Worrying times for Gilmore

IT is easy to understand why Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore is so “quiet, indecisive and unsure of himself” in Cabinet, as reported during the week. He cannot afford to annoy his Fine Gael colleagues. Gilmore was full of fire and brimstone while he was on the Opposition benches but now he as silent as a church mouse in Government. If he wants to remain in Government, he must continue to keep his mouth shut.
An opinion poll published in The Sunday Times last Sunday showed Fine Gael support is now at 44%. In other words, support for Enda Kenny’s party has jumped by a whopping 8% since the general election last February. At the same time, support for the Labour Party has slumped by around 7%, now down to a miserable 12%.
Now, one swallow never made a summer and opinion polls vary. Nevertheless, there should be cause for concern in that opinion poll for Labour and Gilmore.
The fact that the main party in Government has gained support, while the junior party has lost out, carries a message that is difficult to fathom. However, there is one message there that Gilmore will take to heart and that is that Fine Gael might call a snap election at any time.
This latest opinion poll shows that if a general election were held now, the likely result would be an overall majority for Fine Gael, while Labour would be cast out into Opposition darkness.
I am not saying Kenny is likely to call a general election soon. What I am saying is that if Labour started to act up and demand this, that or the other from their senior partner, Kenny could just as easily respond by telling the junior party to keep quiet or else.
That is almost certainly not going to happen in the immediate future but if we get other opinion poll showing the same result as the latest one showed, you can expect an even more silent and indecisive Gilmore in the Cabinet room.
Eamon de Valera pulled a stroke back in the early 1930s that Kenny might like to copy. Fianna Fáil were first elected to Government in 1932, depending on Labour support in the Dáil. After a few months, however, Dev decided he wanted to get the Labour monkey off his back. So he called a snap election in 1933 and was returned with an overall majority.
Do not be too surprised if Kenny at some stage next year, or the year after, decides to flush Labour out of the Cabinet, especially if Labour gets any way obstreperous.
So Labour’s only chance of survival in Government will be to toe the Fine Gael line, while at the same time pretending to their own supporters that they are pushing for the Socialist agenda in Cabinet.
That is not an easy path to take. Go too far to the left and they risk annoying their Fine Gael masters but go too far to the right and they risk losing support to their arch political rivals in Sinn Féin and the Socialist Party and even to Fianna Fáil. Even if they remain in the centre, they still risk losing ground to Sinn Féin and the other left-wing groups. No wonder Gilmore is so indecisive.
He must also be in dread of the reaction he is going to get from his own party, as the threatened further cuts in public spending are announced next month. He knows he has to stand idly by as the Fine Gael axe comes down heavily on his own people, many of whom are depending on social welfare.
Another €6.4 billion has to be taken out of a dwindling economy and that cannot be done without hurting a lot of people who came out in record numbers last February to vote for Labour. They voted for Labour because they believed Labour would stand by them when push came to shove in Cabinet with Fine Gael.
Gilmore promised us when he was in Opposition that it would be “Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way”. It is now definitely Frankfurt’s way. This week he explained this was “chapel gate language…that is used to simplify what are at times complex issues”.
So that explains it. Every promise made in Opposition can in future be taken with a grain of salt. We all knew that, of course but now it is given official sanction as ‘chapel gate language’. I would prefer if he called it ‘pub talk’ or an empty promise made to a gullible people.
We had another example of that during the week when Justice Minister Alan Shatter was quizzed by Cathal MacCoille on Morning Ireland about the expected reduction in garda numbers as a result of forthcoming retirements from the force.
Last December, when he was still in Opposition, Deputy Shatter said it was “of crucial importance that the number of gardaí be maintained at 14,500”. He accused the then Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern of “craven capitulation and incompetence” by planning to reduce garda numbers by over 1,000.
However, that was then and this is now, as Minister Shatter is about to implement the very same reductions in garda numbers that he condemned last December. He spent over 10 minutes on Morning Ireland trying to explain himself – that there was a new Government in power with new policies.
He should have said he had been engaging in ‘chapel gate language’ while in Opposition, rather than going on for over 10 minutes of waffle in a vain effort to convince us we should believe him that things had changed. The change is, of course, that Mr Shatter is now in power and no longer obliged to indulge in irresponsible baloney about the need to maintain garda numbers at 14,500.
There was a time when deputies were never given the same portfolios in Government that they had in Opposition so the promises they made in Opposition would not come back to haunt them in Government. Now they don’t care. Now they think so little about us that, they don’t give a damn what we think.
Is it any wonder that so many people have become so disillusioned with politicians that they no longer bother to vote?