Kenny must take new approach to deliver on passionate commitments

Calm please. Don’t lose the run of yourselves. Less happened last weekend than may be imagined.

The Seanad is saved, but that is small beer. We would have been worse off without it. The real risk was losing permanently any prospect of a really reformed political process. Getting rid of the Seanad would have said to the Government – ‘get on with it lads, yis are doing all right.’ Last Friday’s decision means their card is marked. It’s not all right. Will it make a positive difference? Let’s wait and see.

On second thought let’s not wait. And let’s not wait and see if somebody else will step up to the plate instead. We can actually do something about this ourselves; democracy matters. Part of the pickle the Government has gotten into is that it has become so steeped in the processes of government that it became anesthetised to the fact that back in real life, democracy does matter.

Democratic government is an organism not an organisation. It is bottom up, it is either thriving or waning. It constantly needs new people and new ideas to prosper. And I am not talking cabinet reshuffle here. That’s ornaments on the Christmas tree stuff. Government to be successful needs to be fairly porous in the range of contacts and people it reaches out to for input and advice. It needs to be confident about stepping outside its own comfort zone. It needs to understand that reaching out, bringing in and being inclusive are essential to keep energy up, ideas fresh and support confident.

This Government is remarkably poor at doing those things. It is in the bunker far sooner and far deeper that is either understandable or healthy. The Taoiseach and his ministers were so long in opposition that they haven’t made the psychological adjustment to government. It’s not them against the world anymore. They actually have the world, or a little bit of it anyway, in their hands.

Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore are still running their parties from inside tightly controlled command centres staffed with a small crew of ultra-loyal colleagues and advisers. Outside those coteries very few in cabinet, let alone their wider parliamentary parties, enjoy ‘access all-areas’ privileges. The choke-chain is asphyxiating the inflow of new ideas and support.

The heave against Kenny in 2009 either made him or it allowed him to transform from chairman to chief. But if being a big chief worked in opposition when the prospect of being in government imminently was nearly certain, it is not working in government now. We are a post-authoritarian society being run in a retrofitted controlling style of government. It is funny in its ineffectiveness. It is a great gift to comedy. But it is not credible and it is not working for them or us.

It is not just that tight political leashes inside the Government parties are straining and in some cases snapping. It is that a government, operating with a fortress mentality and command and control as its favoured techniques, is playing a lose-lose game with the electorate. It is truly extraordinary and extraordinarily stupid that from the nanosecond it got elected with the largest majority in the history of the State both parties, their leaders and their advisers immediately fell back on their core political base. The great swathes of votes from other parties, principally Fianna Fáil, that had been successfully borrowed to create that largest majority ever, were summarily cold shouldered. Kenny in opposition made a lot of hay on the back of criticism of Brian Cowen being highly partisan as Taoiseach. Funny then that he is reheating the recipe.

There is nothing inevitable about Fine Gael’s current conundrum. After the last election Fine Gael had an historic opportunity to permanently establish itself as the largest party in the State. My guess is that it will still be the largest party after the next election. But the opportunity for hegemony has passed, or rather it was blown. Kenny’s insistence on continuing a rabidly partisan narrative, more than demonised Fianna Fáil, it turned away that party’s supporters who had switched to him in droves. His failure to co-opt prominent figures, not from that party, but from its hinterland, was a lost opportunity. They would have welcomed a home had it been offered.

Majorities are made up by constantly co-opting new people for new causes. Kenny’s comfort zone is not simply in Fine Gael, it is in the Fine Gael core that stood by him. His treatment of those TDs who walked over abortion was a wanton waste of political capital. His party chairman Charlie Flanagan might well wail on Monday about “an element of pro-life revenge” in the successful no vote. He is right.

There is an awful lot of nonsense being written lately about the rash of ‘don’t-knows’ popping up in opinion polls. The inference is that they are half-wits. They are certainly seen as irritating, occluding as they do a clear view of the future. But the point is they are the future. Core committed party political support has been plummeting for a generation. 2011’s meltdown of Fianna Fáil knocked another chunk out of the edifice.

The dominant political persuasion today is not for any political party. It is not as condescended to ‘don’t-know’; it is independent. It is independent in the sense that some, sometimes do support independent candidates. It is more fully independent in the sense of more and more people making up their mind independently of affiliation from one ballot to the next.

One of the key strengths of Democracy Matters, who in unpredicted victory instantly had more activists than fitted inside the GPO in 1916, is that it had a range of compelling voices that were genuinely independent. Senators Katherine Zappone, a long-time activist but a new political voice, Feargal Quinn with a long career in business and respected for talking sense, John Crown and Professor Diarmuid Ferriter gave credibility to an increasingly deeply held need for a different, and more inclusive national narrative.

The cup is half full for Enda Kenny. His problem is not just that he needs to get out more, it is that he needs to open up from the inside out how this country is governed. He needs to wallop himself and cop-on that he is the leader of the largest parliamentary majority at a time of the greatest institutional and economic crisis in the history of the State.

After a political life time of being a small time player, he is now the man. He has made it. The small mindedness, the cliquishness, the múinteoir-type smacht is Craggy Island stuff. There are a lot of good people out there who want to help. There are a lot of bright ideas to change things. He can still deliver on his previously passionate commitment to a new politics. But it will take some new thinking and new approaches on his part.