Is it just auction politics?

IT HAS been a curiously normal week in Irish politics. Up north, politics without an Executive continues. There was much hype that a deal was at hand when Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and British prime minister Theresa May arrived in Belfast on Monday. This culminated with May saying there was a basis for an agreement at Stormont and that an Executive could be up and running very soon.

Yet the week ended with Irish officials saying a cooling-off period was advisable and that no imminent attempt to restart the talks was likely. It has been 13 months since the Executive collapsed over the renewable heat initiative scheme and Sinn Féin demanded that DUP leader Arlene Foster resign as First Minister. That is one hell of a cooling-off period.

The Executive apparently can’t be restored because of difficulties over same-sex marriage and an Irish language Act despite everyone, including the British government which relies on the DUP for its survival, assuming a deal was on the verge of being completed.

Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin accused Varadkar and May of naivety while irate Foreign Minister Simon Coveney accused his constituency rival of being unhelpful and not understanding what was going on.

IN FACT, not a lot of people understand what is going on. No one now seems to be bothered about renewable heat. Meanwhile, Brexit is looming and Northern Ireland is being run by civil servants. It is politics as normal where nothing is ever as it seems.

In Northern Ireland there are never any policy or ideological debates about health, education, transport or infrastructure. Rather it is all about culture and identity.

The result is the stultifying politics of normality based upon increasingly sectarian lines. Twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement the North is more politically polarised than ever and its citizens seem happy to vote that way. Here in the Republic we are back in the normality of the politics of promise where political parties compete on who can promise the most. Delivery is a different issue.

On Friday our Fine Gael-led Government published plans detailing how more than €116bn – €91bn of which is to come from taxpayers – will be spent on infrastructure over the next decade and beyond.

The plan is to build the ‘Ireland of tomorrow’ which will have one million extra citizens, 660,000 more people at work, with four new funds totalling €4bn for rural and urban growth, climate action and innovation. If the slogan is insipid, the plan is eerily familiar when it comes to its promises. There will be building of schools, houses, roads and hospitals to meet the needs of our growing population.

The Sligo setting was deliberately rural as that quintessential south Dublin politician, Minister for Transport Shane Ross, noted when he argued that it was not a Dublincentred plan, but one that was about delivering balanced regional development whereby everyone in the country would benefit.

At the same time his cabinet colleague, Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, and TD for Cavan-Monaghan, Heather Humphreys, was insisting the plan was not about ‘one for everybody in the audience’.

We have been here before. Take transport for instance. We have yet another announcement of a metro link. This one will connect Swords and Sandyford via Dublin Airport and is to be delivered in a decade at a cost of €3bn. The Dart will run to Drogheda and Maynooth. And there will be a light rail system for Cork. Since 1976 there have been six transport plans for Dublin including a Metro North, a Metro West and an underground Dart. Metro North was announced in 2001, 2005, 2010 and 2015. All that has been managed in that period is the Dart and two Luas lines.

AND this in a period of unparalleled prosperity for our country notwithstanding the recessions of the 1980s and the economic crash of 2008. In 2002, at the height of the boom, the plan was for the metro link to Dublin Airport to be in place by 2007. By the time of the crash, nothing had happened to make this a reality. That crash allowed Varadkar and Ross to state on Friday that this plan was about putting a lost decade behind us. The new decade will be one of expansion.

The big question is where will the expansion be. Electorally Fine Gael has a rural problem. In the 2016 general election it was fully wiped out in its rural heartland of Tipperary. It won 12 of 43 seats in Munster. It was equally as bad in Enda Kenny’s Connacht Ulster where they won eight of 28 seats. By contrast, Fianna Fáil’s recovery was based in Munster and the west where it outpolled its bitter rival.

There have been rumblings within Fine Gael that Project Ireland 2040 is far too urban in orientation and that the Varadkar, Paschal Donohoe, Simon Coveney axis at the heart of Government has no feel for rural Ireland. All three after all represent city constituencies. Yet they also know that a similar performance in rural Ireland in the looming general election will see them in opposition, no matter what the polls say.

That is why Rural Affairs Minister Michael Ring has been given €1bn for regeneration of towns and villages with a population of less than 10,000. How this will happen is yet another matter, particularly when the plan also says Dublin is Ireland’s globally competitive city of scale and continues to drive much of the country’s growth. That is a conundrum not easily fixed.

In 1977 Fianna Fáil introduced auction politics here with their election manifesto which promised all sorts of bounty. Des O’Malley described it as being designed to give the country a lift. They won the election in a landslide. That was the last single-party government Ireland has seen.

Forty years on we have a minority government promising a more extravagant bevy of goods without any clear idea of how to do it. It is politics as it ever was. In the North politics is about identity. In the Republic it is about buying the electorate. Gary Murphy is Professor of Politics at Dublin City University