A FF-Labour coalition makes sense for both
Fianna Fail can help Labour find its relevance again, while Labour can boost Fianna Fail’s Dublin ratings, writes Eoin O’Malley
WHEN Hillary Clinton took to the stage to accept her party’s nomination for president, amid all the vacuous slogans that filled that hall all week, she wisely gave the nod to different groups whose support she’ll be looking for. She’s received endorsements from Bernie Sanders, an old-fashioned socialist, and Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman. She won’t satisfy both of them in every way, but she’s building a coalition around herself as the moderate candidate.
All governments are formed of coalitions. Even presidents and single-party governments are coalitions. Look at any large party and you see groups of people with different ideas working together to achieve some goal. They often have to supress some differences, and do so willingly because there are some other goals on which they can agree.
When they can no longer hold it together, they should prepare themselves for a sustained period in opposition. That’s what we see happening with the UK Labour party.
The 2016 Irish election saw the collapse of a coalition. The collapse of Fine Gael and Labour’s historic majority was a decision taken by the Irish people rather than the parties themselves. But soon after we could see changes in the way the parties viewed each other. Writing in the Sunday Independent at the end of May, the then leadership contender Alan Kelly wrote: “We need to kill off the expectation that it will always be coalition with Fine Gael. It may not always be.”
Since then the new Labour leader Brendan Howlin has been quick to criticise Fine Gael but has been conciliatory to Fianna Fail.
Coming from the other side, Micheal Martin has been gushing. Coming up to the election he repositioned Fianna Fail on the centre-left, and it appeared to work. By painting Fine Gael as rightwing he successfully captured the middle ground of Irish politics, and played up to the sense that Government policies were serving an elite.
He’s on record as saying that Fianna Fail is “a bit to the left”. And last week he singled out Labour as the party he’d like to form the next government with. Would this work? And how should Labour respond?
Martin’s evidence for whether it would work or not is based on the experience of the Albert Reynolds-led Fianna Fail-Labour coalition that governed in 1993 and 1994. He was a backbencher then and obviously has fond memories. Martin talked about the equality legislation that was introduced and infrastructural projects that were started. His reminiscences might be coloured by time, and the fact that the government had much more money than any Irish government was used to having.
Still, the proposal makes a good deal of sense for both parties. The parties are both centrist, although they tend to govern on the right. For Labour, being continually attached to Fine Gael has acted as a drag on it. If there are differences between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael they might be in the attitude towards the State. Fianna Fail sees the State as the basis for solutions to problems for ordinary people, whereas many in Fine Gael instinctively see the State as an impediment to solutions or even the cause of those problems.
But for reasons of electoral arithmetic, Labour kept finding itself coalescing with Fine Gael when, on the economy at least, it might have been closer to Fianna Fail.
A Fianna Fail-Labour coalition makes sense for both parties because the other party does well where they are electorally weak. Fianna Fail still has a Dublin problem, and though it’s not as stark as in 2011, it underperforms there. Labour, up to 2016 at least, was strong in Dublin, especially among the middle class, but only ever had patchy support outside Dublin. Where it did well outside Dublin, Labour depended on a strong local TD, the likes of Alan Kelly, who could easily pass for a Fianna Fail politician.
This sounds like the two parties should get together. But Martin should revisit Sean Duignan’s diary of the period, One Spin on the Merry-GoRound. When the coalition was formed, some prominent political scientists speculated that Fianna Fail could expect to govern indefinitely. But within the first few weeks Duignan wondered whether the government, then with the largest majority in the history of the State, could survive for long.
It fell quickly because the two parties didn’t trust each other. Of course Martin is more used to coalition, and doesn’t have Reynolds’ suicidal tendencies when it comes to government. Nor is Howlin quite as sensitive as Dick Spring.
But there are significant differences between Fianna Fail and Labour. Labour is one of the more liberal parties in Ireland, whereas Fianna Fail is the most conservative. This is one of the reasons Labour was more comfortable with Fine Gael. The parties could probably get over these differences by farming out disagreements to a constitutional convention and referendum.
There are also cultural differences. Labour sees Fianna Fail as ethically unclean. Fianna Fail sees Labour as pious. These views have weakened somewhat, but they could benefit from working together on projects in opposition.
But should Labour allow itself to be wooed? Normally you’d say no. Pre-election pacts have tended only to help the bigger party. The Mullingar Accord, between Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte, was a mistake for Labour, but gave Fine Gael a lifeline to pull it out of irrelevance.
The pacts associate the smaller party with the larger one, which could lose Labour some support from those who dislike Fianna Fail. Some potential Labour supporters who like Fianna Fail might also just choose to vote for Fianna Fail as a more direct way to form the government.
However these aren’t normal times for Labour. Labour is the party struggling with irrelevance. It’s no longer the third party, and instead finds itself in a crowded space on the left.
This week’s Paddy Power RedC poll puts it on just 4pc. The leadership change gave it no bounce.
Talk of a Fianna Fail-Labour coalition might have the effect of making it relevant again.