Taoiseach’s rule like last days of John Major
He was not ready for Lisbon, not ready for the recession, not ready for the emergency budgets, and last week not ready for a report coming down the tracks for 10 years. It was a similar story with the murders of two British soldiers in Armagh last March as they collected pizzas on a Saturday night. The lightning strike attack sent a pronounced shiver of impending dread through the island, but the Taoiseach did not show his face and comment on the matter publicly until 42 hours later.
Say what you like about Bertie Ahern, but he’d have been across every media outlet from first light that Sunday assuring the nation the North would never be allowed to return to the darkness it had so recently dragged itself from.
But it is not just a problem of projection and being seen to feel the national pain, it is also one of substance as voters grow increasingly weary of his inability to accept any responsibility for the economic crash. It is a world recession, but the electorate knows it is the policies of the past five years that meant it hit this part of the world harder than any downturn has hit any Western nation since the 1930s.
The country seems to have taken a value judgment about Cowen and decided that it just does not like him and does not want him in charge.
This is most pronounced in Dublin where the old country and western fault line that did so much damage to Albert Reynolds has risen once again with a vengeance. Ahern projected himself as the ultimate Dub, yet when he was in Cork, he was from Cork, or at least made sure everyone knew his dad was, when he was in Galway he found a way of making himself seem almost Galwegian.
Cowen can only ever be from one place and with that place being small town Offaly, Fianna Fáil support in the capital has collapsed to the point where they may come fourth in the popular vote, lose their MEP, limp in third in the two Dáil by-elections and see their seats on the 52-berth city council crumple to barely six.
The Government’s communication machine is incapable of getting ahead of the news cycle and projecting a coherent, simple message of hope.
Cowen’s talk of green shots and rapid growth just around the corner sounds ever more desperate.
This month’s campaign has been a bizarre inverse of the 2007 general election. Then Ahern went into hiding for the first three weeks scared of being asked about the Mahon corruption probe, he met voters in secret with no media. This time it is the voters Cowen is avoiding as the media looks on. Yesterday was a case in point as he only encountered safe, specially selected groups of people in Schull and Kerry. In Skibbereen he stopped briefly at the famine memorial, but it was the famine of real people on this tour that was most striking. As someone who covered Westminster in the dying days of the doomed, disaster-laden John Major government it is all eerily reminiscent.
That was an administration which was narrowly returned to office as voters gave it the benefit of the doubt on the economy only to see that trust smashed apart by financial collapse and mass unemployment within months, leaving an exhausted, out of touch Government which proved incapable of communicating with the people as it desperately tried to cling onto every extra day in office in the desperate gamble something — anything — would turn-up to save it. But every extra day just made the public despise it more and turned the inevitable electoral defeat into a once in a generation wipeout.
Some senior Fianna Fáil figures now realise this could be their fate, and feel it might be better to get out now and lick the wounds in opposition before the party becomes a totally contaminated brand in the public mind. In the five seaters where they hold three TDs, and the four seaters where they hold two at least one FF-er will go, even if the party rallies back above 30%. With Cowen in command Fianna Fáil would be likely to see its Dáil tally plummet to somewhere in the 40s.
That also presents massive disciplinary issues as the Dáil faces into another fractious autumn redolent with aggressively harsh spending and welfare cuts. Does the FF backbencher vote with Cowen and ensure they are the one in the constituency to get the boot, or vote against and campaign for re-election as a maverick?
With Cowen heaved out of the way, the party knows it would have no choice, but to hold a snap national poll as the second unelected Taoiseach in a row could not govern with a third-hand mandate.
Yet, the FF realists hope a change of horses could stop the rout, with most probable successor Micheál Martin holding, say 50 plus seats, and readying the party for a comeback in the hope the electorate had a short memory. In private Cowen is a warm, intelligent and highly likeable man with genuine charm. Yet the nation does not see that in public.
It just sees failure.
