The problem with Bruton and his party

The Fine Gael website is chock-full of policy positions and statements. Policies on social welfare, health, the budget, greenhouse gas emissions, the reform of the Dail and the public service, road safety, education, the Internet, transport, children, defence, immigration, a vision for Ireland in 2010, the beef industry, world debt.

But does anyone know what the party stands for, apart from being against Fianna Fail and for integrity and all that stuff? Is there any central thread running through all these documents that might tell us what Fine Gael is about? And if there is, how come nobody knows about it?

John Bruton is a policy-wonk. He lays a policy every weekend free range in Dunboyne and brings it breathlessly into the party rooms on Mondays, where it is scrambled and then served on the Web. Very few pay any attention, which is often unfair to his ingenuity and his effort, but the reason for the inattention is that it is simply too much. And at the same time too little.

No focus, no direction.

He is serious about politics in a way that perhaps only his brother Richard and Proinsias De Rossa are serious - it was because of that shared seriousness that Bruton and De Rossa got to like each other. And because of that seriousness, Bruton is bewildered by the disaffection with him among the electorate, and now within his own party.

On RTE's Questions and Answers on Monday night he flailed around talking about his resoluteness, his strength of character, his decisiveness, his integrity. What he did not do, apart from the guff about integrity, was to speak in clear terms about what he stood for politically. And right there is the problem with John Bruton, the problem with Fine Gael. It has no clear raison d'etre, other than to be an alternative to Fianna Fail to do the same as Fianna Fail.

Fine Gael has been an electoral disaster for most of its life. The party almost went under in 1948, when it was rescued by two Labour parties and Clann na Poblachta. It nearly expired again in the late 1950s and made little headway under James Dillon. Liam Cosgrave was perceived to be an electoral liability and he was rescued by Labour again in 1973.

Only Garret FitzGerald proved an electoral asset for Fine Gael. This was in part because of his great abilities and charm but it was also because he moved the party perceptively to the left of centre. The party, under FitzGerald, stood for greater personal freedom and greater social justice.

When he left the leadership, his two successors, Alan Dukes and John Bruton, both abandoned the left orientation and both suffered.

DUKES tried a deal with the Progressive Democrats in the 1989 election and it backfired. Bruton has flailed around in all directions since then, failing to give the party any clear identity.

But would Jim Mitchell or Michael Noonan do any better? They talk vaguely about Fine Gael's and John Bruton's image problems but they have given no clue how they would sharpen Fine Gael's image by making it stand for anything discernible.

The Fine Gael contest has been issue-free, content-free. The only mention of policy has come from Jim Mitchell, who seems to think that the burning issue of the age is teenage drinking. Apart from that, no politics.

Surely there is a niche to be carved out in Irish politics for a mainstream party that talks clearly about social justice, about the imperative of including the deprived in the wealth generated by the economic boom, about the problems of Travellers and refugees, the scandals in mental institutions and prisons.

Of course, these are not mainstream concerns but isn't politics about taking a position and then convincing others to support that position? And wouldn't a pre-election pact with Labour, telling the electorate in advance what it could expect from a new Fine Gael-Labour coalition, be more democratic than asking the electorate to buy a pig in a poke, as is the usual strategy?

But there is nobody in Fine Gael now offering such an option or indeed any clear option of any kind. So why they believe that a change of leader will make any difference is perplexing.

Michael Noonan is very clever and is politically astute. But what does he stand for? Jim Mitchell is courageous and generous but, apart from being against teenage drinking, what does he stand for? He got great credit for the work of the Committee of Public Accounts - which he chairs - on the DIRT investigation. But what single thing did this committee uncover that the Comptroller and Auditor General did not uncover prior to its hearings? And that committee failed to pursue the central issue before it - how was it that the Revenue Commissioners turned a blind eye to AIB and the other banks for almost a decade, knowing that they had cheated on DIRT?

There are others in Fine Gael who might emerge if there is to be a leadership battle. They include Alan Dukes, who was unfairly removed from the leadership in the course of another panic attack in 1990. Or perhaps the party might look to Brendan McGahon, who might recover the charisma of the party's first leader, Gen Eoin O'Duffy. Charisma is the problem, isn't it?

vbrowne@irish-times.ie