Now the waverers know the price of opting for the ‘devil they know’

SOMETIMES, secretly, politicians hate the electorate. Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh. The politician who works his back off for the people of his constituency, and then loses his seat, usually goes through a couple of years of bemusement, and frequently bitterness.

Some of them never get over it.

But they do frequently come to realise, if and when the bitterness dies down, that they may have got the result they deserved. Maybe they worked too hard at the wrong stuff, or in ways that were invisible to the people they thought they were representing. Maybe they lost touch with the real concerns of their people, or lived too long on their laurels.

But there was one occasion recently that would have caused one group of politicians to mutter some curses about the electorate under their breaths. The occasion was the recent publication of a political opinion poll, carried out by TNS MRBI for the Irish Times, that showed Fianna Fáil and the PDs on a total of 35%, while the combined total for Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens was 51%.

If that opinion poll had been the last before the election, rather than the first after the poll, it would have sealed the fate of the outgoing government and guaranteed the election of the Rainbow.

It would have created an unstoppable momentum for change. The irony, of course, is that most of the opinion polls in the run-up to the election suggested that there was a growing mood for change in the country. It only seemed to dissipate in the days and weeks before the election.

And now it’s back. A small number of people, determined to get rid of the last government, lost their nerve at the last minute. They couldn’t bring themselves to trust the alternative government with the management of the economy.

So they decided to stick with the ‘devil they know’ and now, if the latest poll is to be believed, they’re a bit ashamed of that decision. Isn’t that just great? And so they re-elected the only government that could run the country.

And the health system has collapsed into chaos. Property prices are starting a slow spiral downwards. Shannon airport has been seriously undermined. Public spending is going to be squeezed tight (just as it was after the last election and the one before that — don’t these people ever learn?). Consumer confidence is the lowest it has been since the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. Inflation, especially in the area of energy prices, is starting to climb to troubling levels. All that has happened within a month or two of the election. Oh yes, and the Government awarded itself a massive pay increase and created paying jobs for virtually every single one of its backbenchers.

Most of us knew that the outgoing government was seriously out of touch. In the election, though, a few people chose to cross their fingers behind their backs and hope for the best. They know now, don’t they?

And would you really blame the small group of politicians I mentioned earlier for muttering curses under their breath when they read that opinion poll? They are the group of politicians who worked as hard as they could to get rid of the Government, who believed that’s what the people wanted, but who are now settling into five more years of opposition because a few people funked the change they really wanted to see.

Well, I have good news for them, at least those of them who aren’t comfortable in opposition and who do want to take on the Government. This administration is as unstable as any I’ve seen in my political lifetime.

I’ve often written here that no government is as stable or as unstable as it looks from the outside. When a government looks like it’s on the brink of collapse, you can be certain that there are people working like mad behind the scenes to keep it together. When a government looks smug and content with its lot, you can be fairly sure that it’s because they haven’t heard about the crisis that’s around the corner.

But when a government looks less than competent in its management of crisis, when it develops an accident-prone persona, when its leaders start saying things that sound out-of-touch to the point of being contemptuous — then you can be sure that it has seriously lost its way.

And for a government to have lost its way so soon after its election suggests that a major crisis can’t be far away. It might be a crisis of confidence, of leadership or of trust — the conditions now exist for all three, and each of those ingredients has destabilised and brought down governments in the recent past.

One politician who has nothing to fear from that crisis, whatever its shape and whenever it comes, is Eamon Gilmore, who faces his first party conference this coming weekend in Wexford.

I don’t think there’s any doubt but that the new Labour leader has hit the ground running. He has impressed on his public outings and in the Dáil, landing heavy hits on the Government with the sort of raw passion and anger that we haven’t seen for a while. His party has scored its highest approval rating for many years in the last opinion poll. Ironically, of course, had that opinion poll rating been registered in the election, he wouldn’t be party leader now, and Pat Rabbitte would be Tánaiste.

So he has nothing but opportunity ahead. The first one comes in Wexford. I expect that he will use the opportunity of his first conference to start putting his own stamp on the party he leads. He has the goodwill of not just the members, but also the previous leaders of the party, in doing that.

AND he will need to begin to articulate a different vision. As one who supported Pat Rabbitte’s strategy of allying Labour and Fine Gael, I believe Gilmore needs to strike a more independent course, and that he has the room to do it. But more than that, he needs to begin to articulate the difference Labour would make in people’s lives.

It’s often said about Irish politics that it has all gone towards the centre, and there’s some truth in that. But there is also a huge hunger for a politics that is more people-centred, more democratic in its fullest sense, more participatory.

In one of the richest countries in the world — soon perhaps (despite slower rates of growth) to be the richest — there is an awful lot wrong. An awful lot of injustice side by side with the incompetence; an awful lot of misery side by side with the affluence; an awful lot of neglect side by side with the consumption. We’ve ghettoised a lot of our poverty in Ireland and ignored the communities that are struggling.

Putting all that right would be something worth fighting for. Leading popular support for a campaign centred on social justice would almost be a revolutionary thing to do in our comfortable little republic. But I’d follow that leader, and I’m guessing I wouldn’t be alone.