A brief guide to what the hell is going on right now
Some are trying to get into government by pretending to want to stay out, some are doing the opposite. Brendan O’Connor tries to unravel coalitionology
SO here we are then. The situation is quite fluid but roughly speaking you could sum it up like this: If anyone won the election, Sinn Fein won it. Then they made the huge rookie error of saying they won the election. And Mary Lou said she should be Taoiseach. Other parties, at this point, began tripping over themselves to say how badly they lost the election, and to agree that Mary Lou, with a little bit of help from Sinn Fein, had indeed won the election.
Leo Varadkar signalled that he was happy to head to the opposition benches. Brendan Howlin agreed too, and stepped down as leader for good measure. People, including perhaps Sinn Fein, started to get a bit nervous then.
In some ways there was an element of a huff to the Fine Gael and Labour move. But equally, they would say they were just respecting democracy and the will of the people. We rejected them, so fine, they would leave us at it. And they wished us the best with our new flirtation. That made us really nervous.
Fine Gael clearly got together in secret and decided that their tone around all this would be the classic Irish approach — passive aggressive. Leo did a bit of it, even Paschal tried it, but Hildegarde Naughton gave a masterclass in it on last Thursday’s Prime Time.
You almost felt she was trying not to laugh as she repeatedly basically refused to hear the questions and talked about respecting the will of the people and kept repeating that it was up to Sinn Fein now to form their ‘Republican Socialist’ government.
That’s what Fine Gael keep calling it. Leo started it, and it’s caught on. They stop just short of calling it a Nationalist Socialist Government, but they know what they’re doing. State-farmed butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths when they say it, but dogs for miles around prick up their ears at any mention of it. We know what they are threatening us with.
Meanwhile, Mary Lou is probably getting a bit nervous too. When you are the only one claiming to have won an election, and all your rivals are agreeing you did, you might suddenly start to feel slightly exposed. As Mary Lou started to notice that the two other big parties were clearly planning to get into government by pretending not to want to go into government, she might have got even more nervous. Because she was presumably doing the opposite — trying not to end up in government by acting keen to go in.
Sinn Fein are good at the politics of opposition and conflict, but this was a different game. And Mary Lou McDonald was dealing with some wily old coots here.
As it became clear to Sinn Fein that there would be no grand socialist collective, they had to start pivoting slightly. They had to begin selling a very complex message now in their apparent quest to be in government.
Now stick with me here because this gets complicated.
So the people had apparently overwhelmingly voted for radical change, though some would say the actual numbers make that contention debatable. That vote, apparently, was a kick against the last government, which was apparently a Fine Gael/Fianna Fail regime, those two parties being interchangeable anyway.
So Fine Gael and Fianna Fail could not go into government, because this would betray the will of the people, who wanted change. But from the point of view of who won the election, Mary Lou was not lumping FF and FG in together, because if she lumped them together for those purposes, they won the election.
Furthermore, while FF and FG do not represent change, somehow Mary Lou pivoted to a position where Fianna Fail could represent change, if they went into government with Sinn Fein.
This is a complex message to sell. It requires us to hold at least seeming contradictions in our heads at once. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are the same party but they are not. And Fianna Fail does not represent change but it does if Sinn Fein wants it to.
After a campaign where Mary Lou seemed to be the only one who had learnt the lesson of ‘Get
Brexit Done’, and where she was the master of the simple, digestible message, this is complicated stuff we’re having to get our heads around.
Meanwhile, Fianna Fail seemed to get a bit spooked. Micheal Martin seemed to suggest in the heat of the count centre that he might go in with Sinn Fein. Then muttering began about Martin’s leadership, and things started to seem shaky.
But then, much in the way that the hive-mind of FG scrambled to come up with the passive-aggressive approach, the Fianna Fail hivemind calmed down, went to ground for a while to see how winning the election was going for Mary Lou, and then got together last Thursday for a tribal huddle.
After four hours the message was clear: Martin is safe, there’ll be no going in with Sinn Fein, and Fianna Fail is in government-formation mode, with Fine Gael and the Greens. There was the standard mutterings from reliables like Eamon O Cuiv and John McGuinness, but essentially the message was clear: It’s time for everyone to calm down and the adults will take it from here.
Some people were surprised that the notion of an FF/FG/Greens government was floated so quickly. People thought that the traditional big parties might have let things hang a bit more, with some idea that we would all come crawling back and apologise, say we’ve had our fun, and beg them to make a government.
Maybe they realised that we are in a uniquely unpredictable space here and that if they didn’t go back on the pitch quickly, SF might have surprised them.
You’d have to think it’s still too early to call, and it might be premature for FF and FG to get too cocky yet. But one thing they, and we, should all bear in mind is that democracy is a very brittle thing.
We take democracy and order for granted in this country. But then, they took it for granted in Britain as well.
We would do well to note how easily the things we take for granted can be eroded, how casually you can suddenly find yourself in a place where an unelected advisor is essentially staging a coup against the elected Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a well-performing secretary of state for Northern Ireland can be sacked for not adequately hailing to the chief.
Wherever this unpredictable journey takes us, the three quarters of the electorate who did not vote for Sinn Fein need to respect their mandate, and respect the people who did vote for them.
And equally Sinn Fein and their supporters need to support the vast majority who did not vote for them. Also, the normal standards to which we hold any political party need to be observed right now.
All in all, let’s mind our democratic manners and keep things civil at this strange point.
And whoever makes a government, let us all accept that democratic outcome.