That’s that then: the will of the voters, as cautiously expressed in the general election, is to be enacted.
The voters did, very clearly, express a preference that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael would return to Government, minus the Green Party which was sacked en masse by its employers, the electorate. That is exactly what the voters are going to get: A government, per reports, with fifteen cabinet Ministers drawn exclusively from the ranks of FF and FG, supported by Independents who mostly come from the gene pool of one party or the other – Michael Lowry started life in Fine Gael, the Healy Raes in Fianna Fáil. Now they are all to work together.
First the positive: This should be the most ideologically coherent Irish Government since the first two of the three lead by Bertie Ahern. Then, you had Fianna Fáil and the PDs, who had much in common and differed mainly on how privatisation might affect union jobs, and on the merits or demerits of brown envelopes supplementing Ministerial incomes. Since then – since 2007 really – Irish Governments have been an ideological melange of centrists and people from various strands of the left. FF and the Greens, Fine Gael and Labour, FF and FG and the Greens, and so on. Even the 2016-2020 Government had left wing representation, with Katherine Zappone sitting at the cabinet table and driving the they/them agenda.
As such, this promises to be the first Government in 17 years that does not contain a representative of the official and self-identifying Irish left. For those of us glad about that, we might hope for more focus on bread and butter issues, and less of the constant drive for referendums and rainbows that has characterised the governance of this state over the past two decades.
Yet with that ideological coherence comes grave risk: For most of the past 17 years, Irish Governments have escaped punishment by the voters by deflecting blame for their failures onto the parties of the left. First the Greens were wiped into extinction in 2011. Then Labour got the chop in 2016. In 2020, the aforementioned Katherine Zappone and others were retired by the voters. In 2024, the Greens got another kicking. Throughout it all, FF and FG have muddled on, on the basis that voters thought them so clueless that they couldn’t possibly be to blame for the things voters did not like about the Governments they led.
That excuse has now gone: The alternative to this Government will be explicitly left wing. Left/Right politics is finally here, and it is finally delineated along Government and Opposition lines.
The FF/FG parties would dispute that, of course, because they are naïve: They will assert that they are a centrist Government doing centrist things, even as the opposition bellows that every move they make is an ideological jackboot being stamped down upon the downtrodden, by the Irish heirs to Margaret Thatcher.
What’s more, the Government has poison pills to deal with. The Greens are gone from Government (or will be, next week) officially, but their legacy of legislation will continue to handcuff the new Government unless repealed. In particular, the Climate Change Act commits this Government – with no Green members – to enacting swingeing carbon reductions by 2030. Unless that act is repealed or substantially modified, voters will find themselves wondering why the Green Party’s policies are still being enacted, even after the Green TDs were sacked by the people.
The country is in a decent position financially, but it faces real challenges that will be ideologically difficult for the left to swallow. The expansion of Dublin Airport, for example, is an economic imperative but will be fanatically opposed from the Labour, Soc Dem, and Green benches. Some caution over the Occupied Territories bill and this country’s relationship with the United States and the EU is warranted, but will be presented as quasi-imperialism and surrender by the benches occupied by the former wearers of balaclavas. Immigration policy will clearly need to be tightened and substantially tightened, but one wonders if TDs in the new Government have the appetite to be denounced as Trumpian fellow travelers by coiffed lady columnists in the Irish Times.
The point is this: This is make or break for FF and FG. There will be nobody else to blame this time. The choices facing us in five years – in terms of forming a Government – will be to re-elect this one or to empower an explicitly left-wing Government led by Sinn Fein. If the two old parties fail again, the prospect of them being kicked out of power entirely for the first time in the history of the state beckons, and indeed looms large.
We could have had much worse.
It is to the credit of both Mr. Martin and Mr. Harris that they decided against making Holly Cairns and the Social Democrats into the new Green Party. They clearly have had the sense – or at least the gut instinct – to realise that a new wave of happy-clappy-rainbow-warrior politics was not what the public wanted from them. They have chosen partners in the Independents who will, it is safe to say, not make trouble for them and give them the space to govern. These were wise choices.
Now all that is left is to test their ability, and to see where they’ll steer the country without the burden of Eamon Ryan’s hand on the wheel, pulling them leftwards. We should wish them well, but we should also make sure they all know: This time, there are no scapegoats, lads.