Pat Leahy: A month is a long time to be away from politics

With putative presidential candidates jumping out of the bushes with rather alarming frequency in recent weeks, perhaps it’s been hard to remember that August is a month-long vacation from politics. From serious politics anyway. But the holidays are over now.

Monday signals the beginning of a busy political term. Sinn Féin will meet for its parliamentary party think-in in Cavan, and Fine Gael in Galway later on in the week. Fianna Fail and Labour (that should be interesting) gather the following week. The Cabinet meets again next week after the August lay-off with a lengthy agenda. Budget meetings are being slotted into the planning grid in the departments of Finance and Public Expenditure. The Brexit talks are back in earnest since yesterday. It’s back to school, all right.

Two issues will overshadow the opening weeks of the term: Brexit and the future of the Government.

In a way, they are intertwined. Fianna Fáil does not have much appetite for granting Fine Gael another year in power, much less two, while the Taoiseach and some of his Ministers like the look of their polling numbers these days. They fancy they could hit the low-to-mid 30s in percentage terms in a general election, yielding them perhaps the mid-60s in seat numbers. This looks optimistic to me, but it would place Fine Gael in a probably unassailable position to lead the next government, whatever its exact composition (another matter, and column, entirely).

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At the same time, both Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin know that to trip the Dáil headlong into a general election, leaving the country with an uncertain leadership at exactly the most crucial point in the Brexit process, would be colossally irresponsible – and likely to be punished by voters.

Big bang

A corollary of this, of course, is that if and when the terms of the UK’s exit are settled – and we will know that by the end of the year – the Government’s time will more or less have run out. “Once Brexit is clear, there’s no real reason to keep the Government going,” one senior official told me during the week. An election in April, or a big bang at the end of May with the local elections and the European elections on the same day, reckons the mandarin.

Even allowing for officialdom’s disapproval of the current arrangements - the Government’s inability to get its way in the Dail drives the strong government lobby nuts, and all officials believe in strong government - it’s hard to dispute his logic, whatever about his proposed timetable.

For the time being, though, Martin will try to sit tight; Varadkar will put pressure on for an extension of the confidence and supply agreement.

And although Varadkar is in a stronger position politically (and is also in possession of the ultimate political tool, the power of Government action), Martin has the tactical advantage of being able to deploy that most ubiquitous of political manoeuvres: concerned inertia. He can just do nothing and wait to see how Brexit pans out. Watch how the two big cats circle each other warily over the coming weeks.

A more complex and multi-layered game is being played in Brussels. Ireland is obsessed with the backstop but the focus in Brussels in increasingly on the future relationship between the UK and the EU. That won’t be settled in its detail soon, but it might in its general shape.

If that happens – if the negotiations produce the outline of something the British can live with and the EU can accept – then British concerns about the backstop will ease, and the Withdrawal Agreement, backstop and all, can be concluded in the autumn. That is the Irish hope anyway, according to those at the centre of the process, though the more realistic among them concede that the Irish ability to influence the outcome is not great.

Brexit will remain an ever-present overhang in our politics in the coming months. It will also be more point of contention than it has been in the past. Before the summer, Martin was becoming more and more critical of the Government’s handling of Brexit. Expect that trend to continue.

Budget

A lot of the time and energy of Government for the next five weeks will be taken up with the budget process, which will culminate on October 9th. Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe will spend the time fending off spending demands from his colleagues, from Fianna Fáil, from the public sector unions and from the many lobby groups and special interests which play such a central role in our politics, while trying to make the numbers fit his declared priorities: capital investment, funding public services, balancing the books, and cutting taxes on the squeezed middle.

Donohoe gave a thoughtful address to the Michael Collins Institute – a Fine Gael proto-think tank – during the week, on the subject of renewing the political centre. There was much fine talk about harnessing the power of both State and market to improve society and ensure sustainable prosperity and wellbeing.

Avoiding a repeat of the boom-bust pattern of the past is something Donohoe talks about all the time. Luckily, he will get an opportunity over the coming weeks to display his commitment to this noble ideal.

There’s a fair chance it will be the last Budget before the next general election. The approach of past governments – including the last one, of which Donohoe was a member – was to throw as much money as they had, and also money they didn’t have, at public spending and tax cuts in order to win the election. The ultimate consequences were not pretty. If Donohoe – and the Government of which he is such an influential part – want to stand up for the centre and promote good government ahead of short-term political expediency, they will get plenty of chances to do it in the coming months.