Collins and Dev on the same wall could be more than just a clue about things to come
SO ANYONE for a merger? Maybe Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, as they sit in Cabinet together today for their first serious working session, should now go the whole hog. On Saturday then-Taoiseach-soon-to-be Tánaiste Leo Varadkar noted the ending of the Civil War inside the Dáil – decades after it had ended in Irish life more generally. Mr Varadkar had already packed his portrait of Michael Collins as he vacated the Taoiseach’s office in Government Buildings.
Today we learn that his successor, Micheál Martin, will find space on his new office wall for portraits of both Anglo Irish Treaty conflict emblematic characters, Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins. Coronavirus trauma, and Green Party show-stealing in painfully slow coalition-making moves, blunted many people’s appreciation of the history associated with the sharing of cabinet seats between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
Many younger voters may well have been oblivious to these historic implications until they were finally acknowledged more broadly at the weekend. More than most of the rest of us, the young generation struggles to tell these two great political beasts apart.
So, we ask again: Can Fianna Fáil, the Republican Party, merge with Fine Gael, the United Ireland Party?
Quick answer is – given all we have seen in Irish politics in recent decades – of course they can.
Will it happen? And, more importantly, will it happen any time soon?
Well, other less predicted political developments, such as the huge electoral performance of Sinn Féin last February, the resurrection of the Green Party and Fianna Fáil’s debunking of obituary writers in 2011, tell us one clear thing: there is no future in prediction making.
But that note of caution will not stop those among us who love our politics from making predictions.
Let us, however, try to come at this argument from the other end. Let’s note that many people who know more about politics than this writer believe an “FF-FG merger” is far from inevitable.
We must first acknowledge that just insisting there is no room in national politics for two big centre-right blocs, will not make them into one. Remember a man called Brendan Corish, who led the Irish Labour Party with distinction from 1960 until 1977?
He opened his 1967 party conference at Liberty Hall with the assertion, which soon became part of Irish political folklore, that “the seventies will be socialist”. A version of that happened alright, some decades later, but it took the form that “the seventies are socialist”, as pensioners blocked the streets in 2009 to demonstrate against medical card cuts.
Part of Mr Corish’s assertion was that there was no room for two big conservative parties – and no country in Europe was without its socialist party. Dragging this up is not an attempt to treat the memory of a great politician harshly.
It is just making the point that for 50 years we were being told that either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael had to go – or they had to merge. Irish politics, we were told, had to move away from the Civil War-inspired party structure and move to a “modern” right-left model. But by now that right-left model is under deep pressure of change elsewhere.
At the same time, what discernible differences there were between the two parties were largely down to questions of emphasis and cultural particularisms. The argument went that Fine Gael was right wing and conservative while Fianna Fáil was radical and left leaning.
That had some resonance in the early years of the State when the forerunner of what is now Fine Gael accepted the 1922 Treaty settlement and went about establishing a new administration working with the old structures. That involved the painful business of extinguishing opposition to the Treaty in a bitter Civil War against a group from which Fianna Fáil quickly grew.
Éamon de Valera’s brilliant mass movement swiftly swept the country and often dubbed the re-grouped Fine Gael as the party of the “rich man and the rancher”. De Valera’s Fianna Fáil did implement some radical social policies on housing and health.
Fine Gael sometimes had grounds for dubbing its rival as “communists and IRA fellow travellers”. But over the years these stereotypes blurred and sometimes flipped.
By the 1960s Fianna Fáil had decades of rigorous suppression of the IRA behind it and an increasing level of support from big business, especially the building industry. Fianna Fáil billed itself as the
“natural party of government” – hardly a radical leftist stance.
But by then also Fine Gael’s young turks had discovered social action with a “Just Society” policy. By the late 1970s and through the 1980s, Garret FitzGerald’s Fine Gael was seen as more left-leaning than Charlie Haughey’s Fianna Fáil.
Fianna Fáil was more usually the stronger one and in power. Occasionally Fine Gael roused itself, put together and led an “ABFF” coalition government. But up until the 1980s their combined strength accounted for eight out of 10 voters.
However, for the last 40 years this has been going down and down. In the most recent election their combined poll share accounted for just four out of 10 voters.
The balkanisation of Dáil numbers and their shared antipathy towards Sinn Féin impelled them to coalesce with a surprisingly high level of grassroots support in both organisations.
Both parties have been working together for many years at local council level. At Leinster House they collaborated on a confidence supply arrangement for minority government for the past four years. This coalition was a logical extension of that. A merger is not inevitable – but it is likely.
More than most of the rest of us, the young generation struggles to tell these two great political beasts apart