The connection in recent times between ideology in this republic and in the politics of our nearest neighbours has been consistent if opaque: they experiment, we copy, writes John Waters.
The opacity is due mainly to a time-lag of roughly a decade, which obscures the pattern. Crudely, anticipating a little controversy, you might decide that our Thatcherite phase, which began with the Haughey minority government of 1987, ended last year with the disappearance of Charlie McCreevy into the European vortex. The Gordon Brown phase, signalled by Bertie Ahern's pre-Christmas red interview, seems likely to dominate Irish politics until well after the next general election. Fianna Fáil, which has macro-managed the Irish economy in accordance with principles of prudence and meritocracy, now signals a period of redistribution. Meanwhile, our neighbours again exhibit signs of change.
I mention Brown rather than Tony Blair because, although Blair delivered the party into power, Brown put the ideological stamp on the New Labour social and economic project.
This is partly because the deal cut with Blair made Brown the most powerful chancellor in British history, and partly because the excessive influence of perceptionists like Peter Mandelson caused Blair to postpone his own radical ambitions in favour of a softly-softly strategy of consolidation.
The first term was devoted to gaining a second, the second waylaid by foreign policy. Now preparing for his third, Blair has a final chance to show why he used to be called a radical.
Rationalism over pseudo-compassion, fairness over political correctness, common sense over ideology: these were the values Blair repressed under bad advice in the interests of buying more time to implement them. And because such corrections to Brown's traditionalism have been absent since 1997, Britain is more unfair, more PC, makes less sense, than when Blair took office.
Last week, the influential think-tank, The Centre for Policy Studies, published a staggering report into some effects of policies now synonymous with Brown. It exposed a system of benefits that undermines work, family and child welfare, incentivises family break-up and punishes couples who live together. In one example, a two-parent, single-income family of four on the average industrial wage of £24,000 was found to be just £1 per head a week better off than a single parent and two children on full benefits.
The report found that such a couple could increase its weekly income by £150 by getting divorced, and, unsurprisingly, that the number of children growing up in broken homes has increased by a quarter since New Labour came to power. Given a free hand, Brown pursued a policy of taxation and welfare that demotivates work, undermines adult relationships, damages children and presents to coming generations an image of the state as multi-breasted matriarch, from whom benefits come as a right, without any requirement for a reciprocal contribution. It calls to mind the name of Frank Field, now almost forgotten, but once the secret weapon of Blair's radical agenda. In Blair's first term, Field was minister for welfare reform, with instructions to "think the unthinkable".
Field was a traditionalist turned radical, who combined Christian decency with a rational streak. A decade ago, anticipating the situation outlined in last week's report, he was urging radical reform of pensions and welfare policy. He advocated a shift from generalised redistribution to a limited, targeted form; proposed a rationalisation of pensions and subsidies aimed at holding marriages together; and opposed means testing because it trapped people in mendicancy.
"I'm not blaming individuals," he said in a 1996 interview with the Christian magazine Third Way. "They are behaving as rational economic man and women, working the system instead of working themselves off the system. I blame us politicians, for establishing and then defending a system which creates the incentives to behave in this manner." Field is ancient history. He resigned in frustration after 15 months in Blair's first cabinet, citing "infighting" and "inertia", a victim of Blair's postponement of radical action while he worked off his Faustian pacts with Brown and Mandelson.
In his third term, if he can avoid being a lame duck, Blair will have nothing to lose. The media consensus assumes that when he steps down, as indicated, in late 2008, he will be succeeded by Brown. But that would follow a political rather than ideological logic, and consolidate his previous failures of nerve.
There are other possibilities. Blair's recent appointment as education secretary of 36-year-old Irishwoman Ruth Kelly may signal a return to his promised radicalism after two terms largely squandered in pandering to the soft-left consensus.
Kelly, a pro-life Catholic, is what political simpletons call a "conservative", suggesting she is an advocate of reason and common sense. She is also an ally of Brown, but that may change as the possibilities declare themselves. She may well be the future - theirs and ours.