Fine Gael may have suffered from a loss of nerve, but the party is far fromfinished, argues John Bruton, who accuses Fintan O'Toole ofpolitically correct, undergraduate, adolescent dreaming
Fintan O'Toole must not have given much time to arithmetic at school. Perhaps he was so fascinated with words that he did not have the patience for figures. In yesterday's paper he wrote: "Fine Gael, in other words, is finished. For the foreseeable future the party will not be what it has been for the past 70 years: the core around which any alternative government can be organised."
Fine Gael got more than twice as many votes in the election as Fintan O'Toole's beloved Labour Party. It got an even larger multiple of the votes obtained by Sinn Féin, the Greens and the Progressive Democrats.
It may have escaped Fintan O'Toole's attention, but by going it alone Ruairí Quinn almost lost his seat in Dublin South East. Michael Noonan, on the other hand, held his seat well and came close enough to winning an extra Fine Gael seat in East Limerick.
If Fintan O'Toole wants to dance on Fine Gael's grave, he should go and find another ballroom. His pretty footwork might be appreciated in theatrical circles, but it has no place in serious political commentary where numbers of actual votes count more than adolescent dreaming.
Perhaps Fintan is reverting to the same undergraduate naivety of another ex-student leftie, Eamon Gilmore, who went so far on Saturday as to envisage a new coalition involving Labour, the Greens, Sinn Féin, Joe Higgins and Tony Gregory.
Such a combination would bring Ireland back to the Stone Age, economically speaking. The people would not trust such an alliance with their money. The Irish people are not, and never will be, mad enough to elect it. Even the thought of it would send them flocking back to Fine Gael. If that is the way the Labour Party, encouraged by Fintan O'Toole, decides to go, it will be heading for oblivion.
The truth is that, now more than ever, the Labour Party needs Fine Gael if it is to get back into government.
A Labour Party that contains people like Eamon Gilmore who can envisage an alliance including Sinn Féin (with its private army) is a Labour Party that no sensible person would want to elect either on its own or in Mr Gilmore's preferred combination of class warriors and subversives.
Fintan O'Toole portentously announces in his article that "a left-right divide is opening up". This is reminiscent of the sort of nonsense we heard from the Labour Party in the 1960s, when we were told that "the Seventies will be socialist". The Irish people did not buy it then, even though socialism was relatively popular in Europe in the 1960s.
They are certainly not going to buy it now, when socialism is discredited all over Europe.
For Fintan O'Toole and his friends, the unpalatable fact is that their cannibalistic approach to Fine Gael - and no Fine Gaeler is ever good enough for Fintan - has facilitated the return of a coalition that has done more than any other government to widen the gap between the better-off and the less well-off. And in objective Marxist terms, the Irish left is responsible for that.
Fine Gael has, of course, suffered recently from a loss of nerve. It has now received the shock it needs to return it to reality. If Fine Gael has the guts to stop taking advice from its enemies, consults its own core beliefs and acts on them, it will succeed. Fine Gael represents by far the best - and probably in truth the only - hope to oust a Fianna Fáil-led government.
The core and distinctive beliefs around which Fine Gael can now unite represent a far more relevant, and more modern, project for Ireland than anything that emerges from the left-republican-green alliance envisaged by Eamon Gilmore and Fintan O'Toole.
Fine Gael's modern project can include such things as:
a distinctive approach to the national question which gives equal concern to unionist and nationalist beliefs.
a pro-competitive economic policy which tackles monopolistic practices in the law, health services and agriculture.
a rigid commitment to balanced budgets which protects pensions, unlike the Labour Party's approach, and which would guarantee the future of our children.
a social policy that, through tax credits, closes the widening gap between rich and poor.
a commitment to underpin, in so far as State actions can, the concept of family members giving time to, and taking responsibility for, one another.
Violence, drug-taking and suicide are all manifestations of a loss of the sense of responsibility to others which is the core of good family life. Irish people realise this, but the politically correct friends of Fintan O'Toole never will, because it does not suit their selectively non-judgmental agenda.
Fine Gael has more fight in it than Fintan O'Toole thinks. It occupies the centre ground in politics and is believed in for what it says. The next government, if it is not led by Fianna Fáil, will be led by Fine Gael, and no amount of innumerate wordsmithing by Fintan O'Toole will change that reality.
John Bruton is a former taoiseach and former leader of Fine Gael