Four candidates yesterday launched a battle to lead Ireland’s governing party after troubled Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen quit the post following a series of crises that forced him to announce snap polls.
Micheal Martin, the foreign minister whose departure crippled Cowen’s authority, was the odds-on favorite to win the contest and take the Fianna Fail party into a general election that polls predict they will lose heavily.
He is up against Irish Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan, Minister for Defence Eamon O Cuiv and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation Mary Hanafin, who also wasted no time in declaring their candidacy before today’s 1pm deadline.
Cowen stepped down on Saturday after a week of political turmoil. Despite surviving a confidence vote among his party’s lawmakers on Tuesday last week, his authority had evaporated and was further damaged by a botched Cabinet reshuffle that followed.
The prime minister said he had quit so that Fianna Fail could be “free from internal distractions” to fight the election scheduled for March 11.
He said he was nonetheless staying on as prime minister to focus on getting key budget laws passed to cement an EU-IMF bailout to revive Ireland’s battered economy.
However, Cowen’s government faces a confidence motion in parliament tomorrow and the independent lawmakers on whom his coalition relies for a thin majority are threatening to turn against him too.
That would trigger the dissolution of parliament and an election even earlier than the March 11 date he announced last week.
“Taking everything into account and having discussed the matter with my family, I have decided on my own counsel to step down as uachtarain [president] of Fianna Fail and leader of Fianna Fail,” Cowen told a hastily arranged news conference in a cramped Dublin hotel room. “I will continue in my role as taoiseach as I have before.”
Martin, 50, had publicly called for Cowen to quit before last week’s vote and stepped down from his foreign ministry brief afterwards.
He said he was to spend yesterday setting out before colleagues his vision for reviving the party.
“I believe I have the energy and the passion and the commitment to make a difference in terms of how we organize ourselves and in terms how we develop and formulate policies for the future,” he said.
Irish bookmaker Paddy Power had Martin as the 1/12 runaway favorite. Lenihan, who is battling pancreatic cancer, was 11/2. O Cuiv was 16/1, with Hanafin 18/1.
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