The leadership of Fine Gael and the composition of an alternative government have been opened up again with the joint challenge by Mr Michael Noonan and Mr Jim Mitchell yesterday to Mr John Bruton's position. They have decided to table a motion of no confidence in his continued leadership at the first parliamentary party meeting of the new Dail session on Wednesday. Both contestants claim that they have the support of a majority of the 75 TDs, Senators and MEPs in the party who will decide the issue.
Whatever the reality, Mr Bruton now faces the most serious challenge to his leadership of Fine Gael after ten years of mixed fortunes at the helm. The decision by two leading - and vastly different - opponents to re-open the leadership only two months after the amateurish challenge by Mr Austin Deasy, and to offer themselves as alternative leaders may well prove fatal for Mr Bruton. He has no intention, however, of standing down.
At a packed press conference in a Dublin hotel, attended by businessman, Mr Ulick McElvaddy, Mr Mitchell and Mr Noonan set out their stall. "This should be a time of unprecedented support for our party given the succession of scandals associated with Fianna Fail and its manifest failure to bring about social justice or to tackle major economic bottlenecks. It is painfully clear that we are failing to connect with large section of the electorate and this, we believe, is in large measure due to John Bruton's style of leadership", they said.
There is no doubt that the results of last week's Irish Times/MRBI opinion poll are causing consternation in Fine Gael. The party's first preference vote dropped by four percentage points to 20 per cent, even allowing for a more favourable weighting of the undecided voters, and Mr Bruton's personal rating was at its lowest, 37 per cent, since November 1994. All indicators for the Government parties got a boost from a popular budget despite the pre-Christmas taxi strike, the secondary teachers' industrial dispute and the jailing of Mr Liam Lawlor for failing to co-operate with the Flood Tribunal.
It would be naive, however, to believe that the poll is the only reason why Mr Noonan and Mr Mitchell have come forward publicly now. Most Fine Gael TDs took a roasting from party activists in their constituencies over the Christmas period for the botched challenge last November. It has been conceded by Mr Bruton, under pressure in the last few days, that the vote then was 3:1 in his favour; not 5:1 as claimed by his supporters at the time. The game-plan put forward by Mr Noonan and Mr Mitchell is that there will be one issue to be decided by the parliamentary party on Wednesday: whether Mr Bruton should lead Fine Gael into the next general election. Who will succeed him, should he lose, is for another day.
As Fine Gael enters another bruising week, there is one profound truth which the party should grasp. If the two challengers want only to change the leadership of the party, they shouldn't bother. Fine Gael is beset by problems on all fronts. It is lethargic, moribund, and lacking in self-confidence. It is creaking from the weight of consultation processes. It offers no known vision of an alternative to Fianna Fail. When it arrives at a policy position - to do nothing on abortion, for example - it is afraid to express it. The face on the poster alone will not change all of that.