Splintered Sunrise

Today I want to deal with a question raised by WorldbyStorm in the comments below, which is this – how can Fine Gael start to look like a credible alternative government? It’s a tricky one, and I’m tempted to believe that the FG advance in this election is pretty damn near as good as it gets. Much as I don’t have much time for FG, this poses a problem in that for the political system to function you need some kind of serious opposition – unless you’re a diehard Fianna Fáiler who actually believes the one-party state to be a good thing.

Fine Gael, as an opposition, doesn’t begin to look like a government in waiting. The last of its infrequent spells in government came as a result of Labour changing horses in mid-stream. The party, even in coalition with Labour, hasn’t won an election for 25 years, and that was in the extraordinary circumstances of the Year of GUBU, when lots of strange things were happening. The last time Fianna Fáil wasn’t the largest single party was, if memory serves, in the second 1927 election after the O’Higgins assassination. You begin to see the difficulty.

Now, I’ll grant you that at one point in the last campaign the “Alliance for Change” looked like winning in the polls. But, as we all know, that turned out to be snow on the ditch. The enormous seat gain, from 30 to 51, is of course eye-catching, but it doesn’t even recoup FG’s 1997 position and looks spectacular only in comparison to the truly awful 2002 result. What’s more, the gains were overwhelmingly at the expense of the Desocrats and centrist independents, representing what might be termed the natural FG base. All told, the major opposition party is still flatlining at around 25% of the vote and it’s hard to see where more gains could come from.

The obvious place to start would be Dublin. It seems an age ago that FG, under Sir Garret’s leadership, could outpoll FF in Dublin, running at around 42% in the capital, and that’s what got FG up to the 70 or so seats that made government possible. The problem with regaining that vote is that the FitzGerald vote, or its present-day analogue, plumps for Labour or the Greens. If FG made serious inroads there, which would still be difficult for what’s essentially a rural conservative party, it would be at the expense of massive collateral damage to the party’s putative coalition partners. What you’re then left with is the faint hope that FF will suffer a huge slump and that FF defectors will go to FG or Labour and not to, say, PSF or FF gene-pool independents.

It strikes me that the only way you’re going to get some serious opposition is if FG is displaced as the second party. There have been a few times when that looked possible – in 1948, 1992 and again in 2002. The idea of 1948 as Labour’s missed opportunity isn’t my own – I can recall the late Kevin Boland making that argument in the early 1980s – but it comes to mind again as closely paralleling Mick O’Reilly’s arguments of recent years. That means that Labour, or a Labour-Republican axis, would have to eschew the short-term promise of bums on seats in favour of becoming the main opposition in the medium term. But what are the odds of that? For most of the last sixty years successive Labour leaderships have appeared hell-bent on propping up FG, usually at the expense of their own party.

So I would tend to see FG as a dead weight on the body politic, Electric Enda notwithstanding, not being a serious opposition but still having the critical mass to prevent any other party emerging as the main opposition. There are only two ways this looks like changing. One is the remote possibility that the Labour leadership will discover a political backbone. The other, somewhat less remote, is that FG goes through yet another slump, possibly with independents rising again to nibble at the party’s western base (essentially a residue of the old Clann na Talmhan vote) and other parties nibble at the middle-class eastern vote, and the Labour leadership are good enough opportunists to go for an opportunity. Neither appears terribly likely in the near future.

I’m not of an age to recall the Cumann na nGaedheal government in 1927 using the bankruptcy laws to deprive Jim Larkin of his Dáil seat, but it’s an integral part of the political folklore that forms my background. Maybe that’s why I find it difficult to be censorious in the case of Beverley Flynn, or maybe it’s just a sense of mischief. Then of course there’s the basic democratic principle that the people of Mayo have spoken, only a few short weeks ago, and if the people of Mayo want Bev to represent them, as they evidently do, then they’re entitled to have her.

As things stand, her settlement with RTÉ in respect of her failed libel action in 2001 means that, instead of being pressed for the full €2.8m, Bev will commit to paying considerably less than half of that, which is still a penalty not to be sneezed at. There is nothing odd or suspicious about RTÉ reaching a settlement in the interests of the licence-payers. Faced with a choice between a settlement that will bring in a million quid and change, and pressing a bankruptcy action that could have seen them struggling to recover anything, any accountant worth his salt would have said, Go for the settlement. It’s the same principle as a company settling a personal injury claim that they could have legitimately contested, because often paying off a plaintiff makes more sense than risking going before a jury.

What complicates this, of course, is Bertie’s statement of a little while back holding out the prospect of Bev recovering the Fianna Fáil whip, and even looking at junior ministerial office a little way down the road. Fine Gael are hailing this as evidence that the RTÉ Authority has been nobbled. Somehow I doubt that. Not only are the RTÉ Authority not renowned for being a panel of FF stooges, but it would be deeply uncharacteristic of Bertie to do anything so blatantly. Had Bertie really been twisting arms at RTÉ, he would have kept very very quiet on the Flynn case.

But the FG reaction speaks volumes. If I understand Electric Enda correctly, RTÉ settling with Bev is proof positive of political interference. One assumes that the non-political course of action would have been to have Bev declared bankrupt, trigger a by-election in Mayo that FG would almost certainly win, and play merry hell with the coalition arithmetic in Leinster House. It’s the authentic response of a party that believes that it rightfully owns the state, which is only being illegitimately squatted by Fianna Fáil. Yes, those old Cumann na nGaedheal instincts don’t lie far below the surface.

Following on from WorldbyStorm’s great post on the implausibility of the new coalition government in Dublin, I am drawn to reflect on implausible coalitions. Even by Irish standards, the line-up of Fianna Fáil, the Greens, the rump Desocrats, Jackie the Cap of South Kerry, disgraced Fianna Fáiler Bev Flynn, disgraced Blueshirt Michael Lowry and socialist republican Finian McGrath is a doozy.

I have to say, though, that the putative “Alliance for Change” government touted by Electric Enda would have trumped it. Considering Enda’s ruling out of any arrangements with FF or the Provos, and Jackie already having plighted his troth to Bertie, the only line-up possible would have been: Fine Gael, Labour, the Greens, the Desocrats, Lowry, Flynn, McGrath and our old friend Tony Gregory. As implausible configurations go, that one would have had Amanda Brunker beat. But would it have been the least plausible coalition ever seen in Leinster House? No, it would not.

Let us now enter the Tardis and return to the aftermath of the 1948 election. That time around, Fianna Fáil remained easily the largest party, returning with one more seat than all opposition parties put together. However, after sixteen straight years of FF government and the hardships caused by the Economic War and the Emergency, it was not surprising that FF would suffer a dip in popularity, and in the end Dev returned with 68 seats out of 147, six short of a majority with a dozen fairly diverse independents holding the balance of power.

What would have seemed to be the most plausible outcome would have been yet another FF-led government, not least because Fine Gael at that time seemed to be in terminal decline, returning a mere 31 deputies, with its vote bobbing along around the 20% mark and having been wiped out in large swathes of the state – only returning three TDs in the whole of Connacht, for instance. But that doesn’t account for the ingenuity of the Irish TD sniffing a chance at power, and thus the wondrous First Inter-Party Government was born.

Let’s consider the forces involved in this government. You had Fine Gael, the Free State party, the Commonwealth party, the bolthole for dispossessed Unionists and Redmondites. It was the party of Oriel House and the 77 executions, the party that ran the Saorstát with an iron fist for ten years, the party of then barely reconstructed Blueshirtism. It was, by any standard, an extremely conservative party, representing in the main the interests of the South Dublin upper bourgeoisie and the big ranchers.

You had Clann na Poblachta, a party made up largely, though not exclusively, of former IRA men. These were guys who had spent ten years opposing the 1937 Bunreacht, who had tried in 1939 to launch a war against England, and who during the Emergency had dissented from the almost unanimous support for neutrality in trying to line up Ireland with the Axis. Having been ferociously repressed by Fianna Fáil, they then gave that up for a bad job, abruptly became a constitutional party, and began merrily cannibalising the Fianna Fáil electorate. Their programme was militantly republican on the national question and, by the standards of the time, extremely leftwing on social and economic issues – in other words, a souped-up version of Fianna Fáil’s 1926 programme.

You had Clann na Talmhan, who are unfortunately forgotten these days, but were a fascinating formation in their own right. This was a party of impoverished small farmers in the West and its main policy was radical land reform, in line with the Fianna Fáil programme but not with FF’s record in government. The interests of the CnaT base were fundamentally opposed to the big farmers who increasingly dominated FG.

You also had not one but two Labour parties, having split a few years previously and spent the election campaign smearing and slandering each other with wild abandon. If you think the SWP-Militant bunfights on Indymedia are bad, the Labourites of the 1940s make them look like the wusses they really are.

Put all these disparate groups together and you still weren’t close to a majority, so what transpired in 1948 was a coalition of five parties and a technical group of nine – count ’em – nine independents, none of whom agreed on anything except that they wanted to put FF out. These differences were bridged by the simple introduction of the abeyance principle – in other words, everybody forgot about their programmes and concentrated on the division of spoils. And it all went surprisingly smoothly, with the only big stumbling block Clann na Poblachta’s refusal to accept the FG leader, General Mulcahy, as Taoiseach. So FG put forward Costello for the top job, Mulcahy got a seat at cabinet in any case and that was that. And, as we know, this Frankenstein government lasted a whole three years, thus scundering all those smart alecks in Fianna Fáil who expected it to collapse within months.

There is another interesting aspect to 1948, which is that Fine Gael did not dominate the opposition. FG held a mere 31 seats, as against 19 for the two Labour parties, ten for Clann na Poblachta and seven for Clann na Talmhan. There was a distinct possibility of a Labour-Republican bloc, possibly involving the small farmers, supplanting FG as the second force in the state. But that would have required Norton and the other Labour leaders to play a long game, eschewing bums on seats in the short term for the big prize in the long term. We know of course what they chose, and the effect of their choice was to breathe new life into a moribund Fine Gael, and for decades to come condemn Labour to being not a challenger for power in its own right, but a small and docile appendage to FG.

Does any of this sound familiar?

There are a number of stages to dealing with the results of an Irish election. First you stare at the TV and exclaim “What the hell kind of country is this?” Then you sleep on it. Then you sit down with a cup of tea and a chocolate gravy ring, crunch the numbers and convince yourself it all makes sense.

The results are, I suppose, only dramatic in that they falsified the polls. It’s remarkable, but five of the six parties were pretty much within a 1% deviation from their 2002 result, Fine Gael being the exception. So it’s pretty much as you were for Fianna Fáil, Labour and the Greens; the Provos were a bit unlucky in that their big surge in Donegal didn’t deliver at least one seat to compensate for their loss in Tallaght; and the Desocrats, the weakest of the big six, fell below critical mass. If there hadn’t been a slew of opinion polls, we might have thought the results pretty dull, but consistent polling predictions of a Fianna Fáil meltdown and big gains for the Greens and PSF had skewed our expectations.

On one level, this is sort of the antimatter version of the Scottish election – the reassertion of the competitive two-party system, after a collapse of the main opposition last time out, resulting in a squeeze on the small parties and independents. On another level, the presidential factor would have played a role. Not for the first time, Bertie has played chicken with the electorate and, faced with the very real prospect of Electric Enda becoming taoiseach, the electorate folded. Besides which, one can assume that with the bien-pensants’ predictions of an FF meltdown, the wish was father to the thought.

I’ll write separately about the republican and left votes, because they have some implications for how we might build an opposition in the future. But there are a few observations worth making.

Firstly, I was taken aback by FG’s enormous gain in seats, from 32 to 51. In retrospect, this could have been predicted. The Blueshirts had a genuinely horrible result in 2002, not only seeing their vote slump but, due to a lack of transfers, losing out badly in terms of seats – they should really have scored around 40 last time out. So, Electric Enda has energised Fine Gael and made it look like a halfway serious party again. Factor in a 5% gain in share of the vote, plus a decent level of transfers from eliminated Labour candidates, and you have a recipe for substantial seat gains. However, these gains come at the expense, not of Fianna Fáil, but the forces who capitalised on FG’s collapse last time – the Desocrats and centrist independents.

Speaking of the Desocrats, who may well end up folding as a party, I’m surprised to find myself rather sorry at McDowell bowing out of politics. He’s one of those people, like Alan Shatter or Bob McCartney, who I’ve never had time for politically but who do add something to public life. As in: he may have been a bastard, but he was a bastard with substance, and it says something about our political culture that he can be ousted by a lightweight like Lucinda Creighton.

As for Labour, well, Rabbitte made a rod for his own back with Mullingar. I could have told him this ages ago – the only time Labour ever gained from a close association with Fine Gael was in 1973, and the resulting government was so atrocious you wouldn’t want to see it repeated. He then made a second rod for his back by trying to give himself wiggle room for an alternative coalition. And, while the Green and Provo hordes may have been held off for the time being, a vote share below 10% and a notably elderly parliamentary party should give Labour members pause for thought.

As for Bertie, he has a few tasks ahead of him, not least putting together a stable majority. One may guess that Bev Flynn will get the whip back in the near future, but even so, the two “gene pool” indies and the two Desocrats won’t get him to the magic 83. Will he be willing to reach a non-coalition understanding with the Provos? Will Clever Trevor get his feet under the table? Only time will tell, but things don’t look long-term stable just yet.

And that’s just the electoral end of things. Will the multiple judicial tribunals into corruption actually start claiming scalps, bearing in mind that Mahon will be reconvened soon? What happens when the boom goes tits up? And what of the factional manoeuvring within Fianna Fáil itself? As Kinky Friedman sang, when the Lord closes the door, he opens a little window.

Fresh from my success at calling the weekend polls, I’ll revisit the southern election. It hasn’t to date been very interesting, partly because the parties are saying very similar things about most of the big issues, and partly because the media are intent on making this a presidential campaign, which is bloody stupid in a parliamentary election with PRSTV voting.

Anyway, a presidential campaign suits Bertie, because even a jaded Bertie fast approaching his sell-by date trumps Electric Enda. Enda’s main success in this campaign has been to confirm his image as a likeable bloke with tons of energy. However, being a likeable bloke doesn’t get you the taoiseach’s job in and of itself. Even Jack Lynch, who was famously affable, was also a devious bastard of Bertie proportions when it suited him. Electric Enda, meanwhile, has failed to shake off the widespread perception that he’s, well, a little bit lightweight.

As I’ve indicated, I expect the Provos to do quite well this time out. Whatever about their national poll rating, all indications are that they are doing well in areas where they need to do well. The bookies are quoting them as holding their five seats and picking up their three targets in northside Dublin, but you also have to factor in two excellent chances in Donegal and sporting chances in Waterford, Wexford and Sligo. It will also be interesting to see whether PSF’s difficulty in attracting transfers is on the wane. So, depending on the rub of the green, their seat tally could be anything from 7 to 12. In any case, and whatever Gerry thinks, the southern membership wouldn’t be displeased if they didn’t get into government. Another five years of building up the organisation, grooming candidates and cannibalising the more plebeian sections of the Fianna Fáil and Labour bases would suit them down to the ground.

Labour illustrate how hard it is to make predictions under STV. Despite flatlining for months at around 12%, barely ahead of PSF, they are widely anticipated to pick up twice as many seats. But Labour won so many seats with narrow margins last time out that, again depending on the rub of the green, they could be up a little or down quite sharply. Apart from the Provos, Labour have a further difficulty in the rise of the Greens, who are no longer a niche party for tree-hugging hippies but are making a strong pitch for the votes of nice middle-class people with nice liberal opinions, which describes a big chunk of the Labour electorate, especially in greater Dublin. The Greens these days are cultivating a profile not far distant from Labour’s, only without the vestigial socialism and with a much less elderly parliamentary party. This is likely to be a long-term problem for Labour.

And, since this is supposed to be a left blog, I’ll do a quick review of the further left. The Socialist Party’s manifesto is just as dull as you would expect, although I was interested in them proclaiming “Water charges victories North and South”. Well, one of those was ten years ago, and the other comes under the heading of counting your chickens. Some windy platitudes on the North, as the SP aren’t keen to advertise their neo-unionism in the South – God knows why, because there are lots of people in the South who wish the North was a thousand miles away. And really, extremely youthful appearances from Joe and Clare in their official photos. Have the leaders of the working class discovered Botox? I think we should be told.

Next to the Socialist Workers Party (Swiss Toni prop.), running under the “People Before Profit” rubric. In years gone by, the SWP used to lash the SP for its parliamentary illusions, but now appears to believe that Irish politics can be transformed if only party honcho and friend of this blog Richard Boyd Barrett gets a seat in Dún Laoghaire. I really recommend having a look at Richie’s address to the proletariat of Kingstown if you get the chance. I know Richie has the theatrical gene, but I couldn’t help thinking of Groucho in Horse Feathers singing “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”. Richie has principles, you see, and if you don’t like his principles, he can always get some more. As always with the SWP, the tone could be more accurately captured with a liberal sprinkling of exclamation marks and Yos.

Skipping lightly over the Workers Party, which is running exactly the kind of low-profile campaign it usually does, we conclude with the WP’s former comrades in the Togliattite Irish Socialist Network, who are running the personable John O’Neill in Finglas. John has two key pledges, neither of which he has a hope in hell of fulfilling. The first is that he won’t coalesce with the right, but will try to forge an alliance with Séamus Healy and Joe Higgins (neither of whom, by the way, are looking terribly secure). The second pledge is that he’ll take the average industrial wage – although the Provos take the average industrial wage, and it hasn’t waterproofed them against corruption. Still, I was very taken with his mock pizza ad. A bit of humour in politics is never a bad thing.

God, but wasn’t Prime Time desperate? It had the wholly unforeseen consequence of making me warm slightly to McDowell. Gerryspeak does my head in at the best of times, and between Grizzly’s torrent of abstract nouns and Rabbitte’s continuing impersonation of an 18th-century parliamentarian, I could well empathise with Dirty Mike’s eye-rolling.

OK, so we are now going to look at possible outcomes of the election. I’m not so daft as to try to predict the result of an STV election, but some hazy outlines can be discerned. And I’ll stick my neck out and say that the most likely new government is Fianna Fáil and Labour, although Bertie and/or Pat may have to make way for Brian and/or Brendan in the process. There are of course other possibilities, but this is the most credible one.

The consensus is that Fianna Fáil have had a shocking start to the campaign, which is true in the sense that the party hasn’t dominated the media agenda and its poll ratings have slumped. But there are a few factors militating against that. One is that the punters don’t seem as exercised about Bertiegate and stamp duty as the chattering classes. Another is that, as any fule kno, you can’t place any credence on a national poll. The constituency polls are more interesting, especially the batch of eleven done by Red C for the Examiner group and helpfully summarised in this week’s Phoenix. These indicate that, while FF support is dropping and Fine Gael support rising quite markedly in most areas, this isn’t translating into a big net shift in seats.

There are good reasons for believing this. One is that FF’s higher starting vote makes it easier for them to convert votes into seats, a situation strengthened by the new (and almost certainly unconstitutional) boundaries. The Blueshirts have the converse problem, that Big Phil has failed to crack the whip and therefore they are running far too many candidates to take advantage of the swing. It is of course true that the Red C batch doesn’t cover Dublin, where FF are likely to do very badly, but then the capital is virtually a Blueshirt-free zone and one expects FF losses there to benefit the Provos and Greens rather than the official opposition.

Now, for Electric Enda to become taoiseach a number of criteria have to be fulfilled. First, Fine Gael needs to up its seats from 32 to a minimum of something like 55. These enormous gains have to be overwhelmingly at the expense of FF, and without causing collateral damage to Labour or the Greens. Assuming Labour hold steady at about twenty and there are eight or nine Greens, a bare majority could be achieved – assuming Labour prove resistant to FF blandishments and also assuming that the Greens will come on board, which Clever Trevor to date has conspicuously not done. That’s a hell of a lot of assumptions, and for starters I would be astonished if FG break 50.

Fianna Fáil are likely to remain easily the largest party, despite significant losses. That gives them more options, although they certainly won’t be nearly close enough to the magic 83 that a government could be formed with the support of a couple of indies or the wreck of the Desocrat Hesperus. If the FF tally is in the low seventies, then FF-Green or FF-Provo become possibilities, although either of those parties would have some hard thinking to do first. If FF suffer a bloodbath in Dublin and fall significantly below 70, then Labour becomes the only realistic partner. And it is of interest that Rabbitte, previously viscerally hostile to FF, has been allowing himself sufficient wiggle room lately to make it look plausible for him to do the patriotic thing and become Tánaiste either way.

Obviously this is all just speculation at this point. But I strongly suspect that there won’t be an obvious winner next week, which will make for some fascinating horse-trading.