Spotlight on Martin as he leads Fianna Fáil on to tightrope

The novel arrangement to facilitate a Fine Gael-led minority government, painstakingly put in place over recent weeks and made incarnate yesterday afternoon, has one great question at its heart.

It is clear what the Government will do: it will seek to implement its programme for government. It is also clear that Sinn Féin and the radical left parties and deputies will oppose the Government at every turn.

But what of Fianna Fáil? Having agreed certain policy parameters with Fine Gael and pledged to support the Government on votes of confidence and supply, the party will find itself in an unfamiliar political no-man's land. It will have the wherewithal to bring down the Government, but has committed not to.

At the core of the so-called new politics is a very, very different form of opposition.

Unique arrangement

In many ways, this unique arrangement on which the Dáil has embarked is more Micheál Martin’s creation than it is Enda Kenny’s.

Martin turned down a full coalition with Fine Gael, which would have given the country a historic coalition but a conventional majority government, carving up power and office, dominating the Dáil.

His ultimatum to the Independents – to support him or he would withdraw from the race to be taoiseach – eventually pushed them into exclusive negotiations with Fine Gael. And his facilitation of the Fine Gael minority administration paved the way for the deal with Independents.

How Martin will walk this tightrope is unclear, even to those within his own party.

He has been talking about reforming the way we do politics for years. In 2013, he laid out a programme of political reform at the MacGill Summer School, stressing that the first need was to empower parliament.

"First of all, the Oireachtas needs to be freed from the absolute control which government currently has on its work," he said. "Few parts of the Constitution are ignored as much as article 28.4.1 which states that: 'The government shall be responsible to Dáil Éireann.' In practice, the taoiseach and his ministers exert near total control over the Dáil."

Observers could be forgiven for observing that these things only became apparent to Martin when he found himself in opposition.

Martin himself said his enthusiasm for reform came from a realisation that the political system had failed the country during the boom and the crash. A favoured observation of his was that the Dáil had spent a lot longer debating the regulation of greyhounds than the regulation of banks.

Last weekend, at a Fianna Fáil meeting in Tipperary, he gave a further indication of how his party envisaged the new arrangement. The Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael agreement, he said, "is not a programme for government and it absolutely does not require us to stand back and let the Government do whatever it wants".

He said there would be many points of disagreement and predicted the Government would lose votes on issues which are central to the ability of government to function.

Specific proposals

His Dáil speech yesterday fleshed this idea out. “The Government will most likely regularly not get its way on motions and specific proposals. If it accepts this and reduces the number of areas where it demands the right to be decisive, then there is no reason to be concerned.”

However, Fianna Fáil is acutely aware that it must maintain its own identity. One senior TD says the party is likely to seek to inflict a number of early parliamentary defeats on the Government in the coming weeks in order to demonstrate that although it is facilitating the Government, it is definitively in opposition.

Vigorous opposition

“I think you’ll see immediately attempts to get early defeats, to demonstrate vigorous opposition. Between now and the summer recess we will need to land blows on the Government,” the TD said.

However, a number of the senior frontbenchers are very sceptical about the new departure. If it doesn’t work – by which they mean if it doesn’t work for Fianna Fáil – their grumbling will escalate into something more kinetic.

“The interest groups and the protest groups – they will come after us,” said another senior TD. “Fianna Fáil TDs will get it in the neck.”

And not just outside the Dáil. Sinn Féin, TDs on the radical left and non-Government Independents privately admit they will target Fianna Fáil for propping up the coalition.

“We’ll be saying to them – and to everyone else – how can you claim to be opposed to the Government when you are the ones keeping them in office,” one TD said.