Articulating a credible future proving to be a major problem for Fianna Fáil
The lust for office, the strongest of all the primeval urges in those with the FF chromosome will be an unbearable temptation.
It won’t be in the party’s interest to return to government. Formerly in the driving seat, they will be counted, along with Labour, as the alternate spare tyre in Irish politics. Fine Gael, re-elected for the first time as the major party in government, will have replaced Fianna Fáil as the natural party of government. The highest ambition of the also-rans will be to be picked as its partner.
There will be a lot of water under the bridge before any of this comes to pass. In any event the possibility of succumbing to the temptation of being even the junior party in government may be fantasy. If the combined strength in opinion polls puts the parties now in government between seven and 10 seats off the bare majority they would require; that is now. If repeated on polling day it would be decisive in dictating a change in the makeup of a future government.
But polling day in a general election is two years away and it is not so decisive a difference that it cannot be overcome. So if a change in the makeup of government looks likely on the basis of recent polls, it is far from being a certainty.
Whatever, about the outcome of the general election poll two years from now, a much more worrying poll for Fianna Fáil is the one to be held 10 weeks from next Friday for the local and European elections. There is a dolly mixture of opinion polls to pick from, but for Fianna Fáil the same theme is emerging over recent months. An embryonic recovery in 2013 that saw it achieve opinion poll numbers in the mid- to high-20s and the promise of more if momentum was maintained, has not materialised. Some of that soft recovery has been lost.
The party is now flat-lining in a series of polls at just over 20%. Last Sunday’s Independent-Millward Brown Poll put Fianna Fáil on 21% (down 5%). A RedC poll in the Sunday Business Post on February 23 put the party on 22% (down 1%). Whatever about the jigs and the reels of different polls, Fianna Fáil is looking at a local election result that could be far worse that the 25% achieved under Brian Cowen in 2009. That was an unprecedented disaster. It also occurred under the worst of all possible circumstances when the party was leading a government beset by calamity, which may be exceeded.
This is in spite of the fact that the party has escaped the halter of government. After three years in opposition it now has the advantage of opposing an unpopular government, many of whose problems are of its own making. But Fianna Fáil is not making hay. The problems it has are both its own recent history and an incapacity, so far, to articulate a credible future. Its front bench is lamentably weak. There are only a handful of real players, and some of that handful — even if they’re quick witted — are work-shy.
Fianna Fáil’s main problem is not, however, a shortage of suitable personnel, though that is acute. It is worse, it is a party without either a purpose, or the obvious capacity to invent one. Reinvention is of a different order of magnitude from renewal. Martin constantly talks of renewal; but renewal of what?
There are real issues about what Fianna Fáil might stand for in the future. Its past was predicated on being the constitutional nationalist party. The outward form of the political party was in any event only the temporal sign of the spiritual power that was the national movement within. Guffaw all you want now, but more than enough bought it, or a variant, to empower one of the most successful political movements in any western democracy in the 20th century.
Defeat in the civil war was rekindled into an eternal flame of ethereal republican values. The economic war, Bunreacht na hÉireann, The Emergency, Ireland’s accession to the EEC, The Good Friday Agreement were all a roll-call of achievement synonymous with the nation. Even when from the 1960s self-interest at times disturbingly replaced the national interest within the party, enough of the latter flourished still to be a nosegay for the strongest of smells.
The rearticulation of Fianna Fáil as a party that stood, not just for the national interest, which called for as much sacrifice as it offered reward, into a party increasingly synonymous with the personal interest of its supporters, is now the toxic legacy it has to overcome.
Institutionalised in social partnership, the State was at first subtly, but then more thoroughly, turned into an apparatus that offered nearly all some reward, while excusing them of most responsibility. The banking crisis was an offshoot and a symptom of a largess that had to be invested somewhere, even a bungalow in Ballygobackwards.
The loss of sovereignty, the shattering of credibility, the continuation in opposition of a public face via Martin himself, associated with an ultimately abject failure in government are all mountains to climb. But beyond all that, is more. What if any purpose does Fianna Fáil have in the 21st century? What does it stand for?
IT is its own in-articulation in answering this question that is the party’s ultimate challenge, the one it has largely failed to address. The world has changed radically since the party was founded in 1926. Ireland may have regained its economic sovereignty but it has done so in a world where political authority is no longer synonymous with national government.
We are rearing a generation whose deepest connections are via the electronic gizmos their little fingers manipulate from a disturbingly early age. There is a hoovering up of power above to supra-national boardrooms and institutions. Below, anyone with access to a SIM card is in a position to challenge any narrative. Fianna Fáil is caught in an old world, recycling answers to out-of-date questions.
Micheál Martin became leader of Fianna Fáil because he was the last man standing. He enjoys little love and less loyalty among most of his parliamentary colleagues. His own future is far from assured. It is possible that enough old-fashioned politics, wearing out old-fashioned shoe leather will get enough candidates over the line 12 weeks’ time, to declare, if not victory, at least work in progress. In Dublin especially, even that is not clear.
The party is teetering between the mausoleum of indefinite opposition and the crypt reserved for junior partners in Government Buildings. Both are remarkably similar forms of irrelevance, neither promise any rest in peace.
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