BRENDAN O’CONNOR

The next leader of FG is gambling that we’ve had our fun and are ready to get serious again, says Brendan O’Connor

‘MAXIMUM ridiculousness”. That’s where Alan Kelly reckons we’ve reached on the populism front in Ireland. Now let’s face it. It could be more ridiculous. We haven’t elected a Donald Trump. We haven’t bounced ourselves into bouncing ourselves out of the EU. But what we have done, according to Kelly, is come to a place where no politician will do anything that could be perceived as being electorally damaging. And he could have a point.

And in a sense there is a worse kind of populism than electing a Donald Trump, which is at least a decision of some kind. In this country, we can’t even commit to electing a government.

So we gave some votes to everyone, but not enough for anyone to form a government. Then we bitched and moaned when they couldn’t form a government, and then we bitched and moaned when the government they formed wasn’t really a government. And now we bitch and moan that this government that is not really a government finds itself powerless.

And when no one can claim victory, everyone can claim victory. Paul Murphy is currently claiming total victory. With children in excruciating pain and risking lifelong damage because they can’t get operations for scoliosis. With children all over the country losing the chance of learning crucial survival skills during the very limited early intervention window because there is a scandalous lack of services for disabled people. With old people dying on hospital trolleys. With the weakest in our society abandoned and disregarded at every turn, Paul Murphy chose to make his big issue the payment of water charges, water charges that are affordable to the majority of people in this country, water charges that are far from the most outrageous slings and arrows of austerity.

And he won. And the victory was total because he dragged Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail with him down this daft road. He infected the whole system with his viral campaign. Because we are at maximum ridiculousness. And Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail have reached it because they won’t willingly do anything that could be perceived as electorally damaging.

It’s sad to think about the wasted opportunities. It’s sad to think what people power could have done in the past few years. It’s sad to think what the water charges marches could have been about. It’s sad to think of the lives they could have changed; of the children they could have saved; of the families that could have been transformed; of the old and the sick and the disabled and the forgotten who could have benefited from the establishment being shamed into doing something for them. But the highlighting of those issues has all been largely left to the establishment media that the water movement hate so much. The water movement focused on one simple area where they could win a total victory, even if it meant little change.

Because water will not be free. But the burden of who pays for it will be moved around. Hardly a revolution. Hardly worth the crowing. Hardly worth Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail making clowns of themselves.

But while Irish people have always had a healthy sense of the ridiculous, we also move on very quickly. Sometimes, we like to have our fun for a while. But then we cop on and get serious again. And that is what the next leader of Fine Gael is banking on. That we want to start minimising the ridiculousness again.

Assuming that the next leader of Fine Gael will be either Leo Varadkar or Simon Coveney, the next leader of Fine Gael is going to be anti-ridiculousness. Both men have been clearly framing themselves as responsible, anti-populist, grown-up, and willing do and say things that will risk alienating at least some of the electorate. It is a calculated risk on both their parts, but clearly it is one they think will pay off to position Fine Gael for the next phase of Irish life, after the current pause in government has worn thin with people.

Leo and Simon are both banking on a certain maturity among the electorate that has learnt its lesson about the politics of the street, and the politics that promises whatever you want at no cost. They are banking, perhaps, on the fact that, extraordinarily, nearly four in five of us still identify as Catholics. We may not go to Mass, but we carry the cultural baggage, and that means knowing life is not easy, that you don’t get everything for nothing, that you must suffer a little bit for the good times.

Leo has been setting out his stall very clearly, to the point that the usual insults of Thatcherite and Reaganite are being hurled. Extraordinarily, though, this is a capitalist country, and the vast majority of the people here subscribe to a capitalist mindset, to describe someone as right wing is still an insult. And that is the insult thrown at Leo when he says that there are two types of people in this country; the ones who pay for everything and get very little in return, and the ones “who believe they should be entitled to everything for free and that someone else should pay for it”.

This is the opposite of populism, the opposite of ridiculousness. Indeed, the very notion that some people should not be entitled to everything for free, paid for by someone else, is practically a declaration of war on populism.

Coveney is taking his own stance on populism by refusing to cave in and do what he sees as the wrong thing on water charges. Indeed, he is widely viewed to be destroying his chance of becoming leader of Fine Gael by standing firm on the water issue. The whole situation became even more reckless when it was suggested that Leo had gained an advantage over Simon by being seen to be more anti-populist in the Dail, and by not only standing up for Simon, but by taking ownership of Simon’s anti-populist stance. Two men, at the point of maximum ridiculousness, trying to outdo each other in being anti-ridiculousness. A big gamble indeed.

And, meanwhile, the ridiculous ones from Fianna Fail looked on, many of them seeming half-embarrassed. You expected one of them to pop out of a kitchen press, Bertie-style: “I never thought I’d end up here.”

There has been a low level sense around here recently that we’re doing fine without a government. It was a sense that took hold when we languished for a few months without a government being formed. People noticed that things seemed to be ticking along nicely. The economy had stepped into the vacuum and was providing the momentum one might normally expect from a government. Indeed, after over a year of no real government, we now find ourselves, according to the Central Bank, with a “Phoenix Miracle” on our hands, an economic rebirth based not on debt but on actual economic activity. The performance of the economy contrasts sharply with that of the Government, which essentially seems to spend its time conducting multiple inquiries into the cock-ups of the past, while simultaneously managing to cock up any of the challenges of the present.

But in our Catholic hearts, we know that we can’t keep going like this, that there will be a price to pay eventually.

And we know in our Catholic hearts, too, that we can’t keep taking easy answers, the easy route. We know that someone has to pay. And the next leader of Fine Gael is gambling that by the time they have to face the electorate, we will have had our fun, and our flirtation with maximum ridiculousness will be over.

‘It’s sad to think about what people power could have done’