Southern Reality Check for Shinners

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Ireland Calling with John Spain

Southern Reality Check for Shinners

June 8, 2007

By John Spain

NEGOTIATIONS to form the new government here are proceeding, with intensive talks now underway between Fianna Fail and the Green Party. The talks went on for several on Bank Holiday Monday, and they are continuing all day today, (Tuesday). The most likely outcome — as predicted in this column a couple of weeks ago is that the next government will be formed by Fianna Fail, the Progressive Democrats (PDs) and others. Along with the two remaining PDs, the government will probably include three of the five independents and the six Greens.

The Greens are now seen as pivotal. Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern knows he can do a deal with the PDs. He also knows that he can buy up the independents. And in fact he could form a government with just that level of support.

But it would be a wafer thin majority. A new Fianna Fail led government would be far more stable if the Greens could be included with their six Dail (Parliament) seats, requiring only three of the five independents as well as the two PDs to give a comfortable total of 89 seats out of the 166 in the Dail. Which is why the Greens are now the focus of so much attention.

That kind of arrangement would avoid the necessity for Ahern to do a deal with Tony Gregory and Finian McGrath, the two socialist/republican style independents, who would have very long shopping lists for their support and could be a real pain on issues like the Shannon stopover for U.S. troops bound for the Middle East.

And the Greens — God bless their innocence — are gagging to get into government, which will make the Fianna Fail negotiating team’s job much easier in spite of the differences in policy.

The Greens also have problems with the Shannon stopover and issues like corporate donations to political parties, apart from all their usual brown rice policies and opposition to motorway building. But the cute hoors in Fianna Fail will show them how the real world actually works, and after some wrestling with their consciences the Greens should come on side.

Even so, there is some way to go yet. Later this week Fianna Fail will start formal talks with the PDs and some, or perhaps all, of the independents. The Dail does not reconvene until June 14, so Ahern’s team has plenty of time to sweet talk possible allies.

If his favored formula does not come together, there’s always the possibility of doing a deal with Labor, and a Fianna Fail-Labor coalition would have a huge majority.

So there’s not much point in speculating further at this stage about the make-up of the next government. Which gives us an opportunity this week to look back at the disaster story the election was for Sinn Fein.

This election was a painful reality check for Sinn Fein, which had been hoping to make a big breakthrough in the south. The master plan was to be part of the governments both north and south and to use that to work rapidly towards a united Ireland.

They were predicting up to 10 seats in the Dail. But in fact, instead of making gains, they lost one of the few seats they had.

So what went wrong? Their strategy was to use Gerry Adams as a presidential-style leader who would tour the areas in the south they were targeting and use his celebrity to get the local candidates elected.

This backfired spectacularly for several reasons. Adams had only a vague understanding of issues down here, and his dictatorial way of dealing with interviewers made it look like he was trying to dodge their questions and cover-up his lack of knowledge with empty slogans.

As the campaign went on, this got worse rather than better. And the credibility problem the Shinners had was not helped by their about-turn on tax.

Just a few weeks ago they were arguing for a hefty increase in corporation tax, but when the election started they realized this would be seen as threatening to jobs so they abandoned it. The reversal added to the impression that they were making it up as they went along.

On TV, Adams was a disaster. The lowest point for him was when he claimed to be living on the average industrial wage and Michael McDowell pointed out that he (Adams) had a valuable holiday home in Donegal.

Adams smirkingly said the bank owned it, which allowed McDowell to ask if that was the Northern Bank (the one robbed of millions by the IRA). The whole country watching the debate on TV sniggered.

But it was more than funny. It was also a timely reminder of the murky recent past of the Sinn Fein/IRA boys. The bad tempered response of Adams did not lessen the damage done.

Much of this damage could be seen as superficial. But the Shinners were and still are facing problems on a very fundamental level.

Going into this election they thought that the glow of their “achievements” in the North and their promises of improved social services and a fairer society in the south would be a powerful combination that would prove irresistible to many voters here, especially those in deprived areas and those with vague Republican leanings.

But that’s an illusion. The fact is that the North always has been way down the list of priorities for people here, so the peace dividend for Sinn Fein in the south is negligible.

Surveys that ask people here if they are in favor of a united Ireland always produce a 90% positive response. But when it gets down to the nitty gritty, people here, like people everywhere, vote according to their wallets, and aspirations about a united Ireland remain in the daydreaming part of their brains.

The sight of Adams wandering around Dublin during the campaign was interpreted as an unwelcome intrusion by a northerner. There was something disturbing about someone with an accent like Adams’ telling Dubliners what was wrong with them, or how much tax they should be paying or how to make their hospitals better. What would he know about it, people wondered, and Adams failed to provide any detailed answers.

Far from helping the Shinners down here, the involvement of the “northern” Adams was probably counterproductive. What was a Westminster MP campaigning down here for anyway; he wasn’t even a candidate himself.

Yes, there was peace in the North, but it should have happened years earlier. And on improving services and making Celtic Tiger Ireland a fairer society, the Shinners had neither any credibility or any experience. So why would anyone vote for them in an election which ended up being mainly about keeping the economy on track?

The truth is that in the south the Shinners are largely irrelevant. We already have a mainstream constitutional Republican party here … it’s called Fianna Fail. And the blue collar vote that Fianna Fail does not have will stay with the mainstream working class party, Labor, leaving the Shinners to the far left, the socialists and the loonies.

So in the south the Shinners are never going to cannibalize Fianna Fail like they ate up the SDLP in the North. It’s just not the same down here, and this election will have shown the Shinners that. It’s enough to turn them even greener (with nausea, not nationalism).

Sinn Fein were not the only ones to suffer, of course. The PDs also had a disastrous election, but theirs is a very different story, one that we will be looking at in detail here in the weeks to come.

In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed and with a bit of luck we will have a coherent government in place here shortly, one that will oversee another five years of progress in Ireland.

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