It’s a Mexican stand-off. It’s not the first time and, given the Republic’s electoral system, it won’t be the last.
We’re still at the early stages, eighteen days since the election and less than a week since the Dáil reconvened, so there’s a long way to go during which various red lines will be crossed and core values jettisoned.
There’s one new feature and that’s the stupid position Micheál Martin has adopted. He has elevated the iron laws of Dáil arithmetic into the absolutist sphere of morality. In 1989 Pádraig Flynn opposed the very idea of a coalition saying it was ‘hitting at Fianna Fáil’s core values’. Poor Flynn didn’t know that at that very moment Charlie Haughey was busily concocting a coalition with Dessie O’Malley’s PDs, many of whom were sworn enemies of Haughey and considered renegades by Fianna Fáil. Since then there have always been coalitions.
One of the most interesting and of some relevance to the present difficulties was the coalition of Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left 1994-7; the Republic’s most right-wing party going in with the most left wing. However, there was more to it than that. Democratic Left had only emerged out of the Workers Party – derisively known as the Stickies – in 1992. Many in Fine Gael, which regards itself as the law and order party, were deeply suspicious of some in the new Democratic Left and what they’d recently been up to in the Workers Party.
The WP was the political wing of the Official IRA which the party called euphemistically, ‘Group B’. Until the collapse of the USSR and its eastern European satellite states the Stalinist Stickies happily engaged with Moscow, East Germany and even Ceausescu’s Romania, not to mention North Korea. Yet suddenly they were in government with Fine Gael, no questions asked; like when were their former comrades’ associates in Group B going to decommission? Answer: never. Even for Garret the Good power and arithmetic reigned supreme.
The 1994 coalition is only the most recent example of an Irish government partly composed of a party that had recently turned away from revolutionary violence. Today everyone knows the IRA has eschewed violence and adopted political means to attain republican goals. Even the report cited by the Garda Commissioner Drew Harris confirms that.
It’s unprecedented and not sustainable for a Fianna Fáil leader to refuse to talk to a party on the grounds that it is immoral given FF’s record. In taking this ‘holier than thou’ stance Micheál Martin has boxed himself in, denying the validity of the votes of 535,000 people and the position of the Sinn Féin party leader who garnered most votes for taoiseach last week. Is it either sensible or politically tenable to try to ignore the fact that SF topped the poll in 30 out of 39 constituencies?
Continuing to exclude SF smacks of desperation. The electorate aren’t buying it despite the relentless efforts of sections of the media heaping contumely on SF. A poll last week showed that if it came to another election SF would take 35 per cent of the votes compared to 25 per cent on February 8. Attempting to go into a reverse version of the past four years with Fine Gael will rebound calamitously on Fianna Fáil.
Talking about a FF-FG coalition as Martin is presently doing also begs the question. Who else will go in with them in defiance of the demand for radical change? The Greens might seem the obvious choice, but they were practically wiped out after their last period as FF’s mudguard. Labour has said no. The Social Democrats have said no. Trying to cobble together a coalition including rural Independents would be like herding cats. It would collapse at the first budget in the autumn.
Finally, how can Martin ignore the double standards that it’s OK for him to insist the DUP must share power here on equal terms with SF ministers?
