Labour’s love lost: Fine Gael flirting with Fianna Fáil and a possible ‘remarriage’

Unrequited love is our theme today. My heart went out to Joan Burton yesterday morning. I hope you had the sensitivity to feel the same. 

The Tánaiste woke up like the woman rubbing her eyes who realises the sweet-nothings that put her to sleep are the sound of her boyfriend chatting up another girl on the telephone. The deceit, the shame — the fury.

No this isn’t more guff about the heterosexuals in government feeling they have to explain why they are attracted to the opposite sex. It’s about Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney chatting up Fianna Fáil on the front page of this newspaper yesterday.

It gets worse. Juno McEnroe, who interviewed Coveney, told Rachel English on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that he had spoken to bold, bad Simon before Christmas.

This is such a sensitive time of year. The mistletoe is hardly down, and Burton has been made look like a fool, in public. There won’t be any frolicking at the Government Christmas party next year; if there is any Christmas party at all.

Mind you, Simon’s ardour might have cooled when he saw what was in store for him, in the form of Fianna Fáil’s Timmy Dooley. The Clare TD wasn’t having any of it, at first, and tartly tweeted: “So @simoncoveney is coming out ..... wants to go into Government with FF — No thanks, Simon”.

So @simoncoveney is coming out ..... wants to go into Government with FF - No thanks Simon @morningireland

— Timmy Dooley (@timmydooley) January 20, 2015

There, nuff said. Except it wasn’t. Timmy then made the fatal mistake of saying a lot more. ‘No’ didn’t, in fact, mean no at all. In fact, it meant ‘yes, if the policies are right’. ‘No’ became ‘maybe’, faster than the snap of knicker-elastic, and all the accompanying loss of decorum.

Simon may think now that a slap of the frying pan from Joan would be better than putting up with Deputy Dooley. But too late. The damage is done. The humiliation for Labour is complete.

This wasn’t a philosophical rumination that, maybe, at some time in an as-yet-unforeseeable future, the two grand old parties might coalesce. No, it was a cold, calculating assessment of the numbers.

The numbers aren’t adding up for this Government to get re-elected, for now. And if, on the day after the next election, they do add up for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, a Vegas wedding conducted by an Elvis impersonator is on the cards. You would have to have a heart of stone for it not to break laughing.

Don’t get me wrong. A lot of ‘looking over the shoulder of the person you are talking to’ goes on in politics. The gimlet eye of every politician is trained to permanently scan the room to see if there is somebody more attractive, or at least more available. That is to say nothing of the footsie under the table.

But on the front page of a national newspaper? It’s tawdry and it’s telling. Labour has been taken for a ride. But, then, they knew that from the get-go. For the first time in the history of the State, their presence was not required to form an alternative government to Fianna Fáil.

Reduced to 20 seats, and 17% of the vote, Fianna Fáil, the once-nearly permanent party of government would, in principle, have had to support Fine Gael’s implementation of the agreement with the Troika, which they themselves had just negotiated.

And even if that matter of principle could have been overcome, and it eventually would be, their toxicity ensured that they had to play for time, rather than soon face the electorate again.

But Labour stepped in, rescued Fianna Fáil from that dilemma, and gave Fine Gael a burnt offering of the largest store of political capital they had ever acquired. How burnt that offering has become.

The legacy of the Eamon Gilmore era for Labour, and the accumulated anger of the Irish people, is now a fatal and unresolvable contradiction. Labour, having so righteously dammed what went before, and having promised what could not be delivered, have become the object of the very anger they harvested, but more.

More than anger, there is scorn. The scorn of an electorate betrayed. And now this. Double-dealing, by the very people for whom they sold out and with the very party who authored the bust.

Labour can correctly plead that they have provided good government. But that won’t count for much. They didn’t provide the government they promised. That is what counts against them now.

It’s always the smaller party that gets rolled-over. The PDs and the Greens disappeared from sight. Their dilemma then, Labour’s now, may shortly be Fianna Fáil’s. There is no reason why a coalition with Fine Gael shouldn’t happen, or wouldn’t work, if the numbers add up.

Dooley, by default, admitted as much. Of course, for now, the diminished regard in which all the so-called establishment parties are held is such that a once-grand coalition of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would not even be certain of having the necessary seats to form a government.

It’s hardly 30 years since the two together commanded 84% of the vote in a general election. Last week’s RedC poll put the two on 42%. That would get them just over the threshold of the bedroom door. A once-great edifice has halved in size. It’s like that moment, after long hours in a night-club, when the lights go on. You can hardly believe what went on, and with whom you are on your way home.

Even if Fine Gael are in deep difficulty, so long as they can remain the largest party, they will have more cards to play, and telephone calls to make, than any other. The attraction for Fianna Fáil is to forgo the possibility of further recovery, for the pleasure of government. That will be irresistible for many of its leading lights. It may be a necessity for its leader, Micheál Martin, who cannot be assured of surviving another term in opposition. If he isn’t Tánaiste, will he be toast?

But if he is Tánaiste, and does lead Fianna Fail into government, as the junior party, it will be an ultimate, and likely permanent, hegemony for Fine Gael over the centre of Irish politics.

The centre may be a much-diminished political space, but, regardless of its extent, it is the meeting point around which governments are formed.

For now, Joan Burton is trapped in a loveless relationship. An acrimonious split-up would be far too expensive, so they will go on together, sullenly, until their term ends. But this is how it ends in the modern politics of à-la-carte relationships. ‘Of course I love you, that’s why I am in government with you’. I can almost feel the slap of the frying pan across the jaw.

READ MORE: Simon Coveney supports idea of coalition with Fianna Fáil