General Election 2011 - A stable government is essential

THERE are just four days left in the most extraordinary election campaign in our modern history.

Opinion polls have never been more unambiguous. The core issue has never been as clear and not even the most disconnected candidates have been able to offer anything other than several years of dispiriting but unavoidable belt tightening.

If the polls are right, and there is no reason to imagine that they are not, Enda Kenny will be Taoiseach in little over a week. Though he, and this generation of Fine Gael politicians, will have realised a lifetime’s ambition he will, in the short term at least, face challenges more to do with survival than the implementation of any grand vision. Our IMF paymasters will see to that.

The surrender of our economic independence and the awful cost of shoring up a broken financial system, along with terrible unemployment figures, are the dominant issues of the campaign.

The next government will inherit a bankrupt country and any plans to rebuild it will be defined by the terms of the EU/IMF rescue deal.

If domestic ambitions envisage anything that steps beyond the constraints of the rescue package agreed in the dying days of Brian Cowen’s Government then those plans will be at least deferred.

This will be the reality whether Mr Kenny leads a coalition, a single party administration or an arrangement dependent on the support of some independents.

There may be a glimmer of hope, though, as attitudes across Europe seem to be shifting ever so slightly to recognise the impossibility of our obligations under the current rescue deal. If we are to generate the momentum needed to rebuild this economy then the cost to Irish taxpayers, if not the principles of that deal, will have to be reconsidered.

The terms seem impossibly punitive and impose an unsustainable cost on a citizenship no more culpable for the recklessness of its bankers than the German or French citizens are culpable for the unwise decisions taken by their bankers when they funded Anglo Irish and the other gamblers we once imagined were responsible and trustworthy.

This will be the very first issue facing the next government. The scale of the challenge should not be underestimated but there is still hope that the March EU summit might be the moment that Europe decides to put the wellbeing of its citizens before the demands of its financiers, hedge funds and faceless bondholders.

If our next government is to have the strongest hand possible as they enter these negotiations they will have to be able to convince Europe that they represent an administration that can guarantee a period of stability, four or five years probably, and that they can deliver whatever revised deal is agreed.

As we go to the polls on Friday we should all use the ballot card to give the country a stable government.

We are too close to chaos for anything else.