Fine Gael and the right to die issue

One of the great ethical issues of our time is about to be played out in front of our eyes. It concerns the right to die. No, not the right to die of the Irish football team without Roy Keane; it is Fine Gael's right to die.

It is not a question of letting the party die. It is a question of euthanasia, whether the depleted ranks of Fine Gael TDs have a right to intervene and cause their party to die, not just by pulling the respirator plug but by administering a last lethal poison.

Worse than that, the strategy is concealed in a pretence that what they are about is to revive the old dear, while in reality it contains not one but three deadly potions.

The first of these is to elect a new leader without allowing new senators and the party membership any say. The second is to kill it off altogether by ending the ban on corporate donations. And the third has to do with the blather about Christian Democracy and the party's core values.

Fine Gael's insistence on its right to die might ordinarily be of little more than a curiosity for the rest of us. But there is reason for the rest of us to be concerned, even for those who care about issues of equality and fairness about which Fine Gael nowadays cares little.

If Fine Gael were to be put out of its misery right now, there would be little prospect of electing a government without Fianna Fáil in the next decade. The availability of an alternative government, no matter how pallid the alternative may be, no matter how little difference it might make to equality and fairness, is still of crucial concern. Only with the prospect of being turned out of office can this new government (or any government) be kept sort of clean, sort of humble.

In a decade or so, Fine Gael may not be needed because by then it may be replaced on the centre-right ground by Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin probably will be full of law-and-order guff by then, tax-cutting, zero tolerance, attracting international direct investment,, the whole shebang.

But in the meantime, Fine Gael is needed to make up the numbers, especially as it could take a little longer than 10 years for Sinn Féin to go full circle. How long did it take Sinn Féin the Workers' Party (remember them?)?

And if you doubt that this is the direction in which Sinn Féin is going, did you hear the remarks by Gerry Adams about Colombia being "America's backyard" in a context approving of America's entitlement to having sovereign, independent countries as its "backyard" (I don't think there is anybody even in Fine Gael who would say that).

For Fine Gael even to contemplate electing a new leader now, whose legitimacy would be compromised from the outset, is to invite extinction.

To fail to avail of a mechanism which might have a revitalising effect on the party is inexplicable. There is a chance to take the leadership issue of Fine Gael to its membership countrywide. That exercise might cause a debate within the party on what it is about, what it stands for, where it wants to go. It would also test the electoral popularity of the leadership contenders.

But to short-circuit even the requirement to involve the new senators is to ensure that whoever is elected leader will have his/her leadership legitimacy in question right from the beginning. Incredible!

Can they be serious about ending the ban on corporate donations? Yes, we knew there was a hypocrisy at the heart of that ban. What essentially is the difference between rich people buying influence with political parties by giving a personal cheque or a cheque from their companies? But if there was some "principle" involved in banning corporate donations, how can it now be abandoned so blithely, just because the party is more vulnerable to improper influence now?

The ban on corporate donations was at least a step towards banning all private donations (private finance biases the political system in favour of parties that represent the interests of people who can afford to make donations): removing that ban is to go backwards.

As for the Christian Democracy and core values stuff. Gay Mitchell, theoretically, has a point about Christian Democracy being a "third way" between new-liberalism and socialism. But the term is now so mired in spectacular corruption, especially in Italy and reactionary politics throughout Europe, that it is just plain silly to be deploying the phrase at all. As for "core values", doesn't this beg the question, what core values?

This column is being written while the revelations from Japan about Roy Keane, Niall Quinn and Mick McCarthy are being played out on the radio. Could it be that Fine Gael has secretly infiltrated the FAI, or is it the other way around?

Postscript: In my column of last week I was wrong to state that Fine Gael had dropped only 5.4 per cent of its vote since 1997. The drop in the vote was, in fact, 16.5 per cent, from 499,936 to 417,653 votes.

Contrary to what I wrote, the drop was larger than that in the "new" Labour (Labour-Democratic Left), vote, which was 13.3 per cent. But my point remains valid: Election 2002 was a disaster for the Labour Party also but, because it did not lose seats, it appears not to have noticed.

Ruairí Quinn leading Labour into the next election. Phil Hogan would be more credible. Or even John Bruton, or . . . no, not Olivia Mitchell. I'll give him that.