ANALYSIS:GREEN PARTY leader John Gormley made another attempt yesterday evening to promote his plan for a political consensus with his letter to Opposition leaders asking them to meet to discuss the problems facing the country.
One of the problems with Gormley’s initiative is that it comes from the junior Coalition party and is clearly not sponsored by the Government. The speed with which Taoiseach Brian Cowen damned the idea with faint praise appeared to put paid to any prospect it might have had of making a serious impact on the political agenda.
The Opposition parties were equally wary of Gormley’s attempt to build consensus, but they were reluctant to dismiss it out of hand for fear of appearing to be more concerned with narrow political advantage than the national interest.
Gormley’s refusal to throw in the towel on the matter may force the other party leaders to agree to a meeting to discuss the crisis in the public finances, but the chances of that translating into a common approach to the problem is remote.
It is simply too late in the lifetime of the current Government to get the Opposition on board for what is going to be one of the toughest budgets in the history of the State. The time to try and build a consensus was two years ago in the autumn of 2008, when the crisis in the public finances began to manifest itself.
The Government’s stop-go approach to facing up to the scale of the problem has been one of the problems and it is now far too late to involve the Opposition parties, who naturally don’t wish to be involved in sharing the blame for what are essentially Fianna Fáil mistakes.
For all that, the Greens are right to try and focus minds on the nature and scale of the problem. Developing a coherent national response to the impending threat to our sovereignty is the challenge facing our current crop of politicians, and history will judge them all harshly if they do not rise to the occasion.
Gormley’s initiative has at least prompted some interesting reactions. Fine Gael frontbench spokesman Leo Varadkar has come up with the radical proposal that budget adjustments should be frontloaded in December instead of being spread equally over four years. That would involve enormous pain for almost everybody in society, but such shock therapy has worked in other countries with similar problems.
Of course it could be seen as a cynical attempt to encourage Fianna Fáil to commit political suicide, but at least Varadkar is not shirking the fact that, regardless of who caused our problems, enormous sacrifices will be required to get the country out of the mess.
By contrast Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore yesterday ruled out raising income tax rates or cutting welfare or child benefit. He even ruled out a property tax as part of the solution, while claiming he was committed to reducing the budget deficit to 3 per cent of GDP by 2014.
That just confirms the Taoiseach’s view that it is pointless engaging in real dialogue with all of the Opposition parties as they have no intention of being sucked in to a consensus. It justifies Cowen in his Fianna Fáil instincts to put his head down, draft the budget and a four-year plan and ram it through the Dáil as long as his majority holds.
The problem is that the continuation of party politics as normal means the public may not be fully alerted to the scale of the threat to national independence until it is too late.
The imposition by the European Commission of the requirement to devise a four-year plan is an opportunity for all our political parties to put posturing aside and decide what they really stand for. Sinn Féin’s finance spokesman Arthur Morgan has already been briefed by the Department of Finance about the situation and Michael Noonan of Fine Gael and Joan Burton of the Labour Party will have their briefings in the coming days.
Our political system might grow up if the Government and all the Opposition parties were to publish their four-year plans in November and have them tested through the widest possible scrutiny and criticism in an election campaign.
Fine Gael spokesman on public expenditure, Brian Hayes, struck a realistic note on Sunday night by suggesting it might be necessary to form a national government after such an election. Consensus is required on the public finances but the only prospect of it happening is after and not before the people go to the polls.
Is it possible that the Greens have come to that conclusion and their call for consensus is actually the beginning of an exit strategy?