There is no hope for the once dominant party, which has experienced unconditional policy failure
THIS WEEK there is much talk about how the revelations of Mahon could be fatal to Fianna Fáil. Both Noel Whelan and Stephen Collins in last Saturday’s Irish Times suggested that this might prove too much for even Fianna Fáil to recover. Whelan argued that the revelations are not dissimilar to those of the News of the World hacking scandal.
Closing down the paper, Rupert Murdoch hoped, would allow News International to turn a page on the scandal, and then it soon moved to publish the Sun on Sunday. Whelan presumably hopes the same could happen for Fianna Fáil.
The analogy is clever but not accurate. The News of the World was just one paper in a large media empire. Fianna Fáil is the whole of the party’s empire. Political parties can’t just close down and re-emerge in the way a company can rebrand itself or a product. Anything that re-emerged would be qualitatively different. It would just be an ordinary party that had to compete like any other.
But Fianna Fáil is not just any ordinary party. It was one of a handful of parties in the democratic world that managed to dominate its country’s politics. It built a coalition of farmers, urban working class, public-sector workers and a small entrepreneurial class. It could do this in part by using the resources of the State to ensure different groups in the coalition were kept happy. This reached its apogee under Bertie Ahern, who used the bubble-fuelled tax revenues to buy every conceivable interest group. It even institutionalised this coalition building through social partnership.
The party’s success was built on success. Control of State resources meant the party could reward its supporters with State jobs. In the 1960s, Donogh O’Malley is reported to have said that if a job was to be handed out and it was between a Fianna Fáiler and a Fine Gaeler, the Fianna Fáil man would always get the job.
Ambitious would-be politicians would join Fianna Fáil. The wealthy who wanted to influence public policy needed only donate to Fianna Fáil. Barristers interested in getting State work or on to the bench would join and donate their services to the party. These things gave Fianna Fáil the means to remain by far the most professional political operation in the State. The politicians that led the party weren’t always what we might think of as ideal for the job of prime minister of a country – but they seemed to be effective. Charles Haughey was able to get the economy under control with decisive action following years of dithering under Garret FitzGerald.
So what if he was making himself rich into the bargain – fair dues to him. At least we were all getting better off. Albert Reynolds was able to cut a deal with the British and keep the economy on the straight and narrow. And Bertie, well it wasn’t much he took, and weren’t we all getting boomier?
In a competition between a lovable rogue against the establishment figure, the lovable rogue always wins. Fianna Fáil’s genius was that it could simultaneously be semi-permanently in government and anti-establishment.
Those poor amateurs in Fine Gael who only ever got their hands on power when Ireland was about to enter recession were easily lambasted as establishment figures, with their posh schools and posh accents.
Fianna Fáil could keep this up only as long as the economy was sound, or there was someone else to blame. When the crash came in 2008 there was no one else to blame. The attempt at blaming Lehman Brothers was feeble because it was so implausible. From then on the roguish behaviour that had been so endearing became unacceptable. A good example was our reaction to Brian Cowen’s Morning Ireland radio performance. A few years earlier we might have laughed it off, and even said, “good man”. No one had baulked at the photos of him swigging champagne from a bottle before the crash occurred.
So Mahon only matters because Fianna Fáil failed to deliver on its promise. We elected Bertie even after we knew about Haughey, and we knew that Bertie must have been aware of Haughey’s misdeeds.
Even though Ahern could not answer a straight question on who paid for his house before the 2007 election, we still voted for his party in droves.
These things didn’t matter because everything seemed alright. But now the party has experienced unconditional policy failure. Fianna Fáil’s vote actually held up remarkably well in 2011 – most parties would have been happy to get 17.5 per cent of the vote given the context of the economic disaster.
Opposition parties usually do well in elections, so we might expect the party to recover. But demography is not on Fianna Fáil’s side. Its voters are ageing. Its support is highest among the over 60s and lowest among the under 40s. This is the reverse of the other Opposition party, Sinn Féin.
The old Fianna Fáilers are dying out. And they are not being replaced by a new generation. The new generation of political activists sees little reason to join Fianna Fáil. Mahon is just another reason, if another were needed. Just as success breeds success, failure begets failure.
Eoin O’Malley teaches Irish politics at Dublin City University. His latest book, Governing Ireland: From cabinet government to delegated governance (edited with Muiris MacCarthaigh) is just published by the IPA