FG hopes voters will use June to take a swipe at FF, writes Mark Hennessy, Political Correspondent
Patrick Street in Cork has been undergoing dogged, disruptive reconstruction over the last couple of years, leading many in the city to wonder if it will ever finish. By June, however, Cork Corporation promises that "Pana" will be back better and brighter than before.
Campaigning for local election votes yesterday, Enda Kenny could have felt a certain empathy with this famous thoroughfare. Equally, he too prays that come the long days of June, Fine Gael's fortunes, following the nightmare of May 2002, will have rebounded.
Running 740 candidates, Fine Gael is putting its best soft-focus side out for public view: "Irish society is changing, subtly but certainly. The 'selfishness' of the last 10 years is being replaced by a desire to belong, to feel part of a community," Mr Kenny declares in his party's local election manifesto.
Everything in Fine Gael's manifesto is aimed at mining this seam, if it exists: more help for struggling first-time buyers, State help to pay for local community workers to knit estates into a fabric of communities rather than simply being thousands of houses, better and more efficient local authorities.
Clearly, Mr Kenny faces a difficult task. Fine Gael, as has been said frequently, did extraordinarily well in the 1999 local elections: winning 32 per cent of the seats with just 28 per cent of the votes. In May 2002, it won 21 per cent in the general election. Local authority seats could tumble like nine-pins.
Yet Fine Gael insists that this will not happen. "We will hold onto our seats on borough and county councils and we will increase our seats on town councils," Mr Phil Hogan, Fine Gael's co-director of elections, confidently declares. However, both he and Mr Kenny know that they would do exceptionally well to take Fine Gael's national share of the vote to 25 per cent.
If they were to hold onto the 1999 seat tally as well, it would be a miracle akin to the Lord's loaves and fishes. In reality, Mr Kenny does not have to repeat 1999. What he has to do is convince his own people and voters at large that Fine Gael is off the critical list.
In particular, he has to convince Pat Rabbitte and the Labour Party.
Mr Rabbitte's call on voters this week to transfer "against the Government", rather than confining preferences to Fine Gael and the Greens, has fuelled fears that he still fears a Fine Gael implosion and that, therefore, he must continue to lay an each-way bet to ensure that he has options post-June.
The Fine Gael strategy, therefore, is hardly complicated - voters must use the upcoming local election, in particular, as a referendum on the Government's performance since May 2002. If people want Fianna Fáil out of power after the next general election, they must get into practice and vote against them now.
During the last general election, Fine Gael's campaign came quickly off the rails after some of its promises were greeted with little less than ridicule. Today, it is bidding to ensure that it does not make the same mistake twice. Fine Gael's costings on proposals, to be fair, have so far withstood Fianna Fáil's challenge, but it is early days yet.
In particular, Fine Gael is targetting those pushed out of the housing market since 1999 by a series of punter-friendly ideas, such as an SSIA-type scheme for those saving for deposits, and accelerated mortgage interest relief - even though the latter could simply further drive up house prices.
On crime, the party wants to tag offenders and keep them indoors at night at a cost to the State of €4,000-a-year, rather than an €80,000 jail bill, while civic wardens would act as "social caretakers" in high-risk neighbourhoods, monitoring activity and visiting old folk.
Like so many others before, Fine Gael promises to ensure that local authorities, telephone companies and all others who feel the need to uproot footpaths and roads work together, rather than digging up the same stretch of tarmac again and again.
In older times, previous generations of politicians promised to drain the Shannon.