Pat Leahy: Bitter debate over Varadkar a sign of divided politics to come

Like everything else, Dáil debates on motions of no confidence are not what they used to be, but this week’s exchanges over the Sinn Féin motion on Leo Varadkar were a signal, amid all the noise, of how Irish politics has changed, and of its future direction.

It’s been remarked upon hereabouts before how the shape of the Irish political landscape has been drastically altered by the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael alliance and the establishment of Sinn Féin as the main Opposition party.

But this week was a vivid illustration of how the rivalry between Fine Gael and Sinn Féin – deep, substantial, bitter and now the principal cleavage in Irish politics – is crowding out everyone else, defining the discourse and producing a more polarised and partisan national debate.

Some people will lament the diminution of civility and worry about Trump-style ideological division. Others will welcome the prospect of ending the narcissism of small differences between two similar parties as the main political debate. It will also threaten – they hope – the mushy centrism that gave the country stability and continuity in government, but was resistant to change and made it easy for a range of vested interests, from professional elites to public service unions, to protect their privileges. Whatever lies in store in the coming years, it seems a more sharply divided politics is inevitable.

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That’s why, if you want a sense of how this will look and sound, this week’s confidence debate was illuminating. It’s worth, I think, recalling it in detail.

Varadkar’s first Fine Gael defender was Simon Coveney. He wondered if Sinn Féin’s agenda was “simply to harvest and nurture online hate and bile regardless of the truth and cost, the politics of division and resentment?”

Attack was the preferred form of defence throughout. Minister for Social Protection and Border TD Heather Humphreys described Sinn Féin as “the party of multiple mysterious bank accounts, the party that denigrates victims, the party that operates under a toxic culture of secrecy, bullying and intimidation and, most of all, the party of rank hypocrisy . . . It had the gall to accuse the Government of burying records when victims of the IRA across the country are still buried and their families are still waiting for the truth from Sinn Féin.”

When anyone speaks against Sinn Féin, she said, “its social media army mobilises. Whether it is a politician, a journalist or a member of the public they are all subjected to vile abuse.”

This sort of full frontal attack, not on policy, but on the moral character of Sinn Féin has previously been rare enough. It is now Fine Gael's staple

New TD Jennifer Carroll MacNeill instanced the case of Máiría Cahill, who spoke about sexual abuse at the hands of an IRA man. “It was claimed she was mentally unstable and implied that she was promiscuous. Hate, bile and untruths were spread, all because she stood up and gave an account of her abusive experience and Sinn Féin’s failure to respond to it.”

This is the sort of full frontal attack, not on policy, but on the moral character of Sinn Féin that has previously been rare enough. It is now Fine Gael’s staple.

Sinn Féin’s response was more disciplined and more focused on that party’s pungent populist narrative: the corrupt establishment versus the ordinary people.

The effectiveness of the Sinn Féin critique (notwithstanding the regular help that the Coalition gives it) stems from the link it makes between the difficulties that people are faced with in their own lives and the choices made by “the insiders” in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

“The truth is that for so long as this rotten insider culture is tolerated, nothing will ever change,” Mary Lou McDonald said. “Houses will remain unaffordable, rents will keep going up and up and a generation will have to settle for the box room in their parents’ house as a home for themselves and their own families. Our health system will continue to struggle with overcrowded hospitals, citizens on trolleys and children left years waiting, sometimes in agony, for treatment and for care.

“That is the price of government for the privileged few at the expense of the many. It is a price that generations have paid and it has cost us dearly. It can no longer be tolerated.”

Pearse Doherty summed up: “The politics of the insider comes at a price for those on the outside.”

As Labour frontbencher Aodhán Ó Ríordáin observed in the Dáil debate, “This debate suits both Sinn Féin and Fine Gael.”

It squeezes out the other parties. It’s particularly dangerous for Fianna Fáil, because it threatens to relegate the party to the status of mere Fine Gael ally versus Sinn Féin, rather than one of the principal adversaries.

For as long as Fianna Fáil keeps its capacious backside in the driver’s seat of Government, it can’t be written out of the political debate. But what is going to happen when Varadkar shuffles in there when his turn comes, doing battle daily with Sinn Féin in the run-up to the next general election? It will be hard for Fianna Fáil to get noticed, and the Coalition partner that doesn’t get noticed, doesn’t get votes. This is certainly a fear in Fianna Fáil. It is also central to long-term Fine Gael thinking about how they fight the next election. Part of that will be making Fianna Fáil irrelevant, framing the choice between the Varadkar and McDonald, the old centrists versus the new radicals. A simple, binary choice.

This week has shown how our politics is increasingly painted in primary colours, moral absolutes and tribal divisions.

Danny Healy-Rae didn’t approve. “They would all want to cop on because the people of Ireland will not stand for this for much longer,” he ululated.

Maybe Danny is right. Maybe people will get fed up of this new type of politics. But my guess is that they’re going to hear an awful lot more of it.