Damage limitation is the name of the game

COMMENT

Fianna Fáil have as much chance of winning the next election as Leitrim or Carlow have of winning the All-Ireland.

That goes without saying. The best they can hope for is to limit the damage as much as possible. There may be two years still left in this Government and the best friend they have now is time.
The latest opinion poll – last Sunday’s Red C tracking poll for the Sunday Business Post – had some good news and a lot of bad news for Fianna Fáil.
The good news – from the Fianna Fáil point of view, that is – is that support for Fine Gael was down once more. While Fine Gael support is still ahead of that for Fianna Fáil, this latest poll showed that Fine Gael is down a massive five points in little more than a month. That is a worrying trend for Enda Kenny and his party. A few weeks ago Fine Gael looked as if they might be able to get an overall majority at the next election and for the first time in its history, form a government on their own without any help from Labour or any other party.
There was also good news for Fianna Fáil in the fact that support for Labour was also down in the latest opinion poll and that Fianna Fáil is no longer languishing in third place behind Fine Gael and Labour.
But that’s the end of the good news. The bad news is that Fianna Fáil support is still stuck below 25%. That kind of support would see the party decimated at the next election. The party would lose so many seats that it might take several years to recover.
But opinion polls are only opinion polls. All they do is give an indication about the state of support for the various political options at a particular time. They consistently show Fine Gael ahead of the field with Fianna Fáil and Labour several points behind.
That is probably how a general election would turn out if it were held now.
But this Government is likely to survive at least until the end of this year and the Budget. It has got over so many obstacles in the past three years that the chances are that it can limp on for another year or so. But I still contend that the Greens may find an issue on which to fall out with Fianna Fáil and pull the plug before the June 2012 deadline.
There is so much dislike out there for Fianna Fáil that the Greens will have to fight the election campaign on an anti-Fianna Fáil platform. And they cannot do that if they keep supporting their politician partners to the bitter end.
Fianna Fáil needs a by-election now like a hole in the head. They will need to keep the seats in Dublin South, Waterford and Donegal South West vacant as long as possible because they haven’t a hope in hell of winning any of them.
There is nothing in the Constitution to state that a by-election must be held within a certain time after a vacancy occurs in a constituency. So in order to keep this shaky coalition together as long as possible, Brian Cowen needs to ignore all demands to hold those by-elections now or in the near future.
It is not like the situation in Britain where each constituency has only one MP. Several TDs represent every constituency under our system of Proportional Representation. So I am sure that Dublin South, Waterford and Donegal South West are still ably represented in the Dáil.
And, by the way, Brian Cowen has enough problems from the Opposition and his own backbenches without headaches visited on him by his cabinet colleague Éamon Ó Cuív.
Mr Ó Cuív was only a few weeks in his new job in charge of social welfare when he started talking about cutbacks in the old-age pension. Or at least that’s what he appeared to be talking about.
Now he is talking about cutbacks in the dole and in the lone parent allowance.
As if things were not bad enough for Fianna Fáil already without really landing themselves in the brown stuff.
It is unquestionable that the whole social welfare system needs to be radically reformed. Payments or allowances should not be paid to those who do not need them. But they must always be paid to those in need. That is a simple fact that everybody accepts. But there are always abuses and there are always people who are not getting the payments they should be entitled to.
There is nothing wrong with a proposal to disqualify people from collecting the dole if they refuse an offer of suitable employment. I would imagine tht most people would support that move.
But the way in which it was announced last Friday evening gave the impression that the Government had something to hide. Same with the announcement about changes to the single payment allowance.
Carlow and Leitrim do not need to score own goals in order to lose. Neither do Fianna Fáil .