Gerard Howlin: Fianna Fáil grapples with crisis of identity after counter-revolution

Compared to the acting-up of Sinn Féin and the standing-back of Fine Gael an inaudible, inarticulate Fianna Fáil stands hapless 10 days after the music stopped playing.

The plan, if there is one, is to make up the numbers somehow with someone. The object is government.

But the purpose is unknown. Politics isn’t a binary identity divided between being in and out of government. It is fluid, ideological, rhetorical and dependent on leading the public conversation, not following it. Political energy is the synergy of ideas and organisation. Its currency is public support. On every metric, Fianna Fáil is down.

Reports hurrying-up an imaginary but imminent coalition agreement last weekend were cack-handed attempts to corral events before they were reflected on. In the smoke and mirrors of the party room there were far more imaginary ministers than there will ever be real ones. The mist of ambition obscured a dangerous political vista. That imaginary nearly done-deal was the last barrier before the cliff edge.

The myth of February 8 being a change election is pervasive. It is also comedy. At its most ridiculous are the contortions of the most “woke” to retrofit themselves into the Sinn Féin surge. There are enough facts, if arranged artfully, to support a hypothesis. A youthful upsurge that went all the way into middle age propelled Sinn Féin forward and pushed the previously bigger two back.

It was another dramatic, and perhaps final, break of a nearly century old hegemony. But it wasn’t change. It was counter-revolution. This was a white, not a red revolt. And then there is the inconvenient truth that as Sinn Féin marched left, its eyes were focused firmly right.

What spurred this surge was politics that would have made Mrs Thatcher proud. This was about rage at exclusion from the property-owning democracy. It was motivated not by altruism or socialism but fury at rejection.

The clearest consensus, and this is something Leo Varadkar knew but also misunderstood, is that people want their own money, to buy their own house. Every charge to fund a model of bigger and better government was firmly rejected.

But they also want more public spending. The catch is they are simply not prepared to pay for it. Give them what they want and they blame you.

Water charges are history, but brought a seminal moment when the Irish left fatally retarded the capacity of the State to deliver on what it says it is ambitious for. Anemic carbon charges and property tax are now prey to the same impulse. “Change” is the only loser. The cast and set have changed, but the script remains the same. This is an old playbook, not a new one. It’s the 1977 election again, with new Sinn Féin starring as old Fianna Fáil. The woke are in the middle of a great revival starring themselves. The younger ones at least have motive and alibi. They are excluded by a system stacked to support their elders.

They weren’t around in 1977 so it must seem like change in the way history repeating itself always does at first. But the older ones are inexcusable. Everything wrong was done to pander to them. The scale of the resources they consumed is unequal in human history. Destined to live longer than any generation ever, they revolted because they would not postpone by one year the gratification of an old age pension which they would enjoy longer than any previously.

To understand what happened on February 8 as change is to be blinded by ephemera. The mandate of the 33rd Dáil is to extend, on pain of annihilation for failure, the property owning, low-tax model democracy perfected in Britain in the 1970s. You mustn’t put it that way of course. People have sensitivities. Cossetting illusion is an essential political art.

In thinking of what to do after this election, Fianna Fáil might think of the next. Left in opposition immediately raises the ceiling for Sinn Féin. Even in 1977, 49.4% voted for anyone except Fianna Fáil. If it becomes the bulwark of opposition, Sinn Féin will be bigger. Insidiously Fianna Fáil’s already faded identity will be bleached again.

Politics is not a technocratic list of things nor is it bureaucratic process. It is emotional, it is hope, or it is failure.

Sinn Féin, in re-entering Stormont, sidelined failure that contributed to its demise in last year’s local and European elections. The obstinacy of its absenteeism was transformed into the catch cry of its exclusion. It was a moment of fusion with those who sell-defined as excluded here. The rest is history, albeit history repeating itself.

When the Dáil meets tomorrow, a sequential agenda of failed outcomes will begin. It will be some time before the endgame. Maybe a Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Green and Social Democrat government is possible. It will fail in two ways, however. Firstly Sinn Féin succeeded in setting the bar for what is needed to deliver ‘change’.

But it is unaffordable. Economically the next few years will not be as good as the last. So that’s less. Any attempt to widen the tax base to deliver services is scripted as an attack on working people. So that won’t work. Behind the lines, in rural constituencies independent TDs will pick off what is left over after the full frontal Sinn Féin attack.

If that coalition is not possible, and its constituent parts should fear it, there is an impasse. Either the unthinkable of bringing in Sinn Féin is considered or an election is inevitable. Here the role of the president may be pivotal. He can, in such circumstances and at his absolute discretion, refuse a dissolution.

Having failed, the 33rd Dáil must then try again. It is then, if not before, that finally there might be licence to do what was previously unthinkable. As dangerous as it would be to go into government without Sinn Féin, it would be as fraught to go alone. So having clearly exhausted every other possibility, Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin, and Fine Gael could form a national government.

That is the X in OXO for Fianna Fáil.