Deal or no deal, Fianna Fáil will be sitting pretty when the music stops

Fianna Fáil wants to be the cherrypicker party, permanently in full-term government with an ever-changing bowl of cherries. A changing bowl of cherries is more invigorating to the big party than a period in opposition.

No, that “door is still open” isn’t a ploy. It means what it says.

Bertie made it clear from the outset: it’s all about stability. Getting the PDs and Independents together would — and may — ensure the creation of a Fianna Fáil-led government. But not necessarily the most stable Fianna Fáil-led government. What’s exercising the oversized political brains of Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen is a much bigger, more comprehensive definition of “stability”. As in long-term. As in after the next election.

Fianna Fáil has never bought into the concept that a period on the opposition benches is good for them. One of the reasons they’re so viciously effective in opposition is that they feel they’re entitled to be across the way in the government seats; as a result their fury is constantly on the boil, waiting for mistakes on the other side of the House.

On the other hand, they no longer buy into an “overall majority”. Once they got over the culture shock of going into coalition, they realised something Michael McDowell never copped: Fianna Fáil no longer wants nor needs one-party government. Fianna Fáil wants to be the cherry-picker party, permanently in full-term government with an ever-changing bowl of cherries.

A changing bowl of cherries is more invigorating to the big party than a period in opposition, the way it sees itself. It allows a tilt to the right for a few years, corrected by a tilt to the left for a few years, thus periodically satisfying all elements housed in the Fianna Fáil big tent. It also allows blame to fall on the smaller party at election time. (Fianna Fáil doesn’t blame the smaller party itself. It doesn’t need to. The media will take care of that. Fianna Fáil just shrugs and moves on.)

That’s one of the problems about it picking Mary Harney and a bunch of Independents. It knows and gets along with Mary Harney. It knows she knows government and desperately wants to be in the role when Health finally turns the corner in an inarguable and provable way.

But Mary Harney at the Cabinet table is not a separate party. She’s a sole trader. A formidable sole trader with a spine of steel, but a sole trader, nonetheless. Nobody else to take the flak for Cabinet troubles, other than a Fianna Fáil minister.

Never mind all that guff about Bertie having to give away Cabinet seats. Giving a Cabinet seat to Michael McDowell provided the last government with its very own built-in lightening conductor and hate figure. If you wanted a doll to stick pins in, the face belonged to the Tanáiste. If you wanted a goat to scape, he was that goat. In sharp contrast, Mary Harney, as a sole trader in Cabinet gets instant hero status: “Fair dues to her, isn’t she brave all the same and she all on her own?”

Meanwhile, you have the Independents. Now, assuming Bev does a deal to pay off RTÉ in agreed instalments, Bev can be relied on to toe an essentially Fianna Fáil line. Jackie Healy-Rae is carrying his shopping list atop one of those pikes used to hoist the burning turf that lit his parade. Finian McGrath, at least according to Pat Rabbitte, is likely to do himself an injury, he’s so eager to get into government. Tony Gregory knows what he wants and can’t be bothered to be civil about getting it.

History would suggest that when you buy an Independent, they tend to stay bought. But would this, long-term, deliver the stability Brian Cowen is looking for? Doubtful. It would put a resurgent Fine Gael together with an embittered Labour, an infuriated Green Party and a Sinn Féin eager to put a lousy election behind them. That adds up to a much stronger opposition than has been there during the past few years.

The other fly in that ointment is the bad times ahead. Independents stay bought as long as the currency used to purchase them stays valid. Devalue that currency and all bets are off. Devaluation of the currency would come about if the construction industry and property industries get a hard enough landing to rattle their fillings. It would come about if a couple of manufacturing plants in any Independent’s backyard pull out and head for India or China, especially if those manufacturing plants are what we fondly and foolishly believe are “high-end, intellectual” properties that require educated Irish people to run them. It would come about if there were cutbacks or promises were to be postponed, as is the inevitable consequence of a boom dying down.

In that situation, the numbers are too close for comfort, never mind for stability.

Perhaps four years down the road, when Cowen is leader, having delivered two or three budgets heavy on the costs of ongoing programmes and light on public service improvements, the stability of a government based on the PDs and Independents carries an inherent weakness due to the age of those involved. Not just because, as the old priest Peter Gilligan observed, “people die, and die,” but because, even if they don’t die, they’ve nothing to die for anymore. So they miss a vote by accident, or re-establish their integrity by abstaining on a vote deliberately, and suddenly the government is in rag order.

That’s why Fianna Fáil would have invested so heavily in talking to the Greens last week — but it’s not the only reason it’s still talking up the possibilities of going into government with them.

The Green Party went into last week’s negotiation, as they said many times, not to discuss Cabinet positions but to seek policy changes for a potential programme of government.

Fianna Fáil, on the other hand, went into the discussions with quite different objectives, starting with creating a stable government. But it was also in research mode, setting out to achieve an objective while at the same time doing close-up observation. Fianna Fáil was finding out how these people react under pressure. How they respond to rigid refusal. How they recover from setback. How much they understand of the process of government. How helpful or dangerous might their level of understanding be to stability in the long term.

The Fianna Fáil research came up with mostly positive answers. The real problem, as it saw it, lay, not in the Green Party people with whom it was dealing, but with the Green Party people with whom it was not dealing.

Establishing an understanding of the practical difficulties of implementing a particular policy is grand, when you have the key negotiators in front of you. If they have to go to another body (as the Green Party negotiators did) and explain the processes by which they were persuaded, they are at a huge disadvantage.

The small hope behind the Fianna Fáil half-open door lies in Fianna Fáil’s belief that it’s neither the people nor the policies that pose a problem to a programme for government.

It’s the process.