Justine McCarthy: Simon Harris is unperturbed by Phil Hogan’s mixed record

What might a Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael merger look like? Exactly like Phil Hogan – big, strategic and born to survive. If ever a person embodied the Republic’s two predominant parties, it’s Big Phil from Tullaroan.
The 6ft 5in former European Union trade commissioner has withstood more predictions of his political demise than Charlie Haughey and has been Fine Gael’s foremost election mastermind this century, despite his rocky political career as a junior minister, Cabinet minister and European commissioner.
Now he’s back from Purdah, once more, and operating levers of power behind the scenes for Simon Harris after a bitter falling out with Leo Varadkar.
Hogan exudes a whiff of roguish charm more usually associated with Fianna Fáilers. You could imagine him being good fun on a night out but, also, remembering every word of it in the cold dawn of the next day, to store away for possible use. That’s a handy talent for a political strategist but it is insufficient reason to explain his extraordinary longevity as his party’s kingmaker.
Hot on the heels of reports that Harris has installed Big Phil on his party’s election planning committee came a report in this newspaper by Jack Power that European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen asked an ethics committee to examine the terms of his work in Brussels for an international law firm during a two-year cooling-off period after the Irish man had quit her Cabinet.
Despite assertions by Hogan that he was working for the firm as a consultant and not as an employee, the committee concluded that the circumstances of his engagement by DLA Piper posed “a risk of reputational damage” to the commission. In March 2022, Hogan agreed to pause his work with the firm until the requisite cooling-off period expired.
Last May, when on the brink of becoming Fine Gael leader and by extension Taoiseach, Harris confirmed that Hogan had been advising him privately before Varadkar’s sudden resignation. The seamless succession indicated an impressive level of preparedness by Harris’s camp for when the day would come. “Phil is a friend of mine; he’s a colleague of mine,” Harris told reporters.
By the end, Hogan was no friend of Varadkar, whom he blamed for the ignominious end to his political career in Europe. He has accused his former leader of pandering to “a populist wave of indignation” over his journey across Ireland to a golf event in Connemara in August 2020, when such travel was in breach of coronavirus lockdown guidelines.
So what is it about the former EU commissioner that makes him indispensable to Fine Gael leaders? He was, after all, the minister who oversaw the water charges debacle that worked a particularly Irish miracle in uniting the left and ultra-left against it. Harris is the fourth leader to entrust Hogan with a key role.
His first government post 30 years ago as junior finance minister in John Bruton’s rainbow coalition proved an inauspicious debut, lasting less than two months. He resigned after an official on his staff leaked preview details of the 1995 budget to the media.
Subsequently, he became Fine Gael chairman, was Michael Noonan’s director of organisation for the 2002 general election and Enda Kenny’s in 2011, having put his skills to use the previous year to ensure a leadership bid by Richard Bruton came to naught.
At a University College Dublin ceremony making Hogan an honorary doctor of political science during the summer, he endorsed Tip O’Neill’s famous maxim that “all politics is local”. That might well be Hogan’s motto. As somebody destined to be the kingmaker rather than the king, he has an intimate knowledge of constituencies, their vagaries, feuds and voting patterns. He has also cultivated contacts with selected journalists, thus allowing him media access to big up his man in return for the odd scoop or two. But the public relations has never worked quite so well for his political reputation.
Among those eager to congratulate Hogan on his honorary doctorate was his old buddy and erstwhile Fine Gael minister Michael Lowry, who said on Facebook he was “delighted to see [him] receiving well-deserved recognition”. Lowry had been at the centre of the drama when Hogan, demonstrating an urgent propensity for controversy, hosted the independent Tipperary TD along with a farm-waste business group seeking a regulation change, at a meeting in his Custom House office just 19 days after becoming the minister for the environment in March 2011.
The Moriarty tribunal had published its final report six days earlier. Among its sensational findings were that Denis O’Brien had given Lowry the equivalent of more than €1 million in payments and financial benefits and that Lowry, as the relevant minister for a State mobile phone licence competition in 1995, had imparted “substantive” information to help the businessman’s consortium win the bid. Hogan’s meeting with Lowry’s delegation, while TDs were fulminating in the Dáil over Moriarty’s revelations and demanding Lowry resign his seat, exposed a naivety not normally found in a strategist’s bag of tricks.
Hogan left a legacy in his department. He introduced election gender quotas, abolished local councils and brought in the first version of property tax, but it was the water charges fiasco that finally put paid to his cabinet career. Amid widespread protests and rumours that Irish Water would be privatised, Kenny moved him to Europe, where he initially held the agriculture portfolio. Subsequently, he was considered pivotal to finalising the Mercuscor trade agreement with four South American countries. Politico quoted an unidentified EU official admiringly describing Hogan as “a bit of a bruiser”.
On June 29th, 2020, Hogan issued a statement announcing he was no longer seeking to be appointed director general of the World Trade Organisation because he wanted to continue as the EU’s trade commissioner. Two months later, he was gone from that job after Golfgate.
Harris seems unperturbed about any potential damage by association with Hogan, who has quite the history of PR blunders and runs a lucrative consultancy business in Brussels. Perhaps he considers the risk worth the possible reward if it means he can avoid being the Fine Gael leader who merges his party with its old enemy, Fianna Fáil.