Budget split shows the Civil War parties are nowhere near an electoral pact

Irreverent. Irrepressible. In the corridors of power

IT WAS tough to choose the most striking sentence from the hours of astonishing briefings I received from ministers and civil servants between the Budget and the publication of our frontpage story last week. After intense editorial discussion, it was agreed that the line where Fianna Fáil Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly told the Fine Gael Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe that he was ‘insane’ for cutting the Health budget was the top one.

We were telling you, our readers, what went on in private as it became clear to Stephen Donnelly that the new sheriff at Public Expenditure was not going to be as pliable as his Fianna Fáil predecessor, Michael McGrath.

At one point, we revealed, Donnelly said to Donohoe: ‘What you are proposing is insane. You’re proposing that we stop progress on all of the health services, the cancer strategy, the maternity strategies, stroke, diabetes, genetics, trauma. It just goes on and on and on.

‘You understand we’re going to have to bring in hiring freezes across the entire health service now,’ he said.

Donnelly was most concerned for those who would suffer because of cuts to the Health budget.

‘Do you understand first of all the implications of your position for patients?’ he asked.

Then we came to a longer-term ramification of this inter-Coalition feud. ‘Secondly, do you understand that you are proposing to do this in an election year? Yeah, this is just insane.’

STANDING pitchside of an under-nines football match last Sunday morning, the texts and calls started coming from Coalition politicians and officials (those not involved in helping us on the story). They all saw the significance of this very damaging fissure becoming public through the Irish Mail on Sunday.

This was two of the most senior members of their respective main parties in the historic Coalition falling out spectacularly. Donohoe’s stepping aside from the leadership race in 2017 allowed Taoiseach Leo Varadkar a far easier ascendancy and he has remained the Fine Gael leader’s key ally.

Donnelly, despite some of the criticism he receives from backbenchers and ministers, is a vitally important ally of Tánaiste Micheál Martin. Young, articulate and progressive, Donnelly joined Fianna Fáil from the Social Democrats (also in 2017) with a deal in his back pocket that he would join Cabinet if Fianna Fáil reached power. Martin has stuck by him, his policies and his ideological bent, reappointing him as Minister for Health in the reshuffle last Christmas.

Neither Donnelly or Donohoe will be asked by their respective leaders to back down on this one.

Last week, after I was stopped by yet more politicians in the corridor leading from the main Leinster House staircase to my office – all anxious to talk about the row – I went back to my desk drawer to go through my notes of the briefings that led to this conflict.

My notes showed one Cabinet minister explaining what they thought Paschal Donohoe was doing when he decided, against the precedents of recent years, to cut funding to Health rather than increasing it.

The Cabinet source said: ‘I think it’s ideological. It’s classic centreright versus centre-left. Fianna Fail believes it is centre-left, Fine Gael believes it is centre-right.’

The source continued: ‘Fianna Fáil says we’re in the bottom third of Western European countries in terms of health spending, we need to increase health spending. Can we always get better at running the health service? Of course we can. So let’s go, but we need a lot more health infrastructure.

‘Fine Gael’s view – the centreright view of the world – is that we need to bring in tax breaks for hard-working people and hardpressed businesses. And that obviously puts a stress on funding for public services.’

As this clash between close allies of their respective leaders came to its febrile climax in the postBudget fall out, and as opposition parties gleefully leapt on the split, there were no threats of resignation from Donnelly or Donohoe.

Neither felt that their bosses weren’t supportive of them.

It can then be concluded that Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin share these world views. Some people (non-Fianna Fáil and nonFine Gael people) suggested after the coalition of the old Civil War partners in 2020 that a unification was imminent. That will never happen. The parties remain distinct in personnel and culture.

They remain distinct electorally too. What the ideological fissures exposed by this Budget disagreement over health funding (another Fianna Fáil department, housing, was also overlooked for a raise) palpably displayed is that the two parties are a million miles away from an electoral pact.

THERE is a lot of talk about Fianna Fáil keeping Sinn Féin as an option for a coalition partner. This option has an incredible amount of stress testing ahead of it. There would be, I’m assured, resignations from the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party if it came to pass. Any TD with a relative in an Garda Síochána or the Defence Forces is going to find it tough to explain it at home.

The influence of this pressure has been underestimated when speaking of this Fianna Fáil/Sinn Féin dream ticket.

The narrative of the unstoppable Sinn Féin advance is flawed. The party has hit a ceiling in the opinion polls of, at the very maximum, 35%. Even at 43% in a modern Irish general election a party would struggle to get an overall majority. The last one achieved here, nearly a half-century before the time of the next election, was by Fianna Fáil under Jack Lynch in 1977. The party got 46.2%.

Sinn Féin is different from Fianna Fáil too, in many respects. Because of its extreme left-wing populism and its former political adherence to terrorism, there will be little preference voting for Sinn Féin down the ballot paper from centreleaning voters.

Historically, however, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael voters do give preference votes to the other party. By the next election, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will have co-operated – through both Confidence and Supply and coalition – for almost nine years.

Recent polls show that Micheál Martin is very popular with Fine Gael voters. The polls also show that where Sinn Féin has a ceiling, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have a basement. Roughly polls show that the two parties will not fall much below 19% each in a general election, for a total of 38%.

So these ideological splits are part of a nuanced attempt to portray the parties as separate yet associated. It will be a viciously difficult trick to pull off. On the ground in constituencies, the grand strategies will play out in ways that can’t be predicted. Each Coalition candidate – Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael – will try to stay ahead of the other party, as they would have before on same party tickets. All the intricacies of personality, geography and the single transferable vote will come into play.

Where this may help boost a Coalition re-election, there is an obvious problem too. Sinn Féin is going to pick up seats, lots of them – at least 10 in Dublin alone. Whereas some Coalition candidates around the country will be hoping the two parties will help one another, in many cases Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael candidates will compete rather than dovetail, while Sinn Féin triumphs. Thus the overall Coalition complement will be reduced.

Proportional representation has its critics, but its great service to our nation is that it reduces the possibility of extreme ideologies monopolising power. Efforts by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil ministers to give pre-eminence to their ideologies will not be facilitated by the electorate. Nor will Sinn Féin’s ideology – extreme and sometimes bizarre, as evidenced by its stance on Israel last week – get free rein.

The election result in Poland last Sunday, when the electorate threw out a populist government, shows elections always matter. Ideological tensions, candidate profiles and above all a three-week election campaign will matter here, and a vote will decide our future.