Political marriages are really more about numbers than policies

BRENDAN HOWLIN and Pat Rabbitte were squabbling about what Labour will or will not do after the next general election.

Before that, Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny were setting out their stalls in relation to not going into coalition with Sinn Féin. This whole thing is like a political mating dance, but history tells us that when the election results are in, the parties will usually hop into bed with any party, or parties, that have the numbers to form a government.

In 1932 — six years after Eamon de Valera resigned as president of Sinn Féin to found Fianna Fáil, and less than 10 years since the civil war — the Labour party propped up a minority Fianna Fáil government. They had no trouble with Fianna Fáil then.

Fine Gael was prepared to do a deal with anyone to get rid of Fianna Fáil in 1948. The Blue Shirt gang jumped into government with Seán MacBride of Clann na Poblachta, barely a decade after he had been not only a member of Sinn Féin but chief of staff of the IRA. Fine Gael actually went even further — the party replaced its leader, Dick Mulcahy, with John A Costello in order to make such a coalition more appealing to MacBride.

In the late 1960s the Labour Party announced that it would not go into coalition with any party.

The party nominated the greatest number of candidates in its history for the 1969 election. It won 17% of the first preference vote nationally, which was 1% better than it had ever done before, but the party lost four seats.

Fianna Fáil, on the other hand, dropped 2% of its first preference vote but gained two seats to win an overall majority in a general election for the first time since de Valera was pushed to the Park. The victory was largely attributable to a precipitate drop in transfers between Fine Gael and Labour. In late counts, where there was only Fianna Fáil and Labour candidates left after the last Fine Gael candidate was eliminated, only 34% of the Fine Gael vote transferred to the Labour candidates.

By 1973 Labour had changed its tune and agreed to a preelection pact with Fine Gael, and the transfer rate more than doubled to 71%. Even though Labour’s first preference vote dropped by more than 19% in 1973, the party actually gained a seat, while Fine Gael gained four seats with just a 1% increase in its vote. Fianna Fáil increased first preference vote by 1.5%, but lost six seats. As a result, Fine Gael and Labour were able to form a majority coalition, with 73 of the 144 seats in the Dáil.

In 1989, when Fianna Fáil came up six seats short of an overall majority, Alan Dukes announced that Fine Gael would support a Haughey government, provided Fine Gael got half the cabinet seats and the position of Taoiseach rotated to Fine Gael at mid-term. Dukes, who had propped up Haughey with the Tallaght Strategy for the previous two years, later claimed that his offer was not a serious bid for power. It was an attempt to force the Progressive Democrats — which happened to have the necessary six seats — into a coalition with Fianna Fáil. It worked, but it was never a very happy arrangement.

The PDs owed their very existence to their opposition to Charlie Haughey, but the numbers were right and they did what had been unthinkable before the election; they jumped into bed with Fianna Fáil.

During the 1992 general election campaign, Dick Spring proclaimed that he could see no way anyone could go into government with Fianna Fáil unless it underwent a fundamental change. Since Fine Gael had called for a rotating Taoiseach as part of its demands for going into government with Fianna Fáil in 1989, Spring proceeded to make a similar demand of Fine Gael.

Fianna Fáil had just had one of its worst ever general election performances in 1992, so Fine Gael should have been in a position of incredible strength, but it was the biggest loser of all.

However, because Fianna Fáil did not win, Fine Gael began acting as if it had won the election.

Even with the support of Labour, with its record 32 seats, Fine Gael would not have had enough seats to form majority government, but it insisted that the Democratic Left could not be in the coalition. When Spring consulted the Democratic Left, Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats savaged him.

ON the day the new Dáil convened, Des O’Malley, the PD leader, launched a blistering attack on Spring for daring to hold discussions with the Democratic Left. “We made clear,” O’Malley said, “that a three-party government embracing ourselves, Labour and Fine Gael could only emerge.”

Fine Gael and the PDs tried to lay down conditions for Labour’s participation in government, so Labour went off and formed a government with Fianna Fáil instead, much to the fury of the other two parties — and many of the media prophets who got the whole thing dreadfully wrong.

Many pundits stated that Spring never recovered from going into government with Fianna Fáil, but the reality was different. Following the publication of the Fianna Fáil-Labour programme for government, an IMS poll found that Labour’s popularity actually increased by 7% on its general election showing, which was already an all-time high, whereas Fine Gael’s was down by a further 5%. Dick Spring’s popularity was up by 9%. Labour later came to rue that political marriage, but it put some manners on Fine Gael.

When Labour and Fine Gael got together again just two years later, it was with the Democratic Left and without the PDs, because, of course, the numbers had changed in the interim. The Democratic Left had gained an extra seat. Hence, the Rainbow Government was formed.

The PDs had the audacity to savage Labour for going in with Fianna Fáil but this did not stop PDs going in with Fianna Fáil the next two chances they got. Now, Michael McDowell has the gall to accuse Labour of “a con job” in 1992. The PDs are a con job and Michael McDowell is the personification of political hypocrisy.

It is all about the numbers, and it is time politicians admitted this. Rabbitte wants a coalition with the other parties as his first preference, but if the electorate decides otherwise, he should just admit that he would go back to the drawing board and, at least, talk with Fianna Fáil. That’s democracy — and the politicians should now be considering more pressing matters.

While the parties were engaging in their political mating ritual during the week, gardaí were slammed in the High Court for allegedly disclosing that James O’Donoghue — a convicted rapist with a prior conviction for indecent assault — was loose in Ballybunion in 1999. If gardaí did disclose that information, they provided a service, because he proved that he was a threat to society by committing another rape.

But he did not commit it in Ballybunion; an unsuspecting woman elsewhere was his victim. He was again sentenced to a long term in prison.

Where is he now? Is he still in jail, or has he been quietly released? If he has been freed, does the public have a need, or even a right to know, or should the women of Ireland just be secure in the knowledge that he has again paid his debt to society? This isn’t transparency; it’s transparent lunacy.