John Horgan: Irish political divisions are in all the wrong places

Now that the starting gun has been officially fired for the 2016 general election, two significant trends have emerged which, taken together, indicate that the political landscape, and the options for political change in the aftermath of the election, are developing in ways that are increasingly impossible to predict.

The first is the coyness with which many of the political parties are dealing with the issue of coalition, resembling nothing more than a 21st-century version of Lanigan’s Ball:

‘She stepped out and I stepped in again,

I stepped out and she stepped in again,

She stepped out and I stepped in again,

Learning new steps for Lanigan’s Ball.’

The second is the way in which the two potentially largest parties, in particular – Fine Gael and Fianna Fail – are stating their positions and their policies in language which avoids, like the plague, the shorthand words that have been traditionally, and correctly, used to express the ideological divide in democratic politics: left and right.

It gets worse. Invited to position themselves on this ideological spectrum, some politicians – most recently those Fianna Fáil members quizzed by RTÉ reporters on the eve of their ardfheis – duck the issue spectacularly. Some even express the belief that the spectrum itself simply does not exist. Éamon Ó Cuív, for example, maintained that, in the context of Irish politics, the words "left" and "right" were meaningless or irrelevant.

Of course, when you have some supposedly socialist parties opposed to some forms of asset taxation or to charges specifically designed to finance local services, and some parties at the other end of the ideological spectrum wrapping the red flag around a sprinkling of progressive policies, the electorate has some reason to be confused.

But this confusion itself underlines a primary, unacknowledged fact of Irish politics: the fact that the political divisions are in all the wrong places.

Left/right spectrum

Prescinding from the so-called “liberal” issues – those dealing with, for example, human rights in a general sense, and human reproduction in particular – it can be argued that the ideological issues which most readily divide voters on the left/right spectrum are the economic ones. And these economic issues are primarily reflected in contrasting attitudes to the state and to the market.

The primacy of the market in economic policy is the holy grail of the political right, with occasional modifications to mitigate its worst effects.

On the other hand, the correction and, if necessary, elimination by public and democratic authority of the inequities created and fostered by powerful private interests in a mixed economy is the central objective of the left. And it is not too difficult to discern adherents of both these tendencies in each of the two major historical parties, The difficulty is that in each of them the left component has invariably been the weaker part.

This is not a new phenomenon. In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Labour's Brendan Corish correctly identified this as a major obstacle to social and economic progress. Serious overtures were made to leading social democrats within Fine Gael – notably Garret FitzGerald and Declan Costello – in an attempt to persuade them to abandon Civil War tribalism in favour of socially progressive politics.

These overtures very nearly worked, but in both cases the ties of family and history eventually overcame the strong temptation to break the sterile political mould of the past.

Nor was this tension confined to Fine Gael. Niall Andrews once confided to me that, while a university student, he had brought home a membership application form for the Labour Party. It took his father, the redoubtable CS Andrews, a week to talk him out of it.

Even Noel Browne’s pilgrimage through no fewer than five political parties said as much about the lineaments of progressive politics he detected in all of them as it did about his personal unhappiness in any of them.

In all of this, too, the conservative nature of the majority of the Irish electorate is also a factor that cannot be simply wished out of existence. Seán Lemass knew this well, and it enhanced his and Fianna Fáil’s ability to attract the working class with his clever mix of policies, and underpinned his famous dictum that the Labour Party generally was composed of harmless but decent people.

Political change

There are people in both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and indeed also in some of the other political groupings, who are enthusiastic, and realistic, about progressive political change.

But even the most progressive or radical ideas, which may be emotionally satisfying in the short term, will inevitably be trumped by sheer weight of numbers in a catch-all, centrist party. And they will be ineffective without the political organisation, unity, experienced and battle-hardened political leadership, and strategic thinking of a high order.

Millenarian optimism is not an option, except for the unimaginative advocates of gesture politics. We deal with the world as it is in order to make it more like what we want it to be and hope it can become.

Whatever the outcome on February 26th, the heat from the cauldron of post-election compromises will inevitably generate further issues for the monolithic facades of the two Civil War parties, and for those who are dissatisfied with both.

Or is this all just wishful thinking?

John Horgan is a former Labour TD and MEP