THE war of words that signals the onset of a general election campaign is well under way. Over the summer months there has been a series of announcements from political parties about those whom they see as potential coalition partners, and those with whom they may not do business when the election is over.
So far, the focus has been on the three supposedly mainstream political parties: Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Labour. Fine Gael has sought to characterise the electoral choice as being between a government led by itself and a coalition that would involve Sinn Fein in government for the first time in the southern state. All three of the mainstream parties are setting up Sinn Fein as a bogeyman who should be kept out of government.
There is an irony in this, given that all these parties were to some degree involved in championing the peace process, which involved persuading parties north of the border to form and participate in shared-government structures with the political wing of the IRA.
Of course, in the past week, Gerry Adams’s infamous remark about the IRA — “They haven’t gone away you know” — has come back to haunt him. It will be interesting to see whether the revelation that IRA figures might have been involved in murders north of the border will now harden the rhetoric about excluding Sinn Fein from government in the south.
Excluding coalition options before an election has been a foolish policy. Our recent electoral experience has featured high-profile denunciations of parties and then the embarrassing spectacle, post-election, of cobbling together a coalition with the party we’d earlier condemned.
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Fianna Fail attacked Labour ferociously before the election of 1992, only to form a coalition with it afterwards. John Bruton ruled out the Workers’ party at the same time, and went into government with it in 1994. Charles Haughey and Fianna Fail resisted bringing the Progressive Democrats into power, only to include the party when numbers were needed to form an administration. Few would have imagined a Fianna Fail-Green coalition prior to 2007, but it happened despite negative rhetoric on both sides.
It is a great surprise to me that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are ruling out potential coalition options at this stage. It is likely that either or both will have to eat their words after the election.
The level of fragmentation in the political system is far greater than ever before. For example, the Labour party will be part of a broad left-wing grouping in the next Dail, albeit with much reduced numbers. Since the destruction of Fianna Fail in 2011, a simple scenario of the party against the rest has been replaced by a multi-bloc party system, including independents. This has become even more complex with the recent arrival of Renua and the Social Democrats.
Despite its deep decline in support, a smaller Labour party may be in a position to help form a coalition government of the broad left including anti-austerity campaigners, independents, Greens and Sinn Fein. It may be that forming a government with a much larger Sinn Fein will be too much to stomach for Joan Burton’s party.
Fianna Fail’s Michael McGrath has, sensibly, opened up the prospect that Fianna Fail may be willing to take part in a coalition government in which it is the minority partner. This will involve eating quite a lot of humble pie given that the party has never been in that position before. Such a policy stance would facilitate the party forming a coalition with Fine Gael. The party’s strategists see no prospect of stopping Fine Gael from being the largest party after the general election, even though Fianna Fail emerged as the biggest party from the local elections of 2014.
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The fact that people within Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are now prepared to consider doing business with each other, post-election, means that efforts to demonise each other during the campaign itself are likely to fall on deaf ears as far as the electorate is concerned. It should be noted that the process of rapprochement between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael began in earnest when my late brother Brian Lenihan was invited to give the keynote speech at the annual Michael Collins commemoration at Beal na mBlath in 2010. The organisers of this Fine Gael-dominated event recognised that many of the divisions created by the Irish Civil War are now irrelevant to the politics of the 21st century.
Ireland stands on the edge of a potential economic recovery, but one that could be jeopardised by governmental instability at a national level. The need for stability to continue the recovery is the most significant justification for a coalition of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.
We have seen vividly in Greece the manner in which an economic crisis can destroy people’s livelihoods. The Syriza party replicated the left-wing claims of François Hollande in France and of the former Labour leader Eamon Gilmore in Ireland. All three made defiant promises that they would somehow defy the logic of the international downturn and manage austerity and reform in a different way to the governments that they opposed. All of their promises came to nothing, crashing in the face of the cruel realities of the global downturn.
Left-wing parties all over Europe have struggled to find an alternative to the hard economic adjustments that have to be made in office. Labour in Ireland could yet become the biggest electoral casualty of all because of its reckless promises in early 2011, when Gilmore said he would do it his way rather than Frankfurt’s way. His party in office has played it exactly Angela Merkel’s way, and will pay the price.
With the exception of Renua, all of the new parties and splinter groups crowding the political stage are of the left. There is very little in common between them. The anti-austerity crowd dislikes Sinn Fein over its flip-flopping on water charges, while Labour resents Sinn Fein for replacing it as the centre-ground, left-wing party. The Greens and the Social Democrats have plenty of differences with all of the above.
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Because of this, it will be down to the parties of the centre and centre right to form a cohesive government that continues with the economic recovery. A coalition of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail would insulate the prospects of economic recovery from political instability, but also allow for the deep-seated restructuring of the Irish state which has been neglected by the current government because of the Labour party’s tendency to shield the public sector from serious change.
The mainstream parties need to be honest with the electorate and spell out where they stand on the many options in terms of government following the election. The parties that are committed to continued economic recovery should not use phoney rhetoric, given that the public have already become too cynical about the political process in Ireland.
Conor Lenihan is a former junior minister and Fianna Fail TD;
Kevin Myers is away