It is time to bury legacy of division - A coalition of the centre

HAD Fianna Fáil’s finance spokesman Michael McGrath suggested a decade or two ago, even during an emotional, off-guard moment at one of his party’s lively sleepovers, that the party might have to contemplate being a junior coalition partner he would have been taken aside by a fatherly figure, PJ Mara maybe, and told firmly to keep his dangerous, defeatist ideas to himself. Mr McGrath would have felt the steel in the velvet glove on his collar.

The party backwoodsmen, those colourful closed minds who enlivened party conferences for so very long, would have been more vocal. Words like traitor, betrayal or, from the more articulate, phrases like tar and feather or, most damning of all in that particular lexicon, West Brit, would have turned the air blue.

If circumstances were slightly different, if fate had dealt Fine Gael the hand Fianna Fáil is holding, any member of that party brave enough to make such a pragmatic suggestion would have got a pretty similar reaction. Like the Soldiers of Destiny, the grandees of Fine Gael see it as their duty, as their birthright, to lead; better not to be in the orchestra at all than have to play second fiddle would be one of the very many, many things both parties agree on.