Fianna Fáil falls to 32% - Cross-party co-operation is now crucial

IT WOULD have been amazing if the weekend opinion poll showed anything other than profound disappointment with our beleaguered Government.

Even the most ardent and optimistic of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s supporters must find it disconcerting. They will find it difficult to dismiss a loss of seven points in the few weeks since late October.

The Sunday Business Post poll shows that Fianna Fáil stands at 32%, a mere point ahead of Fine Gael.

It has been a long time since our two main parties, divided more by culture and history than current policy, have been so close in a poll of any kind. The usual “the-only-poll-that-matters” dismissal would be entirely out of tune with the sorry story told by these figures.

Since it was returned to office, the Government has had a very bad run of it. If it continues, it is unimaginable that all of those independents and the Greens, who keep Mr Ahern in the Taoiseach’s office, will hold their nerve.

Mr Ahern is facing, or has endured, embarrassments that would make a minor despot cringe — poisoned water in Galway, the Shannon/Heathrow debacle, Ryanair’s unanticipated raid on Aer Lingus, 24-hour U-turn on provisional drivers’ licences, a tremendous fall in values on the stock market and private pensions, unpopular pay rises for politicians and civil servants.

We’ve even had stories about a cabinet minister asking critical constituents to “step outside” to settle bar-room differences.

All of these difficulties have been trumped by the almost daily revelations in our festering health crisis, a scandal that has been slowly coming to the boil for more than a decade.

Despite record employment figures, these sorry affairs were greeted by entirely predictable — and justified — outrage. Opposition spokesmen enjoyed an early Christmas, all they had to do was state the obvious with varying degrees of indignation.

The point comes in any ongoing conflict — and that is what our public and civic lives have sadly become — when it is time to look at what the next step might be.

We have reached that point and it’s time social rather than political objectives were brought to the fore. Unless someone gets a grip and shows qualities of real leadership, the damaged credibility of our political system will be further diminished. We cannot afford to have this happen, citizen or politician. Politics, after all, is the process through which we try to order our lives.

It is time all of our politicians started to work together to bring about the reform that nearly every aspect of the way we conduct our public affairs is crying out for.

There must be a reassessment of the values and core objectives of this small and affluent society and of the procedures we employ to achieve those objectives.

If that includes ministerial resignations then so be it. Ms Harney, though she should not, is likely to remain in charge at health primarily because no one else wants to be sent to “Angola”. That the Taoiseach has lost the moral and political authority to force a senior cabinet colleague to move to that nightmare department will also contribute to Ms Harney’s survival.

Ironically, Fine Gael might have to make the greatest sacrifice to make any of this happen. Even though we are, in theory at least, four years from an election, it has a strong hand and, after so long in opposition, would like to play it out. Though it would be a bitter pill to swallow, it could initiate a new kind of Tallaght Strategy (policy of support for government introduced in 1987), one that might force change at the Cabinet table and give the party a leverage it might otherwise not have. It is all too easy for the cynical and politically irredeemable to dismiss these proposals as hopelessly naive but then, hope is the very cornerstone of politics: the hope that the impossible might be attained. After all, we cannot keep going the way we are.