Cowen means to fight on — but for what, and to where?

BRIAN COWEN is going nowhere. Official. It is the one thing everyone in politics agrees on — though they have polar opposite views on what it means.

Mr Cowen believes he is digging in for the long haul, his Dáil mandate — helpfully re-confirmed by Fine Gael’s ill-judged no confidence motion — runs for another three years and he has made it clear he will not be prised out of Government Buildings until the very last second of the parliamentary term.

The opposition, and increasingly anxious backbenchers within his own party, see things differently.

They believe Mr Cowen is merely delaying the inevitable and will be lucky to survive the autumn, and will likely be blown away by the third emergency budget (scheduled for December, although it may well be rushed forward depending on how big the black hole in the public finances is by then) in little over a year.

Mr Cowen sees things differently, he sees the merciful respite of the summer recess, when the Government can rule by dik-tat with no annoying interference from the “negative defeatists” on the opposition benches, looming tantalisingly close.

Fianna Fáil has finally woken up to the fact that, even if it does have some kind of strategy for lifting the nation out of the technical economic depression (though the 400,000 people on the live register see nothing “technical” about their plight), it has failed miserably to communicate that to the electorate.

It’s now all going to be about the “message”, with FF hoping desperately that the voter will not just shoot the messenger anyway at the next election.

The Lisbon II referendum must be held before October 31, and it looks like Mr Cowen will not be facing an electoral Halloween as the economic crash has so shaken the nation that any notion of No protest vote has been terrified out of people by the plight of pathetic, bankrupt no-EU Iceland.

Despite the fact it was largely due to his own blunders and lacklustre campaign the Yes vote lost the first referendum, Mr Cowen will try and claim the follow-up as some kind of mandate for him to continue in Government.

However, a growing number within FF feel the party would do well to bail out of Government now and let the Rainbow take the flak for trying to get the nation’s finances back on track.

The nation seems to have taken a value judgment on Mr Cowen and decided he is not up to the top job, so an election with him in charge is likely to be another wipeout.

A delegation asking him to step down for the sake of the party, or a direct heave, would inevitable trigger a snap general election as the successor could not rule on a third-hand mandate originally won by Bertie Ahern.

But under new management this FF faction hopes the losses could be stemmed to the low 50s, thus allowing for a dramatic come back at the election after that.

The opposition now see Mr Cowen as a broken Taoiseach, they scent his blood and are waiting for the final Government collapse.

Mr Cowen insists, like British PM Gordon Brown — the fellow ex-finance minister who took over the top job from a formidable populist without a contest only to see early popularity swept away by a cack-handed response to the economic collapse — that he fights on, he fights to win.

Unfortunately for them both, the last European premier to use those words in similar circumstances was Margaret Thatcher — just before she was swept from power.