As Bertie Ahern allegedly ceases to be a politician and becomes instead the architect of the "triumph of the right" and Fine Gael is told to find a new identity, maybe we should re-examine what is left and right. Hasn't the difference between left and right often enough been mythic, and dependent on one's ability to surround the long-term intent of one's policies with pieties, regardless of their efficacy, and then call them "left".
One person summons up this witlessness to perfection: Joe Stalin. who was hailed across Europe as "left-wing" and "progressive" when he was simply an Asian tyrant who appropriated the correct-sounding language.
More recently, a desire to impose taxes for social purposes has been identified as "left-wing". So, clearly, a government which kept personal and corporate taxes high, which legally restricted profit-taking among major corporations, which subsidised job-creation programmes for the poor, and which expanded the state-controlled sector of the economy had to be left-wing. Yet these were the policies of the Third Reich in the 1930s; and every time you hear of a Nazi Stuka dive-bomber plummeting onto Warsaw, you can marvel at the brilliance of the state-owned Junkers aircraft factory where it was designed and made.
Flabby consensus
Perhaps, the real issue is not actual policy so much as words. It has become fashionable recently for any popular groundswell against the flabby and social democratic consensus of the EU to be demonised by the Strasbourg élites as "right-wing", which in their banal world is the synonym for "bad". Thus a Dutch homosexual who believed in free trade was lumped in the same right-wing bracket as a French politician who wants to restore subsidies and tariffs to protect French industry.
So what have they in common? Both wanted to end third-world immigration to their countries, because both saw their own indigenous culture being threatened by outside influences. A right-wing position surely - until you remember that most anti-colonial movements are predicated on the same desire to preserve indigenous cultures from foreign subversion or subjugation.
Outside commentators resorted to EU-blather and called both men xenophobes, though Pim Fortuyn's deputy leader was a black man. Fortuyn, like Le Pen, thought his country could not take any more immigrants. Is it so very wrong to say that, with much more mass immigration of people with different loyalties, France will no longer be France, nor Holland Holland? Put it another way. If very large numbers of English people began to populate the Connemara Gaeltacht, and locals began to leave because they found such neighbours uncongenial, would resistance to this displacement be called left-wing or right-wing? And if the people who were moving into Connemara were not English but Pakistani, how would similar resistance be termed? Right or left? Simply, the terms are meaningless.
Helping the poor
What is the Green movement? Does it not seek a vanished, purer past? So how right-wing can you get? And surely, is not helping the poor a mark of the left? But the man who has done most for the poor in the history of this State is Charlie McCreevy. And if he has taught us anything, it is that well-meaning but unsound economic policies do not help those they are directed at, but actually make their position worse.
So what is better for the poor: low-taxation, "right-wing" economic policies based on utilitarianism which make the poor richer, even while they make the rich even richer still? Or "left-wing", high-taxation ones which actually repress growth and limit the potential of the poor to escape the poverty trap, and all within the benignities of ideological egalitarianism? Since no one is in favour of the workhouse, floggings around the fleet or slave-galleys any more, the term "left" is largely one of self-gratification about the purity of one's motives, as the paradox of health services might suggest. The left increasingly want a vast health service, free at the point of supply. Such ubiquitous health-care requires huge numbers of doctors to run it, and doctors are an expensive luxury. Very well, says the left: limit doctors' incomes.
Excellent idea; and then watch our doctors flee to other, more prosperous countries: Canada, the US, Australia. Waving a sad farewell to our departing graduates, we then invite immigrants to take their places, introducing a medical caste for which English is a second language, and Ireland perhaps only a third loyalty, Islam and their country of origin being the first two. (In Britain, one third of all doctors are immigrants.)
Third world recruits
Worse, by recruiting our doctors from third world countries, we'll be depriving the neediest peoples in the world of those vital medical personnel, whom we'll be bribing to come and treat our neuroses and our hypochondrias, free of charge at point of service. This is actually what we mean by a health service, since most GP work consists of distributing placebos to cranks, or treating patients who will get better anyway, regardless of what the doctor does.
As economically the most successful Taoiseach and Minister for Finance in the history of the State knuckle down to government, their next challenge will be to reject attempts to throw money into the black hole called a free, universal health service.
As the experience of every country in the world tells us, it won't increase life expectancy, but once in place, it will be almost impossible to dismantle. Like anything else, health policy shouldn't be based on its perceived left-right position on an ideological spectrum, but on two questions: Can it work? It is worth it?