Groundhog Day. Seven weeks on from the election. Another Thursday, another fruitless vote for Taoiseach. And the weary sense of déjà vu, of going through the motions, and of the ship of State drifting rudderless (although, of course, we do have an "acting" Government). The patience of the public at what it sees as political obfuscation is wearing thin.
But there is some point to this rigmarole, apparently. Exhaustively, and exhaustingly, eliminating alternatives, explicitly or by nod and wink, our political class is whittling down the options – bit by bit all we will be left with – perhaps indeed, are left with – after yesterday's shadow boxing is the choice of minority Fine Gael government or a general election, God forbid!
There’s still some way to go, but two important truths have now sunk in: a)– Micheál Martin will not be taoiseach, and now accepts he will not be taoiseach, for the time being; and b) – the enduring myth that minority government is inherently, inevitably unstable, has been laid by a small bit of research. All our politicians needed to do was look around them to observe that a quarter of western democracies, most of them pretty stable, are governed by minority governments without recourse to regular general elections.
Denmark’s Venstre party governs with a mere 20 per cent of the parliament seats, propped up from the opposition benches by the far-right Danish People’s Party. Even a sharp ideological divide is clearly not an impediment to getting business done.
Yet our reluctant partners in Ireland have no such gulf between them – in reality it is almost certainly the case that there are wider differences on many policy issues within the relatively broad churches of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil than between the two parties. Policy differences are by no means an insuperable barrier or beyond the wit of the old hands in both parties now involved in discussions. If there is the will.
Both parties also face internal challenges to empower their own backbenchers, all too often relegated to what they see as voting fodder by their leaderships. Such reform is as as crucial as the broader Dáil reform both say they are seeking, and which Micheál Martin again reemphasised yesterday. A new regime of genuine “collective decision making”, within and between parties, will have to be fashioned in tandem with the policy discussions that are now to resume.
To blame the incoherence and prevarication of Independents, and their mass abstentions, or their shameless covert plugging of constituency projects, for the current impasse is all too easy but wrong. As the Taoiseach acknowledged yesterday, it is quite reasonable not to buy a pig in a poke, not to back the formation of a particular government without knowing its programme. In the end the ball remains firmly in the court of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.