In a time of high crisis, will parties on left learn to do the right thing?
Voters will punish those politicians who fail to do their duty to a nation in need, writes Jody Corcoran
‘FF and FG will arrive at a deal and then turn to Labour’
THE unanswerable question is what politics will be like after coronavirus. Will it return to the usual fare, or will the trauma of the death of our mostly oldest and wisest generation leave its mark on the national psyche?
And will that mark dictate that those politicians in, or about to step into, the breach now, be rewarded in time or punished when the final bill comes to be settled?
And will that final bill come at a cost as severe as the years of austerity after the national humiliation of 2008?
There are many in the Greens who think they know the answer to those questions.
That is why they are running a mile from government formation talks, wrapped in a cloak of cynicism unsuited to their image.
In time the likes of Neasa Hourigan, the new Green Party TD in Dublin Central, may be proven right, but she might just as easily be wrong, because the public mood is different this time.
The hope for a stable government rests on the shoulders of the new Labour leader, Alan Kelly, this weekend, and with him the Social Democrats whose joint leaders face a last spin of the merry-go-round before time passes them by.
Labour’s current position is that it too wants to head for the opposition benches, and the relative luxury of rebuilding a party which has always manned up in the national interest.
That would leave Fianna Fail and Fine Gael together, with a clutch of Independents, sitting on a three-legged stool, facing into the consequences of the greatest national reckoning in living memory.
And if that does not prove to be enough — both party leaders have said another of the smaller parties is required — we could be back to a day of reckoning sooner than we thought, in the form of another election.
Such an outcome might not be so bad for Fine Gael, whose generation of politicians has come of age during the coronavirus crisis.
But how would other parties fare?
The Greens, for example, who look set to turn their backs on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to effect real change on the issues which matter most to them? Not very well, some would argue.
Or Labour, who as things stand look set to abandon a tradition of acting in the national interest, the consequences be damned.
Or the Social Democrats, who up to now have removed themselves from the frame at a time when the country has come to bury its dead by webcam?
Right now it is doubtful that Leo Varadkar is doing ‘what ifs’, but if he is in the privacy of his own thoughts he must be wondering what if he had taken Micheal Martin at his word and delayed the calling of the recent election until after Easter.
He would now be looking at a postponed election in September and a people grateful for the manner in which Fine Gael has managed this great national trauma so far.
The cynics out there would have it that Varadkar is preparing to manipulate such a situation anyway. That the Taoiseach, who heretofore would not have changed his socks without assessing the political consequences, is preparing to collapse the talks on the grounds of instability of outcome, to take advantage of a popular outpouring toward his party.
That may be so, but if he is, it would be a risky strategy.
No, it is more likely that Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are serious about their intention to put together a good and stable government, as will be required.
And that takes us back to the Greens, Labour and the Social Democrats.
There are other possibilities within the matrix, of course.
A chunk of the Fianna Fail parliamentary party want no truck with Fine Gael, and when the moment presents, before the second wave hits, might choose to dump their leader and turn to Sinn Fein.
Similarly, all other possibilities exhausted, Fine Gael might also turn to Mary Lou McDonald.
In that scenario, it is easier to see the radical chic wing of the Greens scrambling to get on board.
Which tells us how deeply engrained in the DNA of some smaller parties is an antipathy not towards Sinn Fein, but towards Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. How post-modern of them.
But the exhausting manoeuvrings within such a matrix seem too complicated at this stage.
The clock is ticking in Leinster House.
The need for a new government to be put in place sooner rather than later is the imperative.
What would happen if new legislation is needed to contend with the consequences of the first wave of coronavirus, or the second?
According to the Attorney General, such a scenario could lead to a full-blown crisis of paralysis within the Oireachtas because the Seanad would not be properly constituted.
No, it would seem we are where we are. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael will shortly arrive at a deal and then turn to Labour, and after that to the Social Democrats should Labour come on board.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man…
What will Alan Kelly do? There is talk of Labour facilitating the potential new government from opposition, but that will hardly do either. Neither would it satisfy the Alan Kelly ego, one would imagine, in the nicest possible way.
There is a kind of poetic symmetry to it all: the three parties which have formed part of every government since the foundation of the State coming together to lead the country through the consequences of the greatest national trauma since the Spanish flu in 1918.
In Sinn Fein and the Greens, and in parties on the left, they would present such an outcome as a sign of their own importance.
The supporters of these parties will never tire of telling us of how politics has changed and changed utterly.
Look, they will say, and point toward such a government — civil war parties, and the oldest party in the State — dwindled in numbers, huddled together. Aren’t we great?
And they will clap themselves on the back and present this as a validation of themselves.
There will even be talk of the emergence of a left-right divide, and the “normalisation” of politics, even the Europeanisation of it.
And they will sit back and carp and complain and pretend that they could have done it better.
Give us a chance, Sinn Fein and the Greens and others will cry.
Well, this is their chance, and some have abandoned it; worse than that, they have run from it in the most cynically opportunistic way imaginable.
So, to answer the question, what will politics be like after coronavirus?
Look around you, at your family, your friends, your neighbours, at the random strangers who have come to bury their dead, and tell us the story of their father or mother dying alone with nothing but the plastic-wrapped mobile phone of a hero nurse held to his or her ear.
And tell me, who will you vote for when next you come to choose a government, the people who stood up to be counted now, or those who hid in plain sight?