Keaveney crosses the Rubicon to fire first shot of next election campaign

Colm Keaveney may have used a dead language when letting the world know that he was jumping ship last week. Does it mean that his own career is now also in that extinct state, that he jumped only to find himself sinking rather than swimming?

On the Wednesday night on which the first vote on the Social Welfare Vote came up, a veteran colleague told me that Keaveney would not vote against the Government that night but wait until the next day when the specific measure to cut the respite care grant came up.

"The Colm Keaveney reelection campaign starts here," he said.

How right he was and how wrong everybody else was. Keaveney didn't oppose the Government that night and went onto RTE's Late Debate to more or less say that he would not be voting against the Bill (although what he said is open to interpretation).

The next morning, however, following another text in Latin ("deeds not words" was the translation) he voted against the Government on respite care.

The implications were clear. It was immediate expulsion from the Labour parliamentary party.

Politically, Labour was also cast into its biggest crisis since the Government was formed. An indication to me of the difficult and uneasy relationship Keaveney has had with Eamon Gilmore was the way in which the Tanaiste's statement was phrased.

He never mentioned Keaveney by name in the statement but vowed that his fellow East Galway man would spend the rest of this Dail term watching the Government from the opposition benches. His sense of betrayal and anger was unmistakable. In a whole raft of interviews over the following weekend, senior Labour figures dissed Keaveney.

What caused most offence was that on Wednesday night, Keaveney had pledged loyalty and stated almost unequivocally that he would support the Government. His switching of sides essentially made him as good as dead to the Labour Party, or as a Tuam sham might say, a persona non grata.

By his own account, Keaveney had had a long night of the soul as Wednesday turned into Thursday and really only made his mind up that morning, as the Bill was debated in the chamber. The phrase he used of Julius Caesar's as he prepared to cross the Rubicon was more apt that even he could have imagined.

For by crossing that river into Italy, Caesar precipitated a long civil war. That will be Keaveney's fate too as he takes on the Labour patricians in a long battle over the heart and soul of the party. But from the outside, he's going to find it an uphill struggle.

But what about his chairmanship? It's true that it's the members of the party and not its leadership that voted him in. And as such, as things stand at present, that position remains in the gift of the membership.

Keaveney, we must remember, was not the leadership's preferred candidate and did extraordinarily well in getting the ordinary membership to back him.

But given the tenor of Gilmore's utterances over the weekend, the party leader is going to move might and maim to remove the new adversary from the position. As chair, Keaveney will still (perhaps nominally) have influence but it will be awkward as he has been essentially exiled.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.