The fragmented nature of its origins continues to be recalled in the splintered message of Fine Gael today, writes John Waters
FINE GAEL'S confusion about its birthday reflects a deeper identity crisis besetting it into its 76th/86th/87th year. This confusion, however, belongs more to the wider political culture than the party itself. The question as to whether Fine Gael was born in August 1922, on the death of Michael Collins, in March 1923 with the foundation of Cumann na nGaedheal, or in September 1933 when that party merged with the Blueshirts and the National Centre Party to form the entity since known as Fine Gael, reflects deeper issues relating to the party's core philosophy and its relationship to the present moment.
The fragmented nature of its origins continues to be recalled in the splintered message of Fine Gael today. In the past week or so, for example, apart from making sundry predictable noises on the economy, the party has been associated with two distinctive initiatives.
One was the call by three senior FG Oireachtas members for the Government to adhere to its promise to hold a referendum on children's rights; the other was the proposal by one of the party's newer faces of a voluntary repatriation scheme in which immigrants would be offered incentives to return home. These proposals come from what on the surface appear to be two distinct elements within Fine Gael.
Conventional political analysis perceives the children's rights initiative as coming from the soft left, and Leo Varadkar's intervention as emanating from the hard right. Such labelling is unhelpful both to Fine Gael and the wider political context.
Varadkar's proposal has been widely dismissed as racist and divisive, but a subsequent poll indicating growing public worry about immigration indicates that he may be much closer than his detractors to the public mindset.
The suggestion of racism is typical of the puerile discussion we've been having about immigration. In fact, all Varadkar has proposed is that we offer immigrants a lump sum to take a punt on going home rather than a phased payment to take their chances by staying here.
This seems an all-round win-win dilemma for immigrants. There is no suggestion of compulsion in what appears a purely technocratic solution to an emerging problem.
I remember back in the 1980s an economist on the Late Late Show making a similar suggestion in respect of Irish citizens, and nobody at the time thought of calling it racist. Say what you like about Varadkar, he thinks beyond the conventional cliches and has the bottle to speak his mind.
The intervention by Alan Shatter on the children's rights issue is emblematic of a different Fine Gael. Accusing the
Government of secretly abandoning its promised referendum on the statutory rape issue, Fine Gael's spokesman on children threatened to withdraw co-operation from the Oireachtas Committee on Child Protection unless the position is clarified. Fine Gael's stance on this issue is solid and well thought out. Sensibly, the party is not pursuing a referendum on inserting a UN concept of children's rights in the Constitution, but is focusing on the narrower but urgent issue of statutory rape.
Of course, everyone knows the Government's promise of a referendum related to the broader question - which has since emerged as horrendously complex and almost certainly unwinnable - which is why the idea is being quietly shelved.
Shatter and Varadkar are impressive politicians with a keen sense of the oppositional ethos. The problem for Fine Gael is that, in conventional political culture, their voices appear to come from opposite directions.
In the Fine Gael context, Shatter emanates from the just-society, social-democratic tradition of the party, which has its roots in the FitzGerald era of the 1980s and remains the implicit ethos of present-day FG. Varadkar seems to hark back to a murkier era in the party's backstory, and therefore causes some of his colleagues to stare at their shoes whenever he opens his mouth.
On the surface of things, this appears to reflect some irreconcilable duality in Fine Gael, rendering it incapable of achieving a coherent philosophy for addressing the present.
But this is a misreading caused by an outmoded ideological viewfinder that divides everything into left and right, PC and non-PC. While our culture continues to sees politics in this way, Fine Gael will seem like a ragbag of unrelated factions thrown together for electoral comfort.
Varadkar and Shatter have both made cogent proposals in respect of real issues which the Government seeks to elide, but in doing so have added to the incoherent concept of their party which persists in the public mind.
If Fine Gael is to create for itself a new way forward, it firstly needs to challenge the assumptions that imprison it within this false paradigm, and propose a new way of understanding how issues of the moment might be perceived.
The main Opposition party needs, in other words, a new set of guiding ideas and a new banner to march under - defined not in terms of right/left conservative/liberal, and still less by anything in its own history, but by rapidly shifting facts of Irish politics 2008.
Whatever age it may decide it is, the realities of political climate change suggest that what Fine Gael needs for its birthday is a new umbrella.