Eilis O’Hanlon
Cobbled together from scraps of the old world, our new Government answers few of the needs of this strange new world, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
IN years to come, people will ask each other where they were and what they were doing when they first heard that a coalition between Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Greens had been overwhelmingly approved by all three parties.
Only joking. Of course they won’t. The new Government may be historic, but it doesn’t feel it. It doesn’t even feel that interesting.
The principals did their best to add to the drama by dragging out the counting all day Friday; but despite giddy predictions that the Greens might reject the deal, requiring wider talks on Government formation, in the end all three parties voted for it in large numbers, the Greens by an even larger margin than FF. The moral of the story: never believe what you see on social media.
Ultimately, it was all a bit of an anticlimax, and part of that surely has to do with the confidence and supply agreement.
The two main parties may now be in formal coalition for the first time in history, and will be so during the centenary of the creation of the Irish Free State, which will no doubt spark lots of high-faluting baloney about the healing of Civil War divides; but most people had been softened up for this arrangement by the years in which it was effectively happening anyway, for all the pretence that there was a normal government vs opposition dynamic in the Dail.
Even if it is the first time the two have thrown in their lot together, there’s not much more to say about it than that. It’s a Government which satisfies no one in particular, and about which few will feel enthusiasm or loyalty towards.
FF, who feared being gobbled up by rivals in another snap election, will be relieved, not least Micheal Martin. No one wants to be the first FF leader never to become Taoiseach. That future dishonour will now pass to someone else.
The Greens may get the chance to roll out a few flagship policies, but will be understandably nervous at what happens to unpopular minority parties when the electorate gets the chance to punish them.
Fine Gael will hover between quiet satisfaction and smugness, roughly the same position on the political spectrum that they always occupy anyway; but they wouldn’t have been distraught if a spell in opposition had beckoned either.
There’s no point complaining about any of this. It’s the Irish way. Anyone who wishes to argue for a first-past-the-post electoral system, in which stronger majorities can be secured on lower proportions of the vote, is welcome to try. SF will just have to lick its wounds and wait for the next time, ruing the decision not to run more candidates in February, which would have given it first bite at the cherry.
The Greens also deserve credit for not ducking the challenge of government. Too many smaller parties still prefer the purity of protest to making the compromises necessary to enact the policies they purport to care about.
Another election would have solved nothing, and might even have made things worse.
All the same, let’s be honest. No one is exactly dancing in the streets this weekend as they contemplate the next four or five years.
Indeed, ask most people what’s even in the programme for government, and they’d surely struggle to think of a single word, and certainly not one that originated within FF or FG. Their appeal is not one of imagination or vision, but of managerial competence, stability.
Outside those who benefit directly, the only people who will be euphoric today are those who feared SF would ruin the country, an opinion which arguably gives them way too much credit for being radical; but even for them, it’s more a case of breathing a sigh of relief than being energised or excited by the thought of what’s to come.
It certainly can’t be said that the new Government is new in any other sense. There’s a different Taoiseach, and he’s a decent man who has every right to feel personal satisfaction at attaining the highest honour in Irish politics; but a man who’s been a TD since 1989, and served in governments under two previous taoisigh, does not represent a great upheaval.
The unseemly scrabbling for the spoils of office which took place on Friday, even before the votes were counted, felt shabbily familiar too.
For most people, seeing those who’ll form the Government of the 33rd Dail celebrating this weekend is rather like pressing one’s nose to the glass and watching someone else tuck into a delicious feast. It must be nice for them, you think, but no one invited us to share it.
That’s not to parrot shallow slogans about how “the Irish people voted for change” in February.
Characterising the range of votes cast in the election in that simplistic way is nonsense, and those who berate this new deal would happily have found a way to exclude the more than 50pc of people who voted FF, FG and Green if they thought they could get away with it.
It’s the lack of vision which is so depressing. If a programme for government is to mean anything, it has to be a philosophical statement of direction rather than a bland list of policy objectives to tick off.
People need to know what a government stands for. What it believes. What its ideas are.
Instead, it seems that there are no ideas allowed any more.
It could be that, after the crisis of the last few months, Irish people are weary and ready to settle for a period of dull inactivity.
But that feeling too will pass, and it seems inevitable there will be a backlash, probably quite soon, as they realise that this new arrangement, however stable, answers none of the needs which they have.
Some of those needs may be difficult to articulate, and some of the solutions being put forward might have been unlikely to answer them either. Not all change is wise.
There remains nonetheless a genuine dissatisfaction in the air, a sense that something’s gone awry.
Covid-19 symbolised it in a way. More than a decade on from the financial crash, whose own injustices have still not been addressed, it brought the globe to a standstill, exposing its fractures and discontents more vividly than ever.
February’s election now feels as if it took place a lifetime ago, but the Government which it has eventually spawned in this strange new world seems to have been put together from random fragments of the old one.
That should worry them. Just because it’s hard to put one’s finger on what’s missing in modern life doesn’t mean that the aching hollowness at the heart of society is not real.
It will find an outlet somewhere, somehow.
‘No one is dancing in the streets at the thought of a new government’