NO GUNS DRAWN IN 2017
Neither Enda nor Micheál will DARE to force election when what they FEAR most is us the PEOPLE
ENDA KENNY and Micheál Martin were in the Dáil chamber the last time a government spectacularly fell. Neither man will easily forget the consequences. It was Thursday, January 20, 2011 and the Fianna Fáil/Green coalition was in its death throes. Still, it seemed that then-taoiseach Brian Cowen had bought a bit of time by beating Martin in a leadership vote. Many expected the doomed coalition to struggle on until summer.
Then Cowen encouraged six Cabinet ministers to resign and tried to replace them. It was not received well. I was on the press gallery that day as mayhem and confusion broke out.
Cowen resigned and Fianna Fáil stumbled into the election with no real leadership and no planning. They were annihilated. Brian Cowen’s government had endured over two years of catastrophes until the leader unintentionally inflicted the death blow.
Governments, even minority administrations, do not usually fall easily. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are not prepared for a general election as we enter January 2017. And the parties who control the Dáil will work tirelessly to prevent one from happening.
FINE Gael is at its lowest ebb since its 2002 general election battering. Kenny, many believe, is on his way out. The party is consumed by a leadership struggle between Simon Coveney and Leo Varadkar. Just under a year ago, it lost 26 seats. Last autumn, Marion Coy, a former head of the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, presented to the party leadership a report into the general election debacle.
She is considered a fan of the Taoiseach. Yet it makes damning reading. It concluded: ‘Future electoral strategy and planning must be conducted in a more inclusive manner and take into account the failures in vision, empathy, planning, tactical positioning, communication, campaigning and responsiveness identified in the 2016 campaign.’
Those of us who followed the Taoiseach around Ireland during that campaign understood that we were at the centre of a disaster as it unfolded.
Fine Gael has a long road back. It needs a new leader, new candidates and a total overhaul. It has no Oireachtas representatives in its heartland of Tipperary. The rookie female politicians that were put on tickets late to fulfil the required 30% quota of females mostly bombed. Fine Gael is broke. An election in the near future must be avoided.
Fianna Fáil is in better shape after the 2016 general election. Yet, at 44, it has fewer seats in the Dáil than Fine Gael. Ten years ago, after Bertie Ahern’s last win, it had 77 and it had 81 in 2002.
The party is still in a tentative recovery from the 2011 apocalypse. Many candidates failed to manage their votes and assist running mates. And high-profile TDs like Billy Kelleher, Niall Collins and Willie O’Dea managed to get away without having any running mates at all. If an election happened soon, Fianna Fáil could improve. But it could just as easily lose seats and that would put Martin’s leadership in jeopardy.
Sinn Féin, too, is uncertain about its future. It managed to win 23 seats last year – but that was at least 10 short of the target that its chief strategists had predicted.
The Gerry Adams transition is happening. Eoin Ó Broin, Mary Lou McDonald, Pearse Doherty and a few others are creditable media performers.
However, a lot of the lesserknown TDs are rough around the edges. Becalmed and strangely lethargic in the Dáil, it is clear that Sinn Féin doesn’t want to go anywhere near the electorate in 2017.
The independents, already growing accustomed to the trappings of office and with a traditionally high electoral attrition rate, are even less likely to lobby for an election.
SO 2018 is the election year, many will say. With a possible presidential election that October, it would probably have to be early in the year. And with local and European elections in 2019, it would make sense to get it out of the way. But the Dáil is permitted to run until 2021 and there is a very small group – I’m in it, anyway – who suspect that this minority arrangement might run close to that year.
When the minority Fine Gael Government was formed last year, many said it would be a temporary arrangement. But that was before two of the most shocking electoral results Western politics has ever seen – Brexit and Trump.
In Ireland, politicians, particularly in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, had put the political upheavals down to our financial collapse.
Since June, however, they know that something deeper is occurring – but they don’t know what it is. And the liberal, left-leaning, consensus-driven media has been unable to explain why the ordinary man is rebelling. Even the oncereliable comfort of opinion polling isn’t explaining things.
Now the Irish electorate has seen that it is possible to vote completely against the wishes of the establishment. It too has been neglected, dismissed and disrespected. Since June, and even more so since November, Irish politicians want to rest and regroup.
For the Government to fall soon, Fianna Fáil will have to begin fomenting unrest and discord now. Pressure and quarrelling would need to be manufactured to build up to a parting of the ways. And how would the public react to such a cynical manoeuvre from a party only just emerging from purgatory? Like everything else about 2017 politics, nobody knows.
Water may prove too troublesome for all parties and it will come to a head in the spring. If Fine Gael cannot get an agreement on water charges, Minister Coveney will have to go back to the Dáil and extend their suspension. This will be politically damaging for him and Fine Gael.
In 1994, the Albert Reynolds Fianna Fáil/Labour government fell over the handling of the case of a paedophile priest.
Albert gave us a political axiom that our current rulers must also bring into their planning. He said: ‘It’s amazing. You cross the big hurdles and when you get to the small ones, you get tripped up.’