Make or break time for Fianna Fáil

COMMENT

As the new Dáil session opened this week, only the most foolish could make any predictions about the future of Irish politics.
Fianna Fáil is promising to give more power to ordinary members of the party, while Fine Gael promises that the Budget will be fair.
We can only wait and see. By their deeds we will judge them but we have learned long ago to take little notice of promises made by political parties. So we cannot predict what the future holds.
Still, it is nice to see that Fianna Fáil now realises one of the party’s big mistakes was to ignore the wishes of ordinary party members and rely too much on the advice of so-called experts who couldn’t really know what was happening on the ground.
When Fianna Fáil was founded all those years ago, the main plank of the party’s platform was power to the people. You could argue, of course, that that was the slogan of every party in politics. Can you imagine a party promising to take power away from the people? How long would that party survive?
However, in the old days, Fine Gael was looked on as the party of the big farmer, the wealthy businessman and the rich lawyer. Fianna Fáil was seen as the party that stood for the men of no property, the men with the threadbare trousers. Fianna Fáil got more votes from labourers than did the Labour Party. It got more support from republicans than did Sinn Féin or any of the other republican parties.
Even when it became the established party of government it never lost the whiff of rebellion. It was still seen as the party that would stand up for the small man against State bureaucracy.
That changed. Not suddenly. Over several decades Fianna Fáil gradually turned to big business for support. That was where the money lay. It was no longer dependent on the pennies or the pounds collected at the church gate on Sunday.
We all knew of the cottages in the country where the Sacred Heart lamp was lighting in front of the picture of de Valera. Could you imagine anything like that homage being paid to Dev’s successors such as Ahern or Cowen? I don’t have to elaborate. Enough said about that.
Today – or, more correctly, over the last decade or so – Fianna Fáil has been regarded as the party that looked after the banks, the building societies and the big developers.
The first evidence we got that the tide was turning against Fianna Fáil came in the local and European elections of 2004 at the height of the Celtic Tiger as party candidates up and down the country suffered from the wrath of the electorate.
That was nothing compared to what was coming down the tracks. There is no need here to go into all the gory details but this once mighty institution was almost annihilated at the last election.
People whose fathers and grandfathers would have died for Fianna Fáil now did what they never thought they would do – they voted for Fine Gael, Labour, Sinn Féin or any other party but Fianna Fáil.
Seven months have gone by since that election – seven months of Fine Gael and Labour coalition – and there is still no indication that the people are sorry for what they did then.
The Fianna Fáil label is as toxic today as it was last February and that is the huge task facing Micheál Martin as the new Dáil session opens. It is still too early to say whether he is up to the job.
While this is a good time to be in Opposition, with the Government forced to make more cruel cuts in public spending, Fianna Fáil hands are tied somewhat. How can they attack the Government’s economic policies with any credibility since the Government is merely implementing policies drawn up by Fianna Fáil when they were in power? Anyway, was it not Fianna Fáil policies that landed us in this mess in the first place?
That’s going to be the big test for Micheál Martin in the coming months. He can, of course, as he did this week in Tallaght, attack the coalition for reneging on all the promises they made before the last election. At the same time, he must continue to accuse Sinn Féin of opposing merely for the sake of opposing.
We should know by the end of this Dáil session whether he or Gerry Adams is the real leader of the Opposition.
Nobody can predict at this stage what is in store for Fianna Fáil. There are those even in Fianna Fáil itself who believe the party can never recover from the slaughter of the last election. That may very well happen but I am long enough around to know that you can never say never in politics.
Who could possibly have believed that Fine Gael would today be the biggest party in the Dáil, the Seanad, in the county councils and in the European Parliament?
Less than 10 years ago, the party was massacred in a general election and just over a year ago about half the party’s TDs and senators believed that Enda Kenny was leading them into oblivion.
While support for Fine Gael appears to have increased since the election, there is to guarantee that this support will continue after the Budget. It is more likely to decrease but that may not happen either.
It might be more relevant to speculate on what support there will be for Fine Gael – and for all the other parties – in less than three years’ time when the next local elections are due. But that is an impossible prediction to make.
My point is that we cannot write Fianna Fáil off – yet. I am not going to say that things are so bad for Fianna Fáil that they could not be worse. A lot of people thought that last year and the year before that. Who knows? It might not take too much of an effort for Fianna Fáil to win back the second seat in Clare, for instance, at the next general election. There are several such examples all over the country.
I am not going to predict but I do feel this coming Dáil session will be make-or-break time for Fianna Fáil.