Boxed in, boxed out

With electoral annihilation pending for Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin’s election as that party’s leader had the potential to be interesting only for its facilitation of yet another round of ‘where have all the fadas gone?’ But, writes Harry Browne, his ‘prolier-than-thou’ posturing in last Tuesday’s leaders’ debate may signal an opportunistic shift by his party that, while intellectually incredible, may be politically important in the years to come. That the government-in-all-but-name of Fine Gael and Labour are already spitting teeth before they have even assumed office suggests at least the possibility that the potential for a genuine transformational politics has not been entirely lost. Yet.

Toward the end of last Tuesday’s debate between Eamon Gilmore and Micheál Martin, Vincent Browne asked a question about how and with whom each man might see his party going into coalition. Gilmore partly dodged it, basically saying ‘well not Fianna Fáil anyway, that’s for sure’, and that he hoped to lead the next government. Martin avoided the question entirely, and launched into an idealistic little reverie:

You see this is the classic position, it’s all about which party’s going into power, to go in with who. The people are fed up with that actually. The people actually want a commitment to do the right thing for the country and to put the right policies in place for the country. That’s what the people want. And that’s what we’re going to do.

And Eamon summed it up there, he said 'this is the first time we can get into government and lead it.' Now whether you believe that or not doesn’t really matter, but it gives the story as to how he’s conducting this election campaign... he doesn’t want to offend anyone in the electorate, because he wants to maximise his vote. And that’s the problem with this election, as far as I see it. And Fine Gael are doing the same thing. They still haven’t got it really. We’re in a big crisis. The issues are so serious that they demand a different way of approaching politics...

What we’re getting here is that it’s all about us getting into power, and we’ll say anything to get in, and we won’t offend anybody.

Yes, that was a senior Fianna Fáil politician having a go at a rival for trying to be all things to all people, maximise his vote and seek power for its own sake, prompting a mass walk-out of pots and kettles aggrieved at having their act stolen. And, Even Bigger Yes, that was the same senior Fianna Fáil politician pulling it off, credibly delivering this accusation as an accurate critique of his opponent. Just have a look at the (admittedly unscientific) ‘like-o-meter’ on the same web page as the debate video: Martin, running no better than even with Gilmore all through the debate, shoots way ahead of his Labour opponent during this final section. 

We can wish it weren’t so all we like. But inasmuch as the ‘three main parties’ element of this election campaign holds any interest at all for those of us on the Left, Eamon Gilmore underlined this week that it can’t really be because of anything he says or does. He, probably more than Martin, made sure the debate was held largely on the level of managerial detail, on questions of technocratic competence, rather than on any ideological grounds. It was striking that, later in the evening when the Vincent Browne programme featured the ‘other’ parties, Joe Higgins and Sinn Fein’s Padraig MacLachlainn -- plus CrisisJam’s own beloved Gavan Titley -- could sail like so many intrepid explorers into the so-far uncharted waters of sensible social-democratic approaches to the nation’s predicament, a vast empty space that Gilmore scarcely even acknowledged as existing somewhere beyond the horizon.
So given that there are only so many ways even on CrisisJam that you can say that, hey, the mainstream political debate is limited/strangulated -- even when Vincent Browne is asking many of the right questions -- is there anything to enjoy about the dynamic that has emerged this week? Certainly Fianna Fáil is set for a leftward lurch into opposition; as Gavan pointed out, Martin peppered his neoliberal fact-facing nostrums with ‘prolier than thou’ posturing. And while we cannot take this seriously on any intellectual level, it may be politically important in the coming years as a strengthened ‘real left’ takes its place on the Opposition benches beside the thoroughly unreal left of Fianna Fáil. 

What may be more interesting is that the next government is, in effect, already on the defensive. There is widespread cynicism about the way Fine Gael and Labour ensured that FF would have to eat the Finance Bill before an election, and Brian Lenihan’s little bank-bailout gift left on the desk of the new finance minister underlines deliberately the essential, and despicable, political continuity between the last government and the next one. 

Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore, already anointed Taoiseach and Tánaiste, are enduring this election rather than really fighting it. In Tuesday’s debate Gilmore looked at times to be literally in a defensive crouch. As for Kenny, rope-a-dope doesn’t begin to describe it: Enda is less like Ali in the famous fight against Foreman, biding his time on the ropes, than like Jimmy Young versus Ali 18 months later, ducking out of the ring entirely when under pressure. 

This dynamic would lend itself to the emergence of Fighting Micky Martin even if the FF leader weren’t depicting himself as, literally, son of “the Champ”. We can bitch about this all we like, sending out horrified tweets about which of the party leaders was actually a minister for the last 11 years. But we should get over it. Martin is not about to storm back into government, and nor is he, short of an economic-crimes tribunal that sweeps up Gormley and Ryan with him, going to be made to pay for his sins in any real way. Like most elections, this one is going to conform pretty closely to the opinion polls three or four weeks ahead of polling date, with the main concern for the Left being that we don’t lose the momentum that should see us gain some genuine Dáil representation. To my mind, in the three-way race for the Taoiseach’s office, we don’t have a preference.

I say all this not because of any soft spot for Micheál Martin. On the contrary, I bear him a longstanding grudge because I worked in the education department of the Irish Times when he was education minister, and he thoroughly charmed the women in the office. Which I guess I regarded as properly my job. If he is the most ‘able’ of the party leaders in some sense, I regard that sense, that ability, as meaningless for the transformational politics that the country and the global moment actually demand, way, way beyond the dominant and thoroughly blinded fictions of ‘political reform’ and ‘renegotiation’.    

However, for that politics to have a fighting chance of emerging, the fact that the next government is already on the ropes, or hiding outside them, must surely be a good thing.

(Image top via jamesjustin on Flickr)