So, as anyone anywhere close to the political classes will tell you this last few days since the announcement of the Budget has seen not the long anticipated and – let’s be honest, feared – tsunami of discontent and anger at the Government parties but instead a strange silence. There were some indications of a public sector campaign of emails and calls, but low level in the main. So, all told the Government politicians are counting this as a job well done.
Are they right?
I’m not so sure. The next round of polls will tell their own story, but most intriguing to me is whether we see an upward tilt in the Fianna Fáil poll numbers. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised. And yet, this surely must mark the point at which Fianna Fáil voters in the public sector have finally lost faith with that party. And given that many, if not indeed most – statistics would be useful on this score, people have PS workers in their families as brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters you’d think that the recent cuts would have finally nailed the trope about not sharing this nebulous ‘pain’ and that that might concentrate minds when pay packets come in in the New Year. So, to anticipate some gains for Labour and Fine Gael is hardly the stuff of divine prophecy and more like basic logic.
That said the media and business and econommentariat plaudits for the Budget are unlikely to have gone unnoticed and one wonders if that will support or even strengthen FF numbers. And there’s more than one FG tending voter who likes the lash of firm government, particularly if the crack descends elsewhere.
As regards the Green Party I’d wonder if further collateral damage has been incurred (and let’s leave Deputy Gogarty’s intervention aside… btw a good friend has met the man and found him pretty charming). Where we saw a bizarre, but for them pleasing, dynamic in the first year or so of the Coalition whereby their poll ratings drifted largely free of political events (our beloved former Taoiseach’s antics apparently having zero impact on their general popularity), only to begin to descend precipitously with the arrival of more straitened economic times. They’ve yet to recover, albeit their base is unlikely to be hugely upset by the measures taken against the public sector in the Budget. And yet, and yet. They too have – rhetorically – played it fairly fast and loose with the PS and this too will do them no good politically. An awful lot of second and even first preferences came from those employed in that sector who believed they saw kindred spirits of the very soft centre left. More than one has been disabused of that notion. To suggest that the Green Party may be out of power for a generation following the next election, may indeed slump largely back into the voluntary sector having lost most of its representation, sure ain’t the stuff of prophecy either. I think that’s a pity, I genuinely do – there are people of enormous capability and sincerity inside the GP who are indeed part of the centre left, but the trajectory of their journey over the past two and a half years has near enough cemented that outcome with a public just barely getting to grips with the outline of what the next three or so years are going to be like for them personally. And once it gets personal… well… that’s bad news for the Government parties, and perhaps particularly so for the smallest one.
Moreover, the point reiterated time and again that they have been supporting Fianna Fáil and it’s pomps and works is cruelly underlined by the Budget votes. No Green Party, no Government, no Budget – or at best a staggering on by FF for a short period with the support of a fractious crew of Independents of various stripes, and for progressives, however suspicious we are of FG and – perhaps in part Labour – it’s hard to believe that such a combination wouldn’t have exhibited at least a slightly greater level of social awareness in its machinations. Nothing too great, it must be noted, but perhaps eschewing social welfare cuts in favour of slightly increased on middle and higher income earners.
And talking about the Independents… well, they’re not necessarily doing themselves any great favors. We seem to have seen a remarkable divergence between types of Independents in the past number of years, those who solidly vote with the Government on foot of deals. And those who don’t at all. Telling to see Joe Behan, formerly of Fianna Fáil slot right into the latter category and hear him saying that he was ‘ashamed’ of his former party. But Behan got out at the right time, which is not to ascribe any cynicism to his move, but rather to point that to head to the exit any later and FF Deputies were blooded by Budget 2009. Hence the remarkably diverse rationales emanating from the good Dr. McDaid as regards his stance on the Budget. Eyebrows were certainly raised at other pronouncements during this period, which perhaps we’ll come back to at a later date.
But the point being that this crisis has exposed a problem in the nature of Independents. Too close to government and they must – inevitably – carry the can, as no doubt, many a gleeful Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Féin candidate at the next election will be all too eager to point out. Too far from government and their function becomes unclear and the rationale for their existence potentially too diffuse to give traction. Hitherto I’ve suspected they’d do well as a group next time out. I’m beginning to revise that opinion. That said they still provide a reasonably comfortable home from home for Fianna Fáil voters not entirely sure what the hell is going on, but clear that they’ll never break for Labour, let alone – God forbid – Fine Gael.
And what of those parties? Hard to say. It simply wasn’t their Budget, good bad or indifferent. Their message too splintered – look at the spectrum occupied by Sinn Féin, Labour and Fine Gael… Their scope to shine was limited. There remains one government in this state and despite all the predictions that government has survived every trial and tribulation thrown at it thus far. I’d suspected that would be the case for some while back, the only question in my mind being how a defeated Lisbon II would play. Now that would have been a game changer. But so far, local elections notwithstanding, they’re still there. NAMA, Green Party convention, Budget… and so on.
And that is, what I’d hazard, is at the root of the current silence. There’s little point in shouting when it is absolutely clear that your voice isn’t going to be listened to. What’s in it for the Government, unloved and waiting out its days before its inevitable demise to cut and run? Nothing at all if the most recent polls are to be believed. Indeed the events of the previous two or three weeks where (dis)organised labour crashed and burned on the rocks of the Governments almost complete indifference may well have provided an object lesson to many who otherwise would be marching. It’s not merely that the Government won’t listen. It is now clear that alternative viewpoints will not, in the main, be given even a token sympathetic hearing. Indeed quite the opposite, as was made clear by the ’statement to the Nation’ on one of our more high-profile media outlets during last week.
That’s the new consensus. Gogarty’s words might well have been right, albeit directed at the wrong target… we are indeed screwed.
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