For the first time in a over a decade, we face a general election with the possibility of a single-party government emerging as the choice of the electorate. This may not seem obvious since the only party with even a remote possibility of achieving power on its own is Fianna Fail, and this option has been declared non-negotiable by the Anything But Fianna Fail Alliance (ABFFA).
Much has changed, however, while our attention was elsewhere. And since the analysis available in the media concerning politics is governed by wishful thinking rather than a desire to inform, our understanding of the options may be seriously off the mark.
There has, over the past decade and more, existed an unwritten understanding between the media and an amorphous but nevertheless coherent rump of the electorate to the effect that Fianna Fail must either be excluded from government or, at worst, allowed into office under supervision, and this only when a Fine Gael-led administration is impossible. Hence, the three FF-led coalitions since 1989: with the PDs, the Labour Party and again the PDs.
While recognising that marriage with the devil represented the best opportunity of wielding power without electoral support, the ABFFA has maintained a deeply ambivalent attitude to such unions, mainly because, while putting the clampers on Fianna Fail in office, these had the collateral effect of buttressing that which it had been decided to eradicate. There was, therefore, a paradoxical dimension to the required balance between, on the one hand, ensuring that Fianna Fail was incapable of single-party government, and on the other maintaining a certain entente cordiale with the devil to ensure that pragmatic alliances remained possible.
The starting point was that Fianna Fail, being unworthy of trust, should be chaperoned by a smaller, more principled, party which would impose as much of its policies as possible in the programme for government and monitor the "senior" partner, pulling the plug
if anything happened to disquiet the ABFFA or if the arithmetic changed to make viable a government without Fianna Fail.
The plan worked with the first PD/FF coalition of 1989-92, and again with the Labour/FF coalition of 1992-4. Yet because the hostility towards Fianna Fail is of an existential nature, and often amounts to outright disgust, it was inevitable that the response of some elements of the electorate would lack rationality.
Although, from an ABFFA point of view, both coalitions worked wonderfully, enabling the enemies of Fianna Fail to run the country irrespective of the configuration of government, and to pull the plug when a more congenial arrangement became possible, hatred of Fianna Fail inevitably expressed itself in a subsequent rejection of those who had shared the FF bed.
On both occasions, this paradoxical condition ensured that both the PDs and the Labour Party suffered electoral backlashes as a result of their willingness to play footsie with the enemy and their attempts to redeem themselves by making "principled", if timely, withdrawals from government.
Thus, the self-serving ambivalence of the ABFFA contained the seeds of the destruction of its strategy. The second time around, the PDs, realising that they were damned if they did and even more damned if they didn't, decided in office to two-finger the ABFFA and function independently in government, clearly hoping for a level of achievement which would broaden and deepen the party's electoral appeal.
The result was that, for the first time since Fianna Fail dispensed with its anti-coalition "core value", a coalition in which FF was the senior partner functioned more or less as such arrangements are supposed to. Having waived its right to huff and puff and blow the house down, the junior partner settled in for the long haul and, one or two moments of posturing aside, supported its partner against the onslaughts of outsiders.
The major test of the PDs was the O'Flaherty affair, which presented a classic opportunity for the junior partner to occupy the high moral ground, perhaps leading to a withdrawal from government on a point of high principle. This time, however, the PDs sat on their hands, indicating a desire to hang in for a share of the credit for the success of the administration. It is doubtful if such credit will be forthcoming.
By their reluctance to engage in the brinkmanship of old, the PDs have given the game away, betraying that the junior partner in a coalition with Fianna Fail is no longer necessarily in a position of omnipotence. The ABFFA must now contemplate the possibility that the days of controlling Fianna Fail by installing a hostile partner are over.
The logic is inescapable: if other parties cannot be combined to form a government excluding Fianna Fail, neither is there any point in voting for a smaller party in the hope of cramping Fianna Fail's style. This opens up the possibility that there may now be no point in withholding from Fianna Fail the chance of providing single-party government.
On the contrary, it may very shortly be in the interests of the ABFFA to vote into office a single-party Fianna Fail government on the basis of the fear of something worse - the appalling vista of Sinn Fein riding shotgun in a FF-led coalition.