No one likes ’em but who cares?

ENDA KENNY has a recurring theme about bringing politics back to the people.

The problem is the people threw politics into the skip a long time ago and don’t particularly want it back. Not from Kenny. And not from Pat Rabbitte. And not even from Bertie Ahern.

There was very bad news and not-so-very bad news for the Government in the figures revealed in this week’s Irish Examiner/Lansdowne opinion poll.

The very bad news was that nobody likes them. The not so very bad news was that they dislike the opposition even more. Or worse, they don’t know or don’t care, or both.

Bad news about lack of popularity usually comes in two forms for political parties. The first comes from the opinion polls. They are easy to dismiss. Polls have a 3% margin of error; don’t take account of the nuances of Irish constituencies; people change their minds; people tell pollsters things that they don’t necessarily believe.

All true. The standard response is the hackneyed one - the only poll that matters is the ballot box.

And that is the second way that a party come face to face with the fact it is as unloved and unwanted as Michael McDowell at a Sinn Féin Ard Fheis.

The contortions of logic that parties will use to put a brave face on it have to be seen to be believed. One of the amazing things after last year’s local and European elections - and this years’ by-elections - is that they all declared themselves winners. The slightest crumb of comfort was gobbled up to show, hey, it wasn’t that bad, we may have let six goals in but you cannot deny that we did win the toss.

If you parse the figures for Fianna Fáil and the PDs in the poll, it made for bleak old reading. The underlying trends show the people are getting browned off, impatient, disaffected. The anorak no longer protects Ahern from squalls of unpopularity; the Department of Health has trolleyed Harney; and only two or three ministers seem to be throwing shapes on the pitch.

Another problem for Fianna Fáil is that few of its substitute ministers are up to championship standard. For ministers, too, there is a disconnect that they have failed to address. Most of them swan around self-importantly like the chief executives of multinational firms. For some of these guys, real life is something they occasionally glimpse through the window of a ministerial Mercedes.

So it’s not looking good for the Government. But the opposition have failed miserably to harness the ripped-off, the browned-off and the badly-off. Their figures, in anything, are even poorer than the Government’s, no matter how much they will focus in on the comparatively higher satisfaction ratings for Kenny and Rabbitte. It recalls the glorious line of former Galway TD John Donnellan that badly damaged Alan Dukes as Fine Gael leader. If it was raining soup, he’d be holding a fork.

Nagging questions emerge from the poll about the inability of the opposition to harness that content.

Of course, there is a faux quality to a lot of the hollering that’s taking place at the moment. It’s happening in a vacuum. The only real event of any note is the Dáil returning next Wednesday. An election is at least a year away; and more likely 18 months away.

As such, people have not focused their minds on what party they will give the nod to. There is a plausible argument that many are defaulting to Fianna Fáil, or hedging their bets, until the real decision has to be made.

And have the main opposition parties got their act together yet? We all know by this stage that Rabbitte and Kenny are best pals. But we need something more than platitudes about real and credible alternatives.

What’s needed is some policy or at least some solid signs of policy direction. It’s all very well to say that you are going to bring politics back to the people. But what is meant by that? What specifically are they going to do different? What current policies are they going to reverse? What new initiatives are they going to come up with that will make a difference to people’s lives?

And maybe the best way they can start bringing politics back to the people is by bringing politics - and not artificial beauty contests - back to the politicians.