OPINION:PERHAPS IT would have been better for the mental health of our politicians if that Irish TimesTNS/mrbi poll hadn't been published. It sucked the life force out of Brian Cowen. It put a dent in Declan Ganley's hopes for a Libertas breakthrough. It made John Gormley cranky because the gloriously hysterical Patricia McKenna has been proved right. It left the urban liberal commentariat dismayed and sulky that despite their best efforts the people are getting behind that hick Enda Kenny. Worst of all, it showed that the political love child of RTÉ, the Labour Party, is going down instead of up, writes SARAH CAREY
In response, the Taoiseach is talking renegotiation when he should really slap Dan Boyle around a bit. C’mon Brian, the Greens are going nowhere. Meanwhile, Enda is keeping his ginger-haired head and sticking to the plan. Back in 2007 he heard the same predictions of a Fianna Fáil massacre.
It didn’t happen then and it may not happen now. So he’s staying out of RTÉ and on the road.
Finally, poor Eamo got the message and did what he should have done at the start of this campaign – ruled out coalition with Fianna Fáil. I only wonder how he thought he could get away with it for so long.
You can’t campaign for change if you end up putting Fianna Fáil back into power.
Poor Labour. Of all our political parties, Labour has the least self-awareness and so it is the unhappiest. It’s also the most divided, torn between dreamers and pragmatists who pull and push it from one strategy to another.
The pragmatists accept that they live in a perverted tale of Cinderella. They have to go to the ball with one of the Ugly Sisters.
The dreamers cling to the hope that the Fairy Godmother will show up with 40 Dáil seats and a rotating taoiseach. As always in life, the pragmatists are happier. They hunker down and get on with the dirty job.
The dreamers are miserable and frustrated. They disdain Fianna Fáil, but loathe Fine Gael even more. They speak in the loftiest of tones about the national interest and cannot understand that people vote in their own self-interest. They stand up for what is right but then go all self-righteous. In a nation reared on self-deprecation, it’s just not the right tone. Left-wing people don’t just believe they have better policies, they think they are better people and that bugs the rest of us.
But mostly, they sulk because they think our traditional loyalty to civil war politics is a poisonous wart on the face of a respectable western democracy. They dream that one day the veil will be lifted from the masses in the great estates of Dublin and Leinster.
Soon, surely, and especially now, these old-fashioned notions will be abandoned and a natural left-right split will shatter the status quo. At last the Labour Party will emerge as big brother instead of little sister in a coalition.
This dream ignores many realities, not least that Labour is the only party that actually was around during the civil war.
They keep talking about offering an alternative to “working people”. But we’re all working people. Well, except for the unemployed, and I presume they want to offer them an alternative too. What we are is a deeply conservative people with broad agreement on where we want to go, if slightly different views on how to get there.
There is no politically identifiable group called “the workers” who will rise up and demand the redistribution of wealth. Instead, we have a diamond-shaped society. The vast bulk of people are happily middle-class with an isolated underclass and a privileged oligarchy existing untouched at the edges.
Labour complains that “the workers” have to bail out the banks, but the truth is that those with most to lose have been hit the hardest. The upper middle-classes have lost their shares, their pensions, their jobs and their dreams. They are not going to swing to a party that alienates them by using loaded political terminology.
Why should today’s unemployed architect vote to become tomorrow’s kulak – shot for trying to save himself?
So, there is no left and right; there is a cereal shelf on which Fianna Fáil is cornflakes and Fine Gael is porridge. Labour is muesli which is just porridge with nuts and dried-up fruit. Muesli is expensive and the unemployed middle-classes can’t afford it.
But Labour still shifts between those who persist in the false dream and those who accept that a general election is simply a referendum on Fianna Fáil.
You’re either with them or against them.
That’s why for a party that prides itself on its honesty, Labour’s effort to play both sides of the coin was completely dishonest.
The poll shoved Gilmore off the pot but he still has work to do.
He has to stop complaining that we are bailing out the banks and get on with explaining where we’re going to find the money to do it. He has to accept that the public sector gravy train is over and how he intends to reform the system. He has to convince that in a coalition government, Labour can contribute something other than hand-wringing over public service cuts.
If he wants honesty in politics then he has to start being honest with the electorate and with himself.
In other words, he has to stop dreaming.