Edward Gaffney

John thinks term limits for Dáil Éireann would be a neat idea because legislating doesn’t prepare a Taoiseach well for the duties of leadership. Why should we stop at the office of Taoiseach when this train of thought is leading to such an interesting destination? Cut the legislative-executive link and introduce a presidential system of government, where we elect our President who appoints a Cabinet from outside Dáil Éireann. If career civil servants draft our laws, it’s hard to see what unique talents legislators bring to the administration of any executive department of government.

Especially Irish legislators. We hear the TD mocked as a “glorified county councillor”. This may be unfairly dismissive of an important role of the people’s deputies across all Western legislative traditions – the representative as vindicator of the citizen’s rights – but the point is that this role is paramount in Ireland. The remarkable PR-STV voting system drives party colleagues to compete among themselves for votes. Competition without policy differences can only happen on the axis of favours and graft won for local people, therefore lost for people outside one’s constituency. Politics becomes personalist and rent-seeking and intensely local. For most TDs, legislating is irrelevant to their political futures and the very term “legislator” is a flattering description of their duties.

This job description will not appeal to someone who is ambitious for goals beyond mere personal advancement. Ten years of this waste of time is not worth it for the truly talented just to get closer to political power. Ireland has a localist political culture, and a lack of safe seats – again, thanks to PR-STV. Any individual who would enter politics to improve Ireland must play the unappealing game of constituency clinics to attain even the chance of Cabinet office, because these jobs have not been available to outsiders from Seanad Éireann for twenty-five years. Then, more likely than not, this person will lose to a less-qualified candidate, who can use the fruits of office to shore up a marginal constituency for partisan political gain. Localism bites again – the tyranny of a British-imposed, GAA-sustained county system that poisons Irish society by inducing people to culturally identify with a ridiculously small number of people.

End the tyranny! Make the people who lead our country elected by and accountable to the nation as a whole, not merely the residents of one or two artificial geographic expressions! Why should we constrain the choice of our masters to fifty or eighty men and women, those government deputies who serve as state benefit procurement agents for most of the week and who pretend to legislate for the rest? If you see the disconnect between people and politicians that John does, that I do, it’s irresponsible to seek to reform parliamentary government, because ten years of clinics are enough to screen out almost anyone who can truly connect with people: as leaders, not as mere procurement agents. Parliamentary government was a great step forward from the apathy of the absolute monarchy, but it was not designed for the age of a permanent professional political class, when the parliament itself becomes apathetic. Elect the executive – take constituency clinics and talking about laws out of the list of job requirements for the leader of our country.

Jason Walsh, the editor of on-line magazine forth, reports mutterings about a new right-wing liberal party, whose founders have adopted the unlikely aim of repeating the successes of the Progressive Democrats while somehow avoiding their failures. Walsh asks Slugger O’Toole readers the question: is there room for that party? Again, hardly likely. The demographics and the consequences of coalitions just don’t favour it.

Any group like this in other countries has strong support among the middle class. The aspirant founders talk about Germany’s Free Democrats as a model. But the FDP has a redoubt of electoral support among small business people, who together comprise such a large group that they have their own demographic description, the Mittelstand. Ireland doesn’t really have an equivalent group; even during the Celtic Tiger, lots of the small businesses were transient entities like building contractors rather than staid, traditional, bourgeois artisans.

If anything, the equivalent class in Ireland is our farming community, who face all the pressures of the stereotypical urban entrepreneur. Without small business, you need either farmers or professionals, and the dominance of the big two parties among these groups remains remarkable. Consider the Irish Farmers Journal poll that reported 87% combined support for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael; this total would be not much smaller among high-earning professionals. Without the backing of either of these groups, a party devoted to anti-populist politics has to rely on the kind of personalism that dominated the PDs at the end of their existence. No base, no security of tenure, no consistency of purpose.

The other problem that right-wing liberal parties have is that economics is a much more salient political divide than social issues, but social issues are where the traditional liberal platform is most united and relevant. So these parties go into coalitions with conservatives, then fail to get anything done on a social-liberal agenda because they are a minority partner in government, then get absorbed by the majority partner into a broad right-wing group with a muddled position on social issues as voters stop seeing a distinction between the two groups.

This  happened in Ireland with the Progressive Democrats; their personnel and those of the big two parties seemed interchangeable, and indeed it often was, with the PDs serving as a home for old defectors and a nursery for ambitious youth. Look elsewhere in Europe, too. It has been happening in France for decades, with a new wave of defectors from the centrist liberal parties to the Gaullists every ten years or so; it has been happening to the Dutch right-liberal VVD since their last term of office, with the left-liberal D66 and the radical nationalist lists of first Pim Fortuyn and then Geert Wilders partitioning what was once their support; the nascent new liberal movement in Italy was smothered by Berlusconi’s utter populism; the liberal, post-dictatorship governing party of Spain drifted apart once out of office. While other political movements survive and consolidate after periods in opposition, liberalism seems to wither.

Even if there weren’t a story behind this proposition, it would still be a valid debate. Fans of ex-PDs Michael McDowell and Pat Cox have been flying balloons about political parties led by their heroes in the last two months. The personal circumstances seem wrong in each case: McDowell left politics perhaps even more unpopular than his party, while Cox seems to have overseen remarkable financial profligacy in the campaign group that was ostensibly his road to a political renaissance. But even a strong and well-funded leadership cannot overcome the basic structural problems of small natural support bases and political positioning that hinder right-wing liberal parties across Europe, and that would only be even more serious in Ireland.

William Quill notes the symbolism of venue for the Conservative-UUP-DUP talks; the Times of London sees the impact of the Conservative leadership’s coming to maturity during the Troubles rather than before them. The connection between these two notes is the background and character of David Cameron himself.

Cameron would be more at home in Hatfield House, imbued with the spirits of marquesses and statesmen, than any prime minister of the UK for the best part of fifty years. Upper-class Anglican man once dominated the leadership not only of the Conservative Party but also of its allies in the Unionist Party, and kept it until the turmoil of the 1970s. In each case, the lock cracked and the old bosses were relegated to a supporting role; meritocratic Thatcherites captured the Conservatives, then the Scots-Irish Presbyterians seized a leading position in the Unionist movement in line with their majority status among Protestants.

In each case, the new guard approached politics with a greater intransigence and determination than their cool, assured predecessors. In neither case did the old guard desert; they remained loyal, perhaps waiting for their moment to resume command. Cameron’s moment came, and his position to the left of the Thatcher ministry on economic issues is quite consistent with the tradition of the patrician One Nation Conservatives who preceded each of them. Are we really surprised that he should be consistent with them also on the question of sectarianism in Northern Ireland?

Ties of affinity – of fellow-feeling – can dominate impartial reason when applied to the disagreements of individuals; they can certainly dominate reason when applied to the disagreements of groups. Let us hope that the consequences in this case are not too grave.

This article on the potential for a Fianna Fáil government after the next election is the work of John McGuirk, who knows his subject very well. John argues that a change of government is more likely than the political consensus suggests, i.e. more likely than almost zero. Read the article and you will see discussion of the merits of the party compared to the opposition, with the implication that in this merit is the path to victory.

The problem with this argument is the balance of the numbers. Recall the party-political situation in 2007, after the election of the 30th Dáil, but before the coalition negotiations:
Government: FF + CC + Green + PD = 77 + 1 + 6 + 2 = 86
Alternative coalition: FG + Lab + Green = 51 + 20 + 6 = 77

The unpopularity of the Green Party weakens each of these options, so the balance depends only on the shift in support from Fianna Fáil to the big two opposition parties. Assuming that all other participants are neutral between the incumbents and the opposition, the combined force of Fine Gael and Labour needed to take just five seats from Fianna Fáil. After a five-seat swing, they achieve the upper hand, claim the legitimacy of being the most-represented bloc, and work on negotiations with the small groups and independents.

Five seats is a figure that requires the most marginal of swings in support. I contend that:

1. The unprecedented collapse in Fianna Fáil support is due to a loss of public trust in government rather than disillusionment with party policy, and so arguments to the quality of party policy cannot return support to the level necessary to avoid the loss of five seats.
2. In several seats, Fianna Fáil TDs hold only small majorities on the final count over Sinn Féin. Though they haven’t gained from the swing in support away from Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin can squeeze through the middle in places like Donegal just by holding what they already have.
3. The small parties and independents will not be neutral between the incumbents and the opposition. A desire to remove the present government from office will benefit Fine Gael and Labour in negotiations. This won’t help them achieve first place, but it will help them to turn their (possibly small) seat total into a working majority in the Dáil.

The numerical point I’m making is that, on the current voting intention figures, Fianna Fáil will lose something closer to 20 seats than to 5. But numbers change, so don’t ignore the reason why the numbers are as they are. Positive public feeling was crucial to the party’s policy-free success in 2002 and 2007.

Good policies have their own merits. They are better for the country. And we should not choose a government with worse polices simply to punish the incumbents for their past mistakes. But policies alone won’t return Fianna Fáil to the 40-50 per cent figures that it once achieved, and which now seem like they come from another era.