Following a litany of failures, has Fianna Fáil lost its way?

Fianna Fáil gathers tomorrow night for its annual Cáirde Fáil dinner in one of Dublin’s largest banqueting rooms. It is the party’s annual social celebration. In the ordinary course there would be much to celebrate. Rumours of the party’s demise have been shown to have been exaggerated and it gathers just months after surprisingly successful local elections.

There will also, however, be some sense of frustration in the room. The party faithful will wonder and chat about why they can’t seem to break out of their current becalmed circumstance.

The party survives, and indeed is the largest party in local government, but it is very shrunken. Even in local councils the Fianna Fáil blocs are a shadow of their former selves. Fianna Fáil did not exist in the last presidential election; it has not existed in Dáil representation from Dublin since May 2011.

To those benchmarks of decline must be added the inability of the once legendary Fianna Fáil machine to win byelections, even in opposition to an increasingly unpopular government.

The recent Roscommon-South Leitrim contest was an ideal opening. The party had a personable candidate in a rural constituency where Fine Gael was weakened by Denis Naughten’s breakaway and where Sinn Féin was relatively weak but it lost out to a newly emerging Independent from outside the constituency.

Fianna Fáil’s overall strategy seems to have been to presume that once the Government hit bumps the Fianna Fáil voters who “lent” their support to Fine Gael and Labour in 2011 would revert to Fianna Fáil. The byelections have shown that not to be the case.

Government leeway

Now the economy has gone and made things even more politically difficult for Fianna Fáil by recovering at a surprising rate. Growth has given the Government leeway. In the newly arrived era of recovery politics Fianna Fáil is finding it difficult to decide which way to turn. The launch of its alternative budget last week was wrapped in the vocabulary of prudence and responsibility. It sounds, at least at this stage, as overcompensation for the showtime era. It is a risky stance in the current political marketplace of adjusted expectations where populist opposition to water and other charges is more appealing to the electorate.

Some within Fianna Fáil would like to see the party claim its share of the credit for the recovery: to tout the fact that the last Fianna Fáil-Green government took two-thirds of the corrective steps necessary to restore the public finances.

Others argue, not unreasonably, that this might be counterproductive, not only because so many of the electorate have been and continue to be hurt by the austerity policies, but also because so many voters are not minded, or yet minded, to move from blaming the party for the recession. For now Fianna Fáil must stand by while the current Government claims all the credit for the recovery.

Public popularity

The Fianna Fáil faithful who will gather tomorrow night will come to praise their leader even though they must now realise that he has brought the party to a plateau in public popularity. Over the past three and a half years Fianna Fáil has edged up from the 17 per cent floor of the 2011 election to the mid-20s, only to occasionally fall back again, most recently to 20 per cent in last week’s

Irish Times

/MRBI poll.

Given the Balkanisation of our party system even this slight improvement might be enough to double Fianna Fáil seats in the next general election, but no more than that.Micheál Martin’s work rate in the constituencies has been impressive, most recently in Roscommon-South Leitrim, and he can more than hold his own in parliamentary and media debate. However, it seems he cannot get the party real traction with the electorate. By reason of his membership of previous Fianna Fáil administrations Martin is restricted in his capacity to reinvent or reposition the party. He would be gone as leader if there were any obvious successor who could guarantee improving fortunes. There is no such person in the current parliamentary party.

The reality is that the members of the parliamentary party have no vested interest in seeing the party grow in the next election. They do instinctively want to see their party do better but it is not a compelling necessity for them.

As Ivan Yates has recently reminded us, the first commandment of politics is “deputy mind your own seat”. All of the current Fianna Fáil TDs (except Michael McGrath and Martin himself), having survived or first won in 2011, are now sole Fianna Fáil incumbents in their constituencies. Each of them is almost certain of re-election in 2015 or 2016 provided they don’t allow themselves to be displaced by a stronger running mate.