no doubt, maybe not surprising for someone who fancied themselves enough to attend the “Harvard Kennedy School of Government”. Donnelly only appears to be semi-conscious that his every move is led by the nose of his own elite sense of self-entitlement, even while its increasingly plain for everyone else to see. Now he’s home where he always wanted to be, a Middle Ireland gombeen in the paid service of the most old and decrepit establishment he rose in mock-opposition to.
Think outside the box? You are the box Donnelly! You were the box all along!
Read through all our previous Gombeens here. Out to Kerz for the killer illustration.