IF YOU’RE A politician who wants to get to the very top without anyone ever really even paying that much attention to you, Paschal Donohoe really is the blueprint, isn’t he? 

It was announced this week that Donohoe, who has served as either Minister for Finance or Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform for the better part of the last decade would be moving on to pastures new as Managing Director and Chief Knowledge Officer of the World Bank.

Leaving to one side that ‘Chief Knowledge Officer of the World Bank’ sounds like the kind of title that an eight-year-old would come up with if they were writing a scam email, it does seem pretty cool, doesn’t it? Big salary, off to Washington DC, presumably getting to swim in the vaults like Scrooge McDuck. It’s all really worked out for him. Which is funny, because you don’t often look at the last three or four Taoiseach and think: ‘Wow, it all worked out for them.’ But it’s worked out for Paschal. 

Not only was Donohoe never the leader of Fine Gael, he never even went for it. There were two leadership contests during his time as a cabinet member, either of which would have made him Taoiseach had he won. It seems he was never interested in the top job. In his exit interview this week, he told Morning Ireland: “The pinnacle of my ambition was to be the Minister for Finance.” Which, we all have to admit, is a funny thing to say after you’ve just quit that job to move to what is very objectively a cooler job in every possible way. 

It was as Minister of Finance that Donohoe variably held, tightened, plucked and pulled the purse strings of a state that has failed in so many respects over the course of his tenure, but nobody ever seems particularly bothered by his role in it.

Nobody seems to associate Donohoe with money being held in reserve while the housing and homelessness crises continue unabated, at least not in the same way that they........

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