Political divide hard to detect

THERE are some questions for which there are no answers. Is there life after death? How big is the universe? What happened to Lord Lucan? What’s the difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael?

This week’s Economist survey on Ireland at times read like an extended party manifesto for Fianna Fáil and an abject hagiography of the PDs.

A blizzard of nice adjectives rained down on Mary Harney. She was the Taggart who toughed it out in the badlands and kept Ireland safe from socialism. And as for Michael McDowell? Controversial? Hysterical? Outspoken? Over-the-top? No, sorry.

He is “thoughtful”. That image of Uncle Michael in slippers, puffing away at a pipe, requires a certain elasticity of imagination. It’s ruined by the next sentence where he repeats his canard that inequality is inevitable in Ireland’s incentive economy.

You would expect the Economist to praise the PDs (which, incidentally, get more credit than FF for the country’s economic good fortune).

In a fortnight’s time the magazine will search its soul and - if previous form is anything to go on - plump “on balance” for George W Bush. The same as it did in 2000. The same as it did when casting its influence in favour of the Iraq War on the basis of the threat of WMD. The way it has - like Tony Blair and George W Bush - slyly and subtly changed its tune since then. It knows its market.

Nonetheless, its survey on Ireland is the Economist at its accessible, authorative and campaigning best.

You can disagree with its conclusions but it’s hard to quibble with the quality of analysis. In a few paragraphs, it hits the bulls-eye with its assessment of the nature and direction of the Irish political landscape.

“Most European countries have a centre-left (broadly socialist) party and a centre-right (broadly conservative or Christian Democrat) one, perhaps with some liberals in the middle, plus a Green Party and a few regional or fringe ones thrown in.

“Ireland’s parties do not conform to this model. The political differences between the two main parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, can be hard to detect. As a telling piece of evidence, try asking a political insider in Dublin where the parties sit in the European Parliament: the odds are that he will not know. (Answer: Fine Gael is part of the centre-right European People’s Party, and Fianna Fáil sits, bizarrely, in the Europe of Nations group, with Italy’s former fascists and the anti-EU League of Polish Families.)”

The EU setup has marginally more right and centre-right governments in power than left. Not that anybody would notice. If you look at the policies of virtually all EU countries on a thorny issue like immigration for example it’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In fact, some so-called parties of the left (yes, New Labour, who else?) have come up with some of the most hardline wheezes to keep the riff-raff from the Third World away.

Tony Blair turned the Clinton concept of triangulation into an art form. If the Tories had a good idea on cracking down on crime, say, he would steal it and rebrand it in New Labour packaging. On immigration, he appropriated policies that were hard right.

The defence? We must keep the neo-fascists marginalised but to do so, we must appropriate their policies.

The effect is most large political parties in Europe have staked a claim on middle ground. The problem in Ireland is not much distinguished from them in the first place so it wasn’t much of a journey.

A long time ago, there was the civil war. Its legacy was the respective stances of the party on the North question. At best, at very best, they are now residuals. Later - though the distinction was never all that clear cut - FF became the party of the small farmer and the working classes whereas FG represented the larger farmer and a fractional majority of the middle classes.

Over the past decade, save for a couple of deeply rural constituencies, that distinction has been blown out of the water. FF’s obliteration in Dublin’s working class areas in the local elections was conclusive proof of that.

The nostrum that the two main parties have for the economy and for the country is largely the same, differing only in detail and presentation.

Fine Gael’s challenge in 2007 isn’t going to be about radical change. The question is: Can we trust Enda Kenny to be Bertie Ahern, to put a new Government in place that will be exactly the same as the old, save for the faces?