Politicians are favouring the comfort of opposition to the cut and thrust of government. What an insult to the legacy of 1916

IT’S a sorry state of affairs – perhaps even a desperate state of affairs – when parties want to be in opposition rather than government. Since the extraordinary result that emerged over the weekend we have been left wondering what our politicians are actually doing with the result we gave them.

From Fianna Fáil’s Damascene conversion to parliamentary reform last Monday, when it announced that Dáil reform had to take place before the formation of a government, to Fine Gael’s strange refusal to attach any blame for its woeful election performance to Enda Kenny, we have witnessed a bizarre week with no-one in any hurry to form a government.

While the people gave their resounding verdict on the incumbent Fine Gael-Labour Government, they remained essentially silent on government formation. The RTÉ exit poll showed that just 9% of voters viewed government stability as the most important issue when casting their ballot.

Yet now that those votes have been counted we should expect, and indeed demand, that the electorate grow increasingly impatient the longer we go without some sort of government being formed.

While there has been much discussion about how politicians don’t want an early election the same can equally be said for the voters.

One clue to this lies in the voter turnout of 65.1%, down over four percentage points from 2011. For all who care about this country, in the centenary of the Rising, that is dispiriting. Can we really be satisfied that over a third of citizens failed to cast a vote to decide the future make-up of their Dáil?

Why the voluntarily disenfranchised refuse to vote is something that all political parties, including those on the left, need to address. There is a large streak of cynicism among the general public regarding those who seek public office. The culpability lies at both ends.

THIS is neatly encapsulated by the fact that much of the posturing this week from the political parties about government formation has been to do with the good of their individual parties as we go forward over the next month, rather than the good of the country. The approach adopted by Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and indeed Sinn Féin has been in essence about firewalling themselves against suggestions that they are not acting in the national interest.

The language of stability advanced by both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil couches an innate instinct for selfpreservation that infuses all politicians. Talk of respecting each TD’s mandate and how everyone has a role to play in the formation of the next government, is showboating of the highest order. The reality is that all are seeking maximum political leverage. This includes those on the left who have decided that government, or indeed power in any form, is not for them such is their ideological purity. Those who voted for them are destined to wait and wait and wait.

Even those who claim to want power, such as Sinn Féin, will negotiate only on the proviso that they can get their entire manifesto enacted or at least are the largest party in government. Never mind that they only received 13.8% of the vote, down from 15.2% in the 2014 local elections: they must be severely disappointed with their result, but as usual they are hiding it well and have remained curiously immune from media scrutiny.

There has been an atomisation of the left-wing vote to such an extent that it is now difficult to see a leftwing party or grouping, or indeed a party like the Social Democrats, ever entering government again with either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil. After all, who would want to put up with the ridiculous accusations of treachery the Labour Party had to face throughout the last Dáil and that were repeated by newly elected TD Bríd Smith of the AAA/ PBP in an extraordinary interview on Morning Ireland this week, the main tenet of which was that there should be lots more strikes. That will certainly help the country’s international reputation.

LABOUR never recovered from its overpromises in the 2011 election and paid the severest price of all last Friday with the virtual wipeout of the party. Its electoral fate is a salutary lesson for those on the left. Go into office during an era of austerity and find yourself in electoral ruin when you come out, or don’t go into office at all and piously rant from the sidelines about how things would be better with the left in power.

Those who vote for left-wing parties and independents had better realise sooner rather than later that the nirvana of the government they would wish to see is as far away as ever, notwithstanding the fact that barely half the electorate voted for the two large parties. The lessons of that are for them to draw.

There has been much talk of Fianna Fáil being wary of entering government on the grounds that this will give Sinn Féin a free rein as the largest opposition party. And certainly there can be no doubt but that being in government is bad for one’s political health. Fianna Fáil’s collapse in 2011 was mirrored by Labour’s last week. Despite the robust health of the economy, the electorate rejected its government last week for not doing enough for it.

Yet a significant proportion of the electorate is convinced that their individual TDs can do much for them from the rarefied air of Leinster House. The parish pump is alive and well as seen by the election of Michael and Danny Healy-Rae, Michael Lowry, Mattie McGrath, Denis Naughten, Noel Grealish and a slew of other independents. Most of these are defectors from the two main parties and their reward was to receive over 17% of the vote. These independents will be desperately praying that the grand coalition of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil never sees the light of day because if it does, the independent voice will become all but redundant for the Dáil’s duration.

The likelihood of the grand coalition remains remote at this stage. Partisans from both parties certainly didn’t vote for it. Data from the RTÉ exit poll shows just 13% of voters viewed this as their preferred option. Only 15% of Fine Gael voters and 20% of Fianna Fáil voters wanted it when they voted a week ago, and it’s probably less now given Fianna Fáil’s resurgence and Fine Gael’s decimation.

FIANNA Fáil’s attitude against coalition hardened as the week progressed and it is making determined efforts to ensure that Micheál Martin attains more votes than Enda Kenny in the vote for Taoiseach next Thursday. Such a result would surely finish Kenny off, but even if he does receive the most votes and ends up as taoiseach, it certainly won’t be for any significant length of time.

Leo Varadkar on Friday declared that for Fine Gael the election was a defeat but it wasn’t a rout. Yet to lose 26 seats and over 10% of the vote since the glory days of the 2011 election, and in a recovering economy at that, must surely feel like a rout to Varadkar and his fellow young Turks both within and outside the Fine Gael parliamentary party. Someone among them must surely spell this out to the Taoiseach. Someone in Sinn Féin should do the same to Gerry Adams given its failure to make more significant inroads on the back of the government’s unpopularity.

Over the next few weeks the government formation game will play out and some form of government will emerge. If it is not a Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil coalition, we are likely to be left with a weak minority government and an inchoate Dáil, perhaps the worst of all worlds.

The brave new dawn of parliamentary reform, seemingly beloved of Fianna Fáil, is likely to be crushed before it begins as the only question that will dominate the corridors of Leinster House in that scenario is when will the government fall.

That speaks to a political system barely fit for purpose, since being in opposition rather than government is the preferred option of our political class. A hundred years on from the Easter Rising, that is no way for the State to be governed.