SeriesWinners and Losers
With union strife gripping the country for 24 hours, who can claim victory?
EVERY WEEKEND, OUR political team casts an eye over the events inside and outside Leinster House that have people talking.
This week, Irish public sector workers hit the pickets and various ministers tried to explain why there was no need for them to.
In the States, the Trump administration looked extra chaotic with fewer than three weeks left before the midterms.
Winners
Unions
Until there’s a resolution to the public sector pay dispute, one can’t definitively pick a winner and a loser. But for now, the unions are probably pleased with how this week’s 24-hour strike went.
About 300,000 workers across numerous public sector unions took the action, an impressive mobilisation of people and purpose that also seemed to be largely backed by the wider public.
On Friday, it was confirmed that the planned follow-up strike on Wednesday was called off and as a path to talks at the Workplace Relations Commission was bashed out.
The development came after a week in which the leaders of the four largest unions on the displayed impressive discipline on the airwaves.
Their coherent messaging has been particularly noteworthy, and they’ve prevented a bitter back-and-forth with the government that would have made a rapprochement more difficult.
Phil Hogan
Speaking at the launch of his campaign to become the next director general of the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization, Phil Hogan says he was “sloppy” with Covid guidelines in 2020 and that he “disappointed people for sure and I disappointed myself in the way I responded”. https://t.co/dU3dFhXjJy
— TheJournal Politics (@TJ_Politics) October 13, 2026
Phil Hogan made a public comeback of sorts this week. It came in the salubrious surroundings of Iveagh House, which houses the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin.
The former EU commissioner, government minister and Fine Gael strategist is being backed by the Irish government in his bid to be director-general of the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The position hasn’t been held by a European for some 50 years and comes with a salary of $265,910 (€236,000) should he win enough support to land it.
The Irish government nominated Hogan for the position back in March, and he formally launched his campaign this week, batting away questions about his resignation from frontline politics in 2020 for failing to adhere to Covid-19 restrictions.
Hogan also said he wasn’t going to get into “revisionism” about the nature of that resignation but there were some ministers there supporting him anyway.
None of this is a guarantee that Hogan will get the gig, as there’ll be a vote next year by FAO member states, but the full court press the government put on this week shows he’s back in the good books.
Losers
Jack Chambers
This is a tentative one, as there is an argument that from a certain point of view Jack Chambers isn’t coming off badly from the strike.
As Minister for Public Expenditure, he has to put up a fight when it comes to public money, and if he does ever want to lead Fianna Fáil, having a fight with the unions burnishes certain hard-nosed credentials.
On balance though, as the minister who effectively pays the wages of the 300,000 people out striking, losing millions of working hours in a single day can only be seen as a net loss.
If both sides go to the WRC and ultimately there is a new pay deal, you would think Chambers will chalk it up as a victory. For now though, he still has a little way to go to get in the winners circle.
Kimberly Guilfoyle
In many ways, Kimberly Guilfoyle is the literal embodiment of MAGA. When the phenomenon of ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ was being discussed last year, Guilfoyle’s face was more often than not used to demonstrate the plastic surgery-enhanced look.
But Guilfoyle’s devotion to MAGA extended way beyond mere facial features.
As National Chair of Trump Victory Finance Committee, she was a part of Trump’s failed reelection bid in 2020 and was the keynote speaker on the opening night of the Republican National Convention that year.
At that point, she was also dating a Trump, Donald Trump Jr to be exact, and was therefore at the heart of both the familial and administrative nexuses that make up Trumpworld.
Fast forward a few years and things started falling apart. Her split with Donald Jr in 2024 made things somewhat awkward, so in many ways it suited everyone when she was shipped off to Athens to become the US Ambassador of Greece.
This, however, has in turn become somewhat of a disaster amid allegations that she sought money from a Trump supporter to pay a credit card bill and also accepted lavish hospitality from wealthy Greek businessmen.
Guilfoyle calls the allegations false, but the White House was having none of it, abruptly declaring this week that Trump had asked her to resign.
As if to drive it home, Trump was asked about her previous engagement to his son and the fact that she was therefore almost a member of his family.
“She wasn’t a member of my family. She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago,” he said.
Brutal.