The end of Fianna Fáil is nigh

NOW the end is near. The game is up. We are no longer going to have Brian Cowen, Brian Lenihan, Mary Coughlan nor Mary Harney to kick around. Their days are numbered.

At the time of writing, we don’t know whether we are going to have the general election in January, February or March. It is even possible that we will have it before Christmas. One thing is more certain than anything else in these days of uncertainty about everything and that is Fianna Fáil are going to be dumped out of office with the loss of more seats than any party ever lost since the National Party was trounced by Sinn Féin in the 1918 General Election.
Fianna Fáil has been hated in the past, especially under leaders like Eamon de Valera and Charles Haughey, but never has the hatred been so intense or so widespread as under Brian Cowen. 
In previous years, the party was hated by sections of the people such as farmers or trade unionists. The party survived the economic war in the 1930s, the introduction of internment and the Offences Against the State Act in the 1940s and 1950s and the Turnover Tax in the 1960s.  It even survived all the allegations and revelations of widespread corruption at the highest levels of the party in the 1990s and up to the present. There are now question marks over the party’s survival into the future.
I imagine that the party has never been so unpopular as it has been over the past week. That is even before the introduction of what is expected to be the most draconian budget of all time. If people hated Fianna Fáil before, how are they going to feel after December 7?
If the situation were not so serious, I would have fallen off my chair during the week trying to hold my sides with laughter.
The cause of my near laughing downfall in these very sombre times was the spectacle of The Daily Mail thundering about what the men of 1916 would have thought of the latest threat to Irish sovereignty. What cheek! What hypocricy!  What a laugh!  It was newspapers like The Daily Mail that called for the execution of the men of 1916. The Daily Mail out-Toried the Tories themselves in condemning every little concession granted by England to Ireland.
According to BBC reporter John Simpson in his excellent book published this year, Unreliable Sources, about how the 20th century was reported by the British media, The Daily Mail in 1916 considered that Ireland was “a country of rogues, thieves and drunks”.
This is the paper that now lectures us about turning our backs on the men of 1916 and surrendering to the money men of Europe and the International Monetary Fund.
It was a week of hysterical politics rather than rational or meaningful debate. I would not go so far as Mary Hanafin did when she said the Greens did not have the interests of this country at heart when they called for a general election in the new year. They certainly were naive if they expected we were going to have stability after they made their announcement. As far as the international markets are concerned, stability here is critical at this point but is impossible since the Greens handed in their notice to quit.
I am not too sure either that an immediate general election – that is before Christmas – would provide the stability needed.  For one thing, we cannot have an immediate general election. The earliest time an election could be held would be the middle of December and we couldn’t possibly have the budget passed within that timeframe. Then I expect there would be protracted negotiations between Fine Gael and Labour on the framing of their programme for government.
Would the IMF be willing to wait? Will the banks have collapsed in the meantime?
The best thing to do is for all parties in the Dáil, at least the three main parties, to agree on a budget as quickly as possible and pass all the necessary financial and social welfare resolutions as soon as practical. We need to show the international markets that we are united in tackling the financial mess we are in.
The Government no longer has a mandate to stay in power but it can cling to office as long as it has the numbers in the Dáil. However, even that situation is now very much in doubt. So it is important that Fine Gael and Labour have input into the budget. They should also have had input into the four-year plan rather than be forced to implement a programme of austerity that they had neither hand, act nor part in drawing up.
In other words, what we need now more than ever before is national consensus in Ireland’s interests. We can do without all the hysteria we have been subjected to for the past week.  If we want to lynch Fianna Fáil, we can do so at the polls after the budget is passed. Surely to God if people have been waiting in the long grass for the last three years, they can wait for another few weeks.
In all my years involved in politics in one way or another back to the 1957 General Election, I have never seen so much anger as is out there now. I could have said the same during the campaign leading up to the local elections last year. The anger then, though, was mild compared to the fury and outrage even among former Fianna Fáil supporters. They are impatient for a general election and they want it yesterday. They are less interested in the composition of the next government than they are in getting rid of Fianna Fáil now.
I took pity on Fianna Fáil ministers who braved it onto TV programmes during the week. I thought Pat Carey might have to physically defend himself after he was ambushed by Pat Rabbitte on RTÉ’s Prime Time last Thursday. Poor Tony Killeen and Eamon Ryan were rendered speechless after they were verbally assaulted on Pat Kenny’s The Frontline on Monday night.
I certainly would not like to be a Fianna Fáil canvasser calling to people’s houses for votes during the long winter nights ahead.