Has Fine Gael lost its soul?

The blueprint for Irish Water typif ied FG’s right-of-centre, free market philosophy. The party’s hopeless U-turn on the water utilty betrayed those very principles. So what does the party of probity stand for any more? And can it save itself from politic

TRADITION has it that a committee, asked to design a horse, will inevitably come up with a camel. If the evidence of this week is anything to go by, a coalition government in similar circumstances would come up with a two-headed, legless camel.

Irish Water, as originally envisaged, was to be a lean, mean commercially viable public utility company – completely independent of the Government and with the wherewithal to provide this country with a fit-for-purpose, 21st century public water service.

Instead, we now have a superquango that remains emblematic of all that is worst about our traditional public sector – over-staffed, featherbedded and institutionally inefficient – and that now will be forever dependent on Government subvention for survival.

In a bid to save its own neck, the Coalition has slashed domestic water rates to a point where they will bring in at most €140m a year – a far cry from the €550m we are told is needed for infrastructural investment in the water system.

Meanwhile, pious talk of water conservation – the other original objective of Irish Water – has been rendered meaningless, as has the €500m investment in water meters, by the decision to cap charges until at least 2019.

But why should we be surprised? Time after time, this Government has sacrificed principle on the altar of political expediency. More to the point, Fine Gael has sacrificed core values on the altar of its own marriage of convenience with the Labour Party.

Nothing could have been more in keeping with traditional Fine Gael, right-of-centre, free market philosophy than the original blueprint for Irish Water; nothing could be further from it than the hopeless compromise we ended up with this week.

Meanwhile, a Fine Gael-led government has not only legislated for abortion in certain limited circumstances but is now cheerleading the cause of gay marriage – two measures that, rightly or wrongly, would be utter anathema to many of their core voters.

Such, it could be argued, is the nature of politics: the ultimate art of compromise. But Fine Gael has other problems right now, not least the aura of cronyism and stroke politics that increasingly surrounds this beleaguered Government.

Only this weekend, it emerged that Sports Minister Michael Ring oversaw a €200,000 grant to his home town soccer club, the second in two years and the sort of apparent stroke politics that we had always associated not with Fine Gael but with Fianna Fáil.

Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to see what – or whom – Fine Gael stands for any more. By tradition, it was the voice of constitutional nationalism; the party of probity in public life; and the staunch defender of the free market and of Catholic family values.

ONE by one, all those unique points of difference have been eroded. Now that Sinn Féin has embraced parliamentary democracy, there is no need for the sort of implacable opposition to violence for political ends that Garret FitzGerald so bravely represented.

Meanwhile, whatever legitimate claim Fine Gael ever had to be a party of probity – the polar opposite, in other words, to the men in mohair suits who ran Fianna Fáil – has been long since blown out of the water.

We need look no further than the slew of cronies and party loyalists they have appointed to State boards by this Government or the shameless parish pump politics displayed by James Reilly in carving up the grants for primary care centres. As for free-market economics, Labour has seen off what were at best only ever half-hearted efforts to reform the public service while almost everything this Government has done on the so-called ‘moral agenda’ has been at odds with Church teaching.

In fairness, Fianna Fáil is in a not dissimilar predicament – hopelessly compromised by its own past and therefore trumped by the hard left when it comes to opposing austerity and trumped nowadays too by Sinn Féin when it comes to playing the green card.

The result, however, is a vacuum at the heart of Irish political life. For the first time since the foundation of the State, the political agenda is no longer being driven from the centre; increasingly, indeed, it is the left that is in the driving seat.

In Cabinet, Labour has proven much more adept and focused in pursuing its own policies; meanwhile, in the Dáil and increasingly on the streets, a raggle-taggle army of the extreme left is flexing its muscles to a terrifying degree.

And with considerable success… For all the condemnation of Paul Murphy and his role in the Jobstown attack on Joan Burton last weekend, he will be perceived by many as the David who saw off the Goliath of water charges.

Not only will his outrageous behaviour not cost him votes; it will garner him support. And of one thing we can be certain: there will be even more representatives of the extreme left in the next Dáil than there are right now. Of course, this is not a uniquely Irish problem. In the maw of five years of unprecedented austerity, right across Europe voters have been lurching increasingly towards extremes. In Britain, David Cameron finds himself in a remarkably similar situation to Enda Kenny. Hopelessly compromised by an uneasy coalition with a left-leaning partner, he has watched helplessly as UKIP has stolen both his thunder and now, increasingly, his parliamentary support.

There is, however, one stark difference that makes the Irish situation unique: we have a growing militant army of the left but as yet no equivalent force, let alone a general to lead them, on the right.

INDEED, apart from Fine Gael’s own brief and disastrous flirtation with fascism in the 1930s, the extreme right has never been a force to be reckoned with in this country – largely because Irish politics was traditionally so dominated by the centre. We hear vague rumblings from Lucinda Creighton; but the message is as confused as it is uncertain. Ms Creighton is herself to the right of centre on social and moral issues but appears less so on the economic front. It is, for example, hard to see a former PD supporter voting for her.

This Government will probably limp on for the time being; this week’s cave-in on water charges will ensure that. Both Fine Gael and Labour will pin their hopes on one more giveaway Budget.

But the reality is that we are already in general election countdown. Labour, no matter what, faces annihilation. Fianna Fáil remains, to all intents and purposes, a spent force. Realistically, only Fine Gael can hope to form a new government.

The political landscape, however, has been transformed: the hard left is on the ascendant, the centre has been atomised and a gaping hole remains on the right.

I for one do not for a minute believe that this reflects the true mood of the electorate. By our very nature, we prefer compromise to conflict; that is why the centre, in the form of a Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael hegemony, held sway for so long.

That, however, is no longer the case. If we are not careful, the fulcrum of Irish politics will shift even further to the left after the next election. And history, unfortunately, has shown that wherever the hard left is on the rise, sooner or later the right will be too.

That sort of ugly polarisation is, like the disastrous compromise on Irish Water, the last thing we want. Fine Gael’s challenge, over the next 18 months, is to rediscover its centrist tradition – and to reclaim it.