Breathless pace of political change in Ireland can have its roots traced to 2011
WHEN I was in primary school, there were two other girls in the class who were from Fine Gael families, one or two Labour voters, and everyone else was Fianna Fáil. In the Gubu era, schoolchildren knew exactly which side they were on. It’s funny now to imagine 12-year-olds so confident of their political identity.
People who claim politics is newly aggressive simply weren’t politically conscious a generation ago.
Famous journalists had their phones tapped. Jim Gibbons, a Fianna Fáil TD who opposed Charlie Haughey’s leadership, was attacked in Leinster House by drunken Haughey supporters. He had a heart attack a few weeks later and never returned to politics.
The children of TDs recall mobs outside their homes. Party politics mattered like nothing else on Earth. National bankruptcy loomed. The IRA was at its worst. Democracy itself felt under threat.
From my perspective – my father is a lifelong Fine Gael activist and was a councillor for nearly 50 years – it was a question of good and evil.
Anyone who supported Haughey was morally bankrupt, in our earnest opinion.
While I use the term ‘Blueshirt’ with an ironic twist of affection, Fianna Fáilers believed Fine Gael was full of borderline fascists, big farmers, West Brit elitists, who were overbearingly judgemental. To be fair, the last part has the virtue of being true.
This bitter partisanship preceded Haughey, of course.
A great story from our family folklore involved the principal of my cousin’s primary school asking the pupils to stand and say a prayer after Éamon de Valera died. My cousin heroically refused to obey. “My father says the President was a bad man,” he declared.
He was promptly sent home and a stand-off occurred as an apology was demanded and refused.
In our part of the country, these passionate feelings had little to do with ‘civil war politics’. The great grudge was born from the economic war, De Valera’s crazed policy that cut off our biggest export market – Britain – from an already struggling economy. My mother still recalls calves being thrown into Lough Sheelin in Cavan because there was no point rearing them.
It was the Brexit of the 1930s – ideology’s triumph over sanity. This is all ancient history, of course. But that’s the point.
Because 2020 has delivered so much drama, and promises to deliver so much more, we seem to have missed the astonishing political history now unfolding.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the parties fuelled by the feverish pursuit of keeping the other one out of power, have agreed to govern together. Has everyone forgotten the degree to which these two parties loathed each other?
Why is this former political impossibility now being taken for granted? I suppose it’s like the old trope of Ernest Hemingway going bankrupt slowly, and then quickly.
In the 1940s non-Fianna Fáil politicians were quite fragmented but gradually consolidated into Fine Gael and Labour. Most politicians accepted that membership of a political party committed them to a broad church where say, in Fine Gael, arch social conservatives could exist alongside liberal reformers. But starting with the rise and fall of the Progressive Democrats, the 21st century has seen split after split and more and more Independents. The decline of the two big parties created a negative momentum.
As the probability of a small party or Independent TDs wielding the balance of power increased, so did the incentive to go one’s own way politically. These days, the splitters can gamble on the call from the needy big party with a deal. Independence is empowering. Alternatively, as we’re now witnessing, the refusal to take responsibility for anything appears to be a vote-winner, which is a bit depressing.
But this is only half the story. What we are witnessing now is really the result of the 2011 election.
Fianna Fáil took a hit then from which it has never recovered. By and large, the centre held during the financial crisis. This was almost certainly due to the influence of Brian Lenihan, whose anniversary occurred on Wednesday.
The Lenihan family history is as central to the popularity and success of Fianna Fáil as Haughey was to its weaknesses. Intelligent, likeable, trusted, and while you can say populist in a pejorative sense, undoubtedly in touch with the public mood. In the crisis, this was an extraordinary advantage. Perhaps if Lenihan had lived he could’ve brought the party back. But the legs were knocked out from under Fianna Fáil and no fresh leadership has emerged to rejuvenate it.
There are many in Fine Gael outraged that the old enemy is being appeased. Another election would please them very well. But that virtuous sense of duty, which so infuriated their opponents back in the day, is strong enough to quell rebellion.
But there are many more in Fianna Fáil aghast at the prospect.
Fine Gael may be weaker than it was, but coalition seems more dangerous for Fianna Fáil. Some believe only power and patronage can save them now. But others are convinced, and they may be right, that coalition with Fine Gael is the end.
There is natural concern that a programme for government may not get through the Green Party membership, but I wonder if Fianna Fáil members might yet deliver a shock.
The way 2020 is working out so far, that plot twist would be more than appropriate.
The Lenihan family are as central to the success of Fianna Fáil as Haughey was to its weaknesses