Fine Gael will have all the choices

FINE Gael are now firmly in the driving seat as the sparks begin to fly in this election campaign now officially open. Fianna Fáil admit they have a mountain to climb as the new party leader, Mícheál Martin tries to project a new clean and pure image for his party.

Labour will perhaps be a little disappointed with the latest opinion polls, which continues to show a clear gap between themselves and Fine Gael.
Sinn Féin will have a major task in convincing the electorate to back them in their call to the EU-IMF to feck off and take their money with them.
The Greens are fighting for political survival as they risk losing all their seats in the coming election, while the Independents are hoping to win enough seats in order to have some political clout and hopefully be the real power breakers in the 31st Dáil.
Fine Gael will be the happiest of all the political parties at the latest opinion polls, which show them getting support in the early 30s. Labour support is somewhere in the low 20s, while Fianna Fáil is on about 16%, getting about the same as the Independents. Sinn Féin is on 10% in one poll and 13% in two others, while the Greens hardly figure at all.
On these figures, Fine Gael might have over 60 seats, Labour over 40, Fianna Fáil over 20, Sinn Féin might have about 12 or 13 seats, the Independents could get up to 20 and the Green Party would do well to hold one or two seats in the next Dáil. However, there is a long campaign ahead of us.
Those figures are not telling us much that we didn’t know already. If the election was held last week, Fine Gael’s Enda Kenny would be taoiseach and they would have a range of options. The preferred option may or may not be to invite Labour into government with them. A Fine Gael/Labour coalition would probably have over 100 seats, about 20 seats more than they need to form an overall majority between them.
However, Fine Gael just might prefer to form a minority Government themselves and hope to get support from Fianna Fáil and/or sufficient Independent deputies to hold on to power for a full term.
Why should Fine Gael share power with Labour if they can do it all on their own with outside help from Fianna Fáil or the Independents? They do not have to give any power to Fianna Fáil no more than Fianna Fáil gave power to Fine Gael during the years of the Tallaght Strategy in the late ’80s.
I think the best reason for sharing power with Labour is not because they have to, as in recent coalition arrangements between these two parties but because it might be wise to do so. Labour are now their nearest rivals and would be very vocal in Opposition. It would be better to keep them very quiet, better to have them inside peeing out than outside peeing in.
Anyway, it looks as if Fine Gael will have a luxury of choices after the election. While Labour may be hoping to do better over the course of the campaign, they are still on course to more than double the number of seats they held in the last Dáil. Although themselves and Fine Gael are at odds now on several fronts, they will be able to iron out their divisions as soon as the election is over and all the votes counted, if both parties want to.
Fianna Fáil are in deep trouble but they have known that for a long time now. I am sad at Brian Cowen’s decision not to contest the election. Only two weeks ago he won a resounding vote of confidence from his parliamentary colleagues but his Government was reeling from crisis to crisis and it was obvious Brian himself was on his last legs. The game was up and once he announced he was resigning as leader of Fianna Fáil, it was obvious there would not be a second coming.
What about Bertie Ahern? He threw the cat in among the pigeons – or was accused of throwing the cat among the pigeons – in the course of an RTÉ interview outside the Dáil during the week. He was verbally assaulted by a woman passerby, who interrupted the interview by telling him he should be ashamed of himself for the state he had left the country in.
However, the slant that was put on this by numerous callers to Liveline and other radio programmes gave the impression that Bertie had hit a poor woman while she had a child in her arms. He did no such thing. He listened politely to her tirade, thanked her for her contribution and when she had gone, remarked to the interviewer that some people did such things to get on the radio or television. The woman was later revealed to be a local councillor attached to one of the far-left political parties.
Bertie was also accused of saying his main regret on leaving politics was his failure to build the infamous ‘Bertie Bowl’. He never said that. What he did say was that he regretted there was so much unemployment today and that economic growth was so low. He would have loved if someone had told him what was happening in the banks and then, after saying he had lots of regrets about different things, he said he would love it if we had built a national stadium. Nothing wrong about that, as far as I know.
I have scrutinised the transcript of this interview very carefully and have come to the conclusion that people hear only what they want to hear. In this case, they thought they heard what they wanted to hear. The former taoiseach is now so unpopular that nobody wants to hear anything good from him or about him.
How the mighty have fallen.