FF seeks to turn our loss to electoral gain

Fianna Fáil is back on its feet and getting back to basics. Even if reports of recovery are overdone, the recovery is real and shows signs of continuing.

A lot of the coverage focussed on abortion. However, much of what was debated centred on the party’s core. Farmers, public servants, and the self-employed were all oratorically fondled and had their ire justified. Micheál Martin’s strategy was about slowly slipping off the sackcloth and conjuring up again the populism — “fairness” was the upright term used — required to harvest popular discontent.

His televised speech on Saturday evening set out to do two things. Firstly, Fianna Fáil had given up its auld sins and is renewed. The party, he said, “was held to account for its failings in government”. Now it is time to responsibly move on. “If you want blinkered all-out opposition,” he said, “then the Fianna Fáil party I lead is not for you.”

In truth, for much of the last two years, Fianna Fáil held back from all-out opposition. This was critical for recovery and for restoring credibility. Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s ill-timed attack on Mr Martin on Friday was proof of revival. That the leader of a government with the largest majority in the history of the State could no longer ignore the opposition party that two years ago was shattered tells a story.

The FF leader lambasted the Government’s abject failure to deliver on the political reform agenda central to its electoral offering. His charge that “they haven’t implemented a single significant change in how Ireland is governed” is almost correct.

The accusation that plans to abolish the Seanad are a “major power grab by [a] government” with a massive majority in an unreformed Dáil certainly is true. But if poor governance led us into this mess, and will stymie sustained recovery out of it, it is not what people are most angry about. Mr Martin knows that and has moved on his party’s agenda accordingly.

The second object of his speech was to begin again a two-way conversation with voters. In this conversation, Fianna Fáil will seek a capacity to connect effectively to swathes of society, long years in government eroded. A renewed party began this weekend to champion anger instead of soaking it up. For Fianna Fáil, its ard fheis was about taking the decisive step away from past responsibility towards future political opportunity.

Their opportunity is the Government’s unpopularity. It is also about Sinn Féin’s failure to really challenge effectively for leadership of the opposition against a weakened Fianna Fáil. In that regard it was telling that Mr Martin claimed the label of a “progressive republican party”.

He did so in ways that were explicitly critical of the “alarming disengagement by the British and Irish governments” from the peace process, as well as being implicitly critical of Sinn Féin in the context of simmering community tensions in the North.

If a crisis erupts in the North on Mr Kenny’s watch he has been warned. He might remember the reputational consequences for John Bruton of what the former taoiseach came to call the “fucking peace process”.

The focus on political reform and the refocus on the North were about character building. They were intended to convey a party and leader with a bigger vision and a longer view. The main offering, however, was undistilled political populism intended to wrap up as many powerful groups that could be credibly afforded within the spending limits that the party signed up to when in government.

Mr Martin’s “fairer way to recovery” was morse code for abetting resistance to Croke Park II.

Fianna Fáil is positioning to benefit from public servants’ anger without explicitly opposing the deal or offering an alternative. It is clever politics. It blames the Government for its handling of the deal, not its substance, and it is likely to work.

On abortion, Fianna Fáil has always had a socially conservative base and its members are entitled to their views. On this issue, the Taoiseach is fundamentally right. No new law can do more than codify a constitutional reality.

He and Mr Martin are united in their opposition to a referendum on article 43.3.3. which ironically emphasises the limits rather than the extent of their credentials as pro-life politicians. Amidst the intellectual incontinence of the current debate, however, that is little understood.

Listening to Mr Martin’s speech what struck me was not its content but an accompanying aroma of simmering gravy being prepared to tempt the appetites of voters.

We need the savings a Croke Park II can deliver, but not this way. We need a property tax but not this one now. We need to be made chaste, Lord, but not yet. The old gravy train was out of the wrecker’s yard and on show at the RDS. Choo choo.