Democracy's first requirement is a competent government, sensitive to the needs of the people. To the extent that the people perceive this to be lacking, the second need is for an Opposition capable of providing a stable alternative. At present there are signs that neither of these are readily available to us.
For, as we enter the summer parliamentary recess, we seem to have a Government that commands less public confidence than any of its 29 predecessors. And the public does not seem to be transferring its votes from Fianna Fail to the two main Opposition parties. Instead, potential voters - in so far as they retain any commitment to voting in an election - have been shifting their backing on a substantial scale to smaller Opposition parties or to independents.
The table below shows the movement in the core vote of parties that has taken place within the past two years, as disclosed by Irish Times/MRBI polls. Because this shift in the voting pattern has taken place gradually over two years the magnitude of the drift away from the traditional party system has not yet been grasped.
These figures show that over one-fifth of those who two years ago would have voted for the four parties that have hitherto formed governments have drifted away - half of them to potential abstention from voting and the other half to smaller parties or Independents. But these data require several qualifications.
First, although the comparison between the two sets of figures in the table offers a valid measure of the scale of the changes in voting intentions that took place between April 1998 and June 2000, MRBI believes that, in order to counteract persistent overstatement of support for Fianna Fail in its polls, the individual party figures require adjustments.
When those who do not express a voting intention are omitted from this table with a view to yielding a picture of how an election might turn out, MRBI believes a deduction of five percentage points from the resultant Fianna Fail figure is required in order to adjust for this overstatement factor. However, in the table of core-vote figures published here, the appropriate deduction would be one of four points - three of which would need to be transferred to the Fine Gael/Labour total.
In other words, this poll points to a realistic Fianna Fail core vote of 32 per cent - which would mean 35 per cent for the Government parties, including the PDs. The Fine Gael/Labour total would be raised to 27 per cent.
The poll was taken shortly after John Bruton's statement about a possible restoration of the Fine Gael whip to Michael Lowry, and this may explain part of the sharp four-point drop in Fine Gael support. Some of whatever loss of Fine Gael support may have been due to this factor might drift back between now and an election.
Thirdly, this poll was taken before the replay of the O'Flaherty row, the Tipperary South by-election, and the summoning of the Taoiseach before the Moriarty tribunal - all of which may have further eroded Fianna Fail support. So the gap between support for the two Government parties and the two Opposition parties may be narrower than the MRBI interpretation of this poll would suggest. For all these reasons, the prospects for Fianna Fail are not good.
But the point of this analysis is ail might lose in an early election, but rather to discover whether any stable coalition could be formed in a Dail in which, even after a drop in the Fianna Fail vote from the 39 per cent secured in the last two elections, Fine Gael/Labour might still fail to secure more than about two-fifths of the votes.
The table suggests that the electorate is minded to cast at least one-fifth of its votes for the Green Party, Sinn Fein and Independents - and if large numbers of Independents were to be nominated in the next election, the share of votes cast for them and for smaller parties could even reach a quarter.
However, normally votes for independent candidates and smaller parties yield only about half the seats that their share of the vote implies. Therefore, even if a quarter of all votes were to be cast for such candidates, only about one-eighth or less of the Deputies elected ail would be likely to be drawn from smaller parties and independents.
That would still add up to some 20 deputies. And it would certainly not be easy after such an election to form a Government from a Dail that might contain 8-10 Green Party or Sinn Fein Deputies and 10-12 independents. It is difficult at this stage to see how Fianna Fail under its existing leadership could, in an election later this year, secure sufficient support to form a government.
If Fine Gael and Labour were to form an effective pre-electoral alliance, they would have a better chance to do so. But in order to produce a government with some stability, they would almost certainly need to bring the Green Party into that alliance.
A further unknown factor is the Progressive Democrats. Even though they may not have many seats in the next Dail, they should not be written off. The PDs seem unlikely to rejoin Fianna Fail in government. During the past year they have expressed a degree of social concern that could make their participation in a Fine Gael/Labour-led government conceivable.
There would remain a danger that even a four-party Government of this kind would still require support from Sinn Fein and/or independents. In our present circumstances, only an alliance of this kind may now offer any credible chance of securing a Dail majority.