Test for the Government is to survive the presidency

AS 2013 progresses, a problematic side-effect of Ireland’s six-month EU presidency will become obvious.

The presidency is a huge logistical challenge. It consumes the attention of senior officials and their ministers. People in demanding roles are double-jobbing. Much of government is put on hold.

If the Irish system is temporarily distracted, the beleaguered political system will be sorely tested. In any government, there may be a cast of hundreds, but a dozen people count. Only some of them are politicians. Their attention will be focused on EU business.

This is the first Irish presidency since 2004 and the last until 2027. Successful Irish EU presidencies have been built on the institutional memory of previous ones. By the time of the next, the institutional memory will have retired. For now, however, the challenge is not 2027; it is reaching the political horizon of the summer of 2013 intact, without losing more backbenchers or public support.

A successful presidency might help, but it might not. Past EU presidencies have done more to burnish the historical reputation of the main protagonists than to bolster their contemporaneous standing.

The presidency will allow a government beset by difficulties to showcase its capacity. If that brings no immediate respite, it may, perhaps, be held in the reckoning when it comes to electing a government again. The problem for the Government now is successfully configuring an end-game on its own terms. Those who succeed in framing the debate will likely win it.

Tentative signs of recovery may steady public opinion and political nerves. But the recovery, such as it is, is a long way from either delivering jobs or moving us on from austerity.

January will see a series of hits on households, as higher taxes (in the form of PSRI increases), cuts in child benefit, and more, hit home. As the presidency rolls on, the bills for the new property tax will roll out. That alone will be a major political brouhaha.

The Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children will hold hearings on abortion later this month. That will be the beginning of a furore that will not go away. These, and the unexpected events that beset every government, will come at a time when key people at the centre of the political project are least available.

When the political management of its own business is hard-going for a government, the additional strain of the EU presidency is unlikely to help. If political preoccupation is the part of the iceberg visible above the water, the greater part below is the loss of time for the system to deliver on government priorities.

Four years may be a long time in politics, but it is not a long time in government. In the political race against the clock, the six months, and more, absorbed by an EU presidency may be as costly to the political parties in the Coalition as it is undoubtedly beneficial to the State. Minister of State for Finance Brian Hayes’s restatement, yesterday, of the Government’s intention to secure another €1bn in savings from the public sector is but one example of the sustained political commitment required to attain elusive goals.

That doesn’t account for the daily attention needed to avoid banana skins. The presidency may make statesmen out of government ministers, but it won’t necessarily future proof them as successful politicians.

The issue of a Cabinet reshuffle later this year is increasingly on the horizon, and there is talk of Michael Noonan calling it a day. His retirement would seem to offer more problems than possibilities to Enda Kenny. Kenny may have several candidates for Cabinet. He has no obvious one for minister for finance.

It is Labour, however, that is in difficulty. The Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore is damaged and his party is feverous. The five TDs outside the parliamentary party now outnumber the four Democratic Left TDs who merged into, and have since dominated, Labour. Of those four, two became leaders, one deputy leader and another president. Labour might well ask who gave and who gained. The problem for the five TDs who comprise Labour-in-exile is that the left is overcrowded and has a proven propensity to disunite. For all the talk about policy, fractious personalities, not a sense of solidarity, ultimately hold sway.

The issue for Gilmore is not whether he will remain at foreign affairs. It is will he pass up on the job of EU Commissioner, and, like Lord Cardigan, who led the charge of the Light Brigade into the guns at Balaclava, unflinchingly face the electorate again?

Pat Rabbitte’s longer term future as a minister may also be in doubt. It is an open question whether he will stand again in a reconfigured Dublin South West, where, with the expected arrival of junior minister Alex White, there will be three sitting Labour TDs in a five-seat constituency.

The communications minister’s increasingly overwrought statements, on issues from his own party colleagues, before Christmas, to the media’s “denigration” of politics, this week, indicate that rest from the burden of importance is overdue.

If Rabbitte cannot positively clarify his intention to stand at the next election, his Labour colleagues may query his continued presence at Cabinet. Rabbitte, however, not the nominal honoree, Joan Burton, is effectively deputy leader of Gilmore’s Labour. His departure would potentially signal Gilmore’s move to Brussels. Cumulatively, that would be the most important change for Labour since its merger with Democratic Left.

In a government where fewer than a dozen people really count, and not all of them are politicians, the departures of Noonan, Gilmore or Rabbitte, who count, or James Reilly, who counts for less, will significantly change its complexion. And it would leave the ‘father of the House’ and the daddy of them all, Enda Kenny, leading on into his fifth decade in politics.