RAINBOW’S END

Monday morning as I write this and the smart money’s being laid on Labour spurning the charms of Fine Gael and renewing their marriage vows with Fianna Fáil. Even though a series of opinion polls show overwhelming support for any such decision, you can already predict the furious response of pundits spluttering about another Labour betrayal.

Somehow it doesn’t matter even if it’s the peoples’ choice. Fianna Fáil are devils and Fine Gael are angels and Labour should protect the Irish people from the folly of their preference for F.F.. Don’t you start to wonder why Fianna Fáil must be demonised as if we must all wear garlic to save us from Bertie Ahern? Or are the Irish voters exceedingly wily? They may believe Fianna Fáil should be taught manners but they don’t yet want them taken out.

On that estimate, the electorate seem to think Fianna Fáil have suffered enough punishment. Albert Reynolds committed a series of fouls, the Labour referee gave him the red card and now the spectators say “play on”. They don’t want the Rainbow team trooping onto the pitch.

Of course, there are arguments against a resumption of the partnership. The crucial one runs thus: Bertie Ahern and the other Fianna Fáil ministers also had their fingerprints on Albert Reynolds’ decision not to tell the Dail about the precedent of the Duggan case; only after an election has cleansed that stain should Labour return to the Fianna Fáil embrace.

But even having had more than a week to digest those objections, public opinion hardly changed. There was no new support for either an election or a Rainbow Coalition. And yet be sure that angry columnists will still arraign Dick Spring as a cynical turncoat even if he swims with the tide of public opinion. They surely can’t be claiming the Irish people are slow learners.

FALSE ETHICS

But then don’t expect impartial and disinterested professional analysis. Opponents of a Fianna Fáil/ Labour alliance just don’t want to examine why the people appear to prefer it; it would mean facing too many unpalatable truths.

John Bruton may not be the Face of the Month but rejection of him and his Rainbow is not necessarily because the Fine Gael leader is some mean-featured loser in any political beauty contest. Perhaps it’s because the people distrust his policies and suspect they would be incompatible with Labour and the Democratic Left.

Instead expect many fevered lectures about political morality. Bruton’s Fine Gael and his media acolytes always want us to focus on means not ends. Yet again we will be informed that the difference between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is between the high and the low road. We’re not meant to bother which provides the best transport to Loch Lomond!

Methinks the Irish electorate has seen through this illusion. They may prefer Fine Gael means but they’re suspicious about Fine Gael ends. Given the imperfect choices on offer, they’ll accept Fianna Fáil ends as long as they’re confident that dodgy Fianna Fáil means are policed by Labour.

Besides why is only a Fianna Fáil/Labour government deemed immoral? A false standard of ethics is being used to deceive us. A Rainbow cabinet that placed together such incompatible companions as Bruton and Michael McDowell on one side of the table and Michael D.Higgins and Proinsias De Rossa on the other can surely be accused of political and economic dishonesty for the sake of power. Yet none dare call that arrangement immoral.

Pundits may have been misreading public opinion for some time. That’s why the original trio of weekend opinion polls came as such a bombshell. Few believed that the Rainbow Coalition would be so unpopular or that Fine Gael would gain nothing from the downfall of Albert Reynolds. But that is how it panned out.

Of course in retrospect, excuses were trotted out. Some of them were justifiable. John Bruton was indeed a rather stodgy player in the Dail drama, too concerned about procedural minutiae and blind to the need to raise his sights to appeal to the viewers.

In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Reynolds, he repeated the mistakes of the ‘92 negotiations when he seemed a complacent Taoiseach-in-waiting who believed the job was his and Fine Gael’s by right. Yet again, he began negotiations as if he intended to bring Dick Spring and Labour to heel. Yet again, he refused to emphasise any common policies that might appeal to Labour. Yet again, a lack of political imagination let Fianna Fáil recapture the initiative.

However after those weekend polls, Fine Gael’s position softened. Preconditions were dropped and the notion of Spring as Taoiseach was temptingly dangled. And yet these new tactics had scant affect on the polls. One might profitably inquire if some factor other than John Bruton’s personality was at the core of the problem.

SUSPECT ENDS

Forget Bruton’s personality; instead concentrate on the national perception of his philosophies. Bruton may indeed be an honourable man but the people may have also decided they didn’t want economic slimming lessons from the man in the true-blue Fine Gael hairshirt. Nor it would appear were they convinced, rightly or wrongly, that he wouldn’t mishandle the peace process.

But his champions will claim that he won two by-elections. Indeed they can be rightly astounded by the bizarre chain of recent events. Fine Gael wins a by-election in Cork and, as a consequence, Albert Reynolds decided to put the boot into an apparently vulnerable Labour. A month later, Spring is on the rise and Bruton eclipsed. Now if Labour not Fine Gael had won a by-election...

True but those opinion polls were the product of real politics at a crisis point, a tally of preferences stated when voters had to make a real choice of government and not enjoy the luxury of a by-election protest vote. They ended the Fine Gael affair rather than break up the Fianna Fáil/Labour marriage.

Besides and I’ll keep repeating the point since nobody else bothers to mention it: the nation has gone left as Bruton has led Fine Gael to the right. Yet again the polls confirmed the ‘92 election result that bequeathed us three political blocs: Fine Gael and the P.D.’s on the right; Fianna Fáil in the centre; and Labour, DL and the Greens on the left.

We finally do have the foundations of identifiable ideological politics. But do those writers in the Irish Times who once campaigned for a modern Irish politics with a proper Right and a proper Left, cheer?

Strangely not. Might it be because the Left is stronger than the Right despite all the media support Fine Gael and the P.D.’s have received? Well, I only ask.

Again, Bertie Ahern’s emergence as Fianna Fáil leader may have been misread. Obviously he was luckily placed to succeed Albert Reynolds, a professional campaigner who’d ensured he was known and approved by the party’s activists. But Ahern’s succession also marks a leftward tilt for Fianna Fáil as if the party suspects the centreground is more likely to fragment to the left than the right. Might it just be the Fianna Fáil instinct that Fine Gael has isolated itself in political quarantine?

But then perhaps, it’s appropriate that John Bruton could be the next victim of the politics of personality. After all, opposition tactics have been consistently negative, concentrated on demeaning the characters of those in the government parties.

Bruton rarely accentuated the positive or explained why Fine Gael policies might be attractive. He neither rid himself of his rancher image nor indicated why Fine Gael and Labour could be compatible political bedfellows. So when the crisis broke and the opportunity came, the public just didn’t believe in any honeyed words from Fine Gael.

Still one point to Bruton. Did his party really want to enter government? Were they just going through the motions, observing the formalities, playing a facade rather than seriously negotiating?

There are good electoral reasons for Fine Gael to remain in opposition since at the next election, they could then hope to bridge the gap between their 47 and Fianna Fáil’s 66 seats. But in power, Fine Gael might fall to a new abysmal low beneath 40 while Fianna Fáil, rising above 70, could again begin to dream of single-party government.

The other two opposition parties didn’t show spectacular enthusiasm for a Rainbow arrangement. When Reynolds fell, they too observed the formalities. Mary Harney and Proinsias De Rossa indicated their availability but they hardly dashed to Bruton’s rescue. The result : there was never any momentum behind the Rainbow dream.

But then recent coverage has rarely concentrated on the real dilemmas and divisions of the opposition parties. The Rainbow Coalition has been taken for granted as a marriage between natural partners solely because the other four parties are deemed to include a better sort, nay, better class of person than the subhumans of Fianna Fáil. Thus the recent politics of ethics, of means over ends, has generally focussed on personalities and rarely those policies that really count. And those tactics have also been used by the opposition parties to disguise their unpopular and incompatible economic policies.

And yet Harry Whelehan didn’t bring down Albert Reynolds because of sloppy procedures in his office, but because he erred on a policy matter on which Irish people could take a position. In the public view, improper means merged with suspect ends. In the Whelehan affair there was no ambiguity.

And in the Labour toss-up between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, it also seems the people won’t be conned by false moralism. They have the sophistication to distinguish between means and ends and take proper account of both. They won’t be deceived by false and limited standards of honour.

Ultimately that’s why they are giving two fingers to the pundits and opting for a renewed Coalition between Labour and Fianna Fáil. Nonetheless one option wasn’t canvassed by the pollsters - a grand coalition between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, the end of the one remaining taboo of Civil War politics.

Watch this space; I suspect it’s going to rise up the agenda in the months before the next general election. And of course, if that happens, don’t expect to read furious headlines about a sell-out. Instead our custodians of political probity will kindly describe it as a historical re-alignment. Now what would that double standard tell you?