New party must be national or nothing

The question that will be answered by the next general election is not whether there will be some kind of unpredictable upheaval but what kind of upheaval it will be.

With the Government parties in obvious disarray and the main Opposition parties showing few signs they can make more than modest gains, the rage and disgust many voters feel is going to burst through in some form. Until yesterday, the nature of that form seemed most likely to be a scattergun blast of uncoordinated protest. The next Dail would come dressed in a technicolour nightmare coat of Independents, with a dozen Jackie Healy-Raes doing sweet deals with a weak government. But yesterday's revelation by The Irish Times that the anti-corruption campaigner, Colm Mac Eochaidh, is at an advanced stage in the planning of a new political party suddenly offers a quite different set of possibilities.

At first glance, getting into party politics in the wake of the Tipperary South by-election may seem like taking shares in a company that has just gone spectacularly bust. The sight of the slow and painful extinction of the Progressive Democrats, the last big new reform movement to catch the public imagination, is hardly more encouraging. But, if this new enterprise is thought through with the right mixture of shrewdness and courage, it just might become the pebble that starts a landslide.

The first big mistake those behind the new party must avoid would be to think too small. While it might seem rational for a new enterprise to set itself very modest goals in the short term, modesty, in the current mood, is beside the point. The early indications that the new party intends to contest just 15 seats in the next election suggest it may be in danger of underestimating the breadth, if not the depth, of public anger.

Disgust at the spectacle of the State being hijacked for the personal ends of a narrow circle of insiders is not confined to one social class or to a few geographical areas. The planners of the new party shouldn't fall for the spin that these issues are really of concern only to the chattering classes of Dublin 4 and their unfortunate dupes beyond the Pale. As Mary Robinson showed in 1990, the constituency for change at times of public disillusion is far greater than conventional wisdom would suggest. If, like her, he wants to rock the political system, Colm Mac Eochaidh has to start with the realisation that everything the cute hoors of Irish politics know is probably wrong.

The first thing he should do is have a long, hard think about the Tipperary South by-election. South Tipp is not the kind of constituency that would automatically feature on anyone's hit-list of radical hot-spots. Yet it has just produced the most radical election result in the history of the State. If they can figure out why that happened, Colm Mac Eochaidh and his colleagues will have the makings of a potentially powerful strategy. Conversely, the big danger they face is the possibility that they will be seen as a bunch of well-meaning, middle-class do-gooders, unwilling or unable to connect with the nation as a whole.

A decision to stand in just 15 selected constituencies would send out the message that they are precisely that. It would also run the risk of adding to the fragmentation of voter dissatisfaction rather than unifying and galvanising it. The basic appeal of the new party would be the possibility of channelling anger and dismay into a single, coherent and, therefore, potentially powerful form. A party which contests 15 seats is saying that it wants to be just one more element in the confusing mix that is likely to emerge from the next election. That is not likely to be an irresistible appeal to people who want a fundamental change in Irish politics.

The new party, therefore, has to be national or nothing. Assuming it can manage to field candidates in all constituencies, what should those candidates be saying? Obviously, they have to talk about what has gone wrong and how to put it right. They will have to be able to articulate a clear analysis of how corruption took hold, why it has been so damaging and how the system can be reformed so the culture of impunity is finally finished. But that alone is unlikely to be enough.

"Get the sleaze-merchants out" may have a certain visceral appeal but, on its own, it doesn't amount to a coherent policy programme. The real policy challenge, therefore, is to make the connection between corruption and the wider state of contemporary Irish society. What part has corruption played in shaping a system that seems perfectly capable of squandering the historic opportunities of prosperity in the pursuit of growth for its own sake? More fundamentally, how has the existence of a golden circle contributed to the inequalities that are increasingly obvious in health, education, planning and access to opportunity?

From what we know of Colm Mac Eochaidh, it is obvious that environmental and planning issues will be near the top of the new party's agenda. Insofar as those issues can be seen to reflect a broader set of concerns about the quality of life in contemporary Ireland, they can certainly strike a chord. But if the party fails to reveal the links between the distortions of local democracy by the use of money to influence votes on shopping centres and the poverty of people who can't afford to shop in them, it will not be preaching what James Larkin called the divine gospel of discontent. If it can't draw a convincing line between the ability of the system to look after its own and the plight of an old woman dying on a hospital trolley while waiting for care that never comes, then it won't be talking to the kind of people who elected Seamus Healy in Tipperary South.

IN that sense, its slogan should not be "Kick out the Chancers" but "Reclaim the Republic". What ties together opposition to corruption and concern for social justice and the environment is a desire to live in a real republic where citizens are genuinely of equal value and have equal access to public space. Over the last 30 years the very word "republic" has been hijacked by an armed conspiracy and mocked by the cynical conflation of the public interest with private gain. What a large part of the electorate wants is a way of taking it back.

As well as all of this, the new party will have to be able to answer some much more mundane questions. Its candidates will have to be cleaner than clean. Its own conduct, including its fund-raising, will have to be a model of openness and accountability. And it will have to be able to tell the voters precisely how its candidates will behave if they do get elected. Will the new party go into a coalition government, and if so with whom? Does it want to be a short-term, dramatic intervention, aimed at achieving a once-and-for-all change, or a permanent presence on the political landscape? If it can't answer all these questions, the new project will merely trickle into the gutters of disillusion. If it can, it just might catch a flood tide of anger and ride it all the way to uncharted shores of political change.

fotoole@irish-times.ie