ANALYSIS:There must be serious doubts about how a Government that has taken such a drubbing can continue to govern, writes STEPHEN COLLINS.
FIANNA FÁIL has suffered the worst defeat in its history, and Irish politics will never be the same again. How a Government that has taken such a drubbing can continue to govern and take the decisions necessary to restore the economy to health is now the critical issue facing the political system.
The decision of Fine Gael to table a motion of no confidence in the Government was the obvious move, given its historic breakthrough as the biggest party in the country. More importantly, it is an attempt to focus minds on the profound implications of the election results.
Probably the most striking symbol of the reversal suffered by Fianna Fáil was the fate of Maurice Ahern, brother of the former Taoiseach, who was beaten into a humiliating fifth place in the Dublin Central byelection with just 12 per cent of the first preference vote.
Just two years after Bertie Ahern led Fianna Fáil to an amazing three-in-a-row general election victory, his inability to deliver even a modestly respectable vote for his brother showed how the mighty have fallen. To rub salt into the wound, Maurice Ahern lost his city council seat to party colleague Mary Fitzpatrick, who had been so cruelly stitched up by the Ahern machine two years ago.
What the scale of Ahern’s defeat illustrated more clearly than anything else is that Fianna Fáil is being held responsible by the electorate for the nature of the economic disaster being suffered by the country. Everybody knows there is an international recession, but the “crony capitalist” connections with builders and certain bankers, symbolised by the Galway tent, have provoked a fierce backlash against the party following the bursting of the property bubble.
Brian Cowen and his ministerial colleagues, including the two Green Ministers, are now suffering for the sins of the Ahern era. Unfair as that may be, Cowen cannot avoid accepting a share of responsibility for what went wrong. During his period as minister for finance, he failed to act to stop the bubble getting bigger and, in his first six months as Taoiseach, he was consistently behind the curve in responding to events.
Paradoxically, the Government is now broadly on the right track, having got to grips with the scale of the economic disaster that has derailed the public finances. The problem is that the Fianna Fáil-Green Party coalition has no mandate for the kind of decisions that were required, and will continue to be required, to get the public finances in order.
Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey, with characteristic honesty, conceded yesterday that it was “a very, very bad result” for the party, as he accepted the scale of the defeat.
He rightly pointed out that it was the negative reaction to the “very difficult but necessary decisions” taken by the Government in recent months that had provoked such a disaster.
Backbench Fianna Fáil TDs who complain that Ministers are out of touch with the impact of their decisions miss the point entirely. Tough decisions are required to get the country back on track and there is no way that pain can be avoided. What the public appears to be saying, though, is that it won’t accept that pain from Fianna Fáil.
The substantial cuts in income suffered by workers who have been lucky to keep their jobs, never mind the pain inflicted on those who have lost them, is something that people are simply not willing to accept from this Government. The Opposition’s claims that bankers are bailed out while ordinary people suffer may be a trite simplification, but it clearly resonates with the electorate.
The spectacular triumph of George Lee in Dublin South illustrates the public mood, particularly in middle-class Dublin.
The majority of voters have simply lost all faith in the Government’s ability to do the job and it is hard to see how that mood will turn around while the coalition continues in office. The problem is that as long as the mood remains, the ability of the Government to do its job will be severely hampered.
The election result exposed the fallacy of the dictum that all politics is local. Real politics is national, particularly in times of crisis. While some politicians can buck the trend, due to local popularity, the national mood swept away many councillors who had actually worked very hard for their constituents over the past five years.
The anti-Government trend was most pronounced in the large urban areas, but it rippled all across the country in a wave that has made Fine Gael the biggest party in the country for the first time, that gave the Labour Party its best local election result to date and that left Fianna Fáil nursing its worst result since the party was founded in 1926.
The impact on the Greens has been even more severe. The party has had the bad fortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It has suffered a near total wipe-out in the local elections, and a dismal European election result. Every single one of its Dáil seats would be under threat in an early general election, and the party has some real soul- searching to do in the weeks and months ahead.
The Fine Gael decision to table a motion of no confidence means that pressure on the Government will continue this week and there will be no respite until the Dáil summer recess next month. The pressure on the coalition will remain intense for as long as it survives.
Next week the Taoiseach will attend the critical EU summit on Brussels, which is due to finalise the legal guarantees to enable a rerun of the Lisbon Treaty in the autumn. Over the summer, reports from “An Bord Snip Nua” on reform of the public service and the Commission on Taxation on reform of the tax system will have to be digested by the Government, and decisions made on what measures to adopt.
There have to be serious doubts about the ability of such a badly wounded Government to take decisive action on such important issues, deliver a Yes vote to Lisbon and then formulate another swingeing budget.