Taoiseach under fire over Gavin but intends to lead Fianna Fáil into the next election

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said he accepts responsibility for promoting Jim Gavin to be Fianna Fáil’s presidential candidate, but he said he believes his leadership is not in danger, and he intends to lead the party into the next election.

Mr Gavin spectacularly withdrew from the race late on Sunday night, following reports that he had failed to repay more than €3,000 paid to him in error by a former tenant.

In an interview on RTÉ’s Six-One News this evening, Mr Martin accepted that he had strongly backed Mr Gavin.

“I take responsibility for that, and I want to acknowledge that many members of the party are hurting out there today because of what has transpired,” he said.

“I fully accept that. We have been through tough times in the past. I’ve been through tough times as leader of the party. This is a tough day for us as a party, something I had not anticipated or wanted in any shape or form.”

Fianna Fáil MEP Billy Kelleher, who unsuccessfully sought the party nomination for the presidential election, losing out to Mr Gavin, repeatedly declined to voice confidence in Mr Martin’s leadership.

Mr Martin has insisted that it is his intention to continue leading Fianna Fáil, after the party’s presidential candidate dramatically withdrew from the race.

The bombshell news of Jim Gavin’s withdrawal broke late on Sunday night and followed claims that Mr Gavin owed a former tenant €3,300 for a rental arrangement that was not properly registered.

In a statement issued late on Sunday, Mr Gavin, an aviation official who was formerly a military pilot and Dublin GAA football manager, said: “I made a mistake that was not in keeping with my character and the standards I set myself.

“I am now taking steps to address the matter.

“I have also thought long and hard about the potential impact of the ongoing campaign on the wellbeing of my family and friends. Taking all these considerations on board, I have decided to withdraw from the presidential election contest with immediate effect and return to the arms of my family.”

Speaking to RTÉ this evening, Mr Martin said that he and Mr Gavin had a conversation on Sunday afternoon and he said Mr Gavin had made his decision to withdraw after that discussion.

“I think Jim made the decision himself, but we did discuss it with him, because obviously his whole DNA is competitive, and this is a very painful and very difficult decision for him to make,” he said.

He said Mr Gavin had not dealt with the issue with his former tenant “at that time or since, and probably buried it somewhere in the recesses of his mind, and didn’t deal with it. And the consequences of that have now come home”.

Denying that Fianna Fáil had failed to carry out due diligence on their candidate selection, Mr Martin said: “We do everything we humanly possibly can to get to the bottom of those [issues].

“But ultimately if you put the question to an individual or to a candidate, you depend [on their answers].”

Mr Martin, who is due to complete his term as Taoiseach in November 2027, said it was his intention to lead Fianna Fáil into the next election.

“I got a very strong mandate in the last general election, and my focus is on governing the country,” he said.

Ireland South MEP Billy Kelleher, who lost out to Mr Gavin for the Fianna Fáil nomination, said the party will have to have a “full discussion” on what he described as “a very serious miscalculation”.

Mr Kelleher declined to comment on what the dramatic withdrawal means for Mr Martin, but he said the party clearly “didn’t do our due diligence”.

“I was clearly concerned that there seemed to be no proper process in place, there was no scrutiny of candidates, names were being mentioned on an ad hoc basis,” he said.

“I thought, all in all, it was quite a chaotic scene in early August.”

Asked if Mr Martin’s leadership was badly damaged, he said: “I think what we really have to do initially is just to assess the process, how it went so horribly wrong, so quickly.”

Mr Kelleher said the development was “deeply, deeply, deeply upsetting” for party members.

Mr Kelleher said there would have to be “consequences”, but he said the future leadership of the party was a “discussion for another day”.

“We can’t have a situation where this is just swept under the carpet and we all move on,” he said.

“It’s a very serious miscalculation. It has caused an awful lot of trauma, both to individuals, in terms of Jim Gavin and his family, and more broadly to the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, and the integrity of how we actually assess candidates.”

Pádraig O’Sullivan, Fianna Fáil TD for Cork North Central, said the party’s electorate would be denied a candidate of their own.

“They are now faced with the prospect of voting for a Fine Gael candidate or a hard-left candidate, and to me that’s unacceptable and unconscionable,” he said.

Mr O’Sullivan said he had a level of sympathy for Mr Gavin.

“He was thrown in at the deep end, completely unprepared, due diligence clearly wasn’t done, and there has to be repercussions, and there has to be a radical rethink about the way the party is treated and the way party business is conducted.”

Asked if Mr Martin’s leadership was damaged, Mr O’Sullivan said: “I think the party is in a very, very bad state at the moment, people will feel voiceless now, they will have a candidate denied to them, and I think all members of the party need to reflect and ask where it all went wrong”.

Seamus McGrath, Fianna Fáil TD for Cork South Central, said Mr Gavin, in his own view, “should never have been the party candidate”.

“He was a total political novice and asked to run in the most brutal of all political campaigns, and I think that was poor judgement,” he said.