A HARNEY REIGN’S GONNA FALL

Write this story three weeks ago and you just might begin: September for Albert Reynolds was a tale of two photo-calls. And not just with Gerry Adams and John Hume outside Government Buildings. His session with Waterford’s defecting P.D., Martin Cullen, also confirmed him as King of the Southern Castle. He hadn’t only drawn the fangs of the I.R.A. Both Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats were revealed as toothless once Fianna Fáil was restored to its historical role as the dominant party of Irish nationalism.

That paragraph still stands but its conclusions got clouded once Albert went Down Under for his next chummy set of photo-opportunities with the Aussies and the Kiwis. TEAM and Irish Steel imploded while Dick Spring sulked about the elevation of Harry Whelehan, the Typhoid Mary of Irish politics, to the Presidency of the High Court. But not a bother on Albert, the Real President. He was following Mary Robinson on the Honorary Graduation circut; anything she could do, he could do better.

And yet life couldn’t have been more blissful for the Taoiseach as his plane left Irish airspace. He and his entourage could legitimately argue that he’d achieved an authority and primacy in Irish nationalist politics denied his four predecessors including both Jack Lynch and Charles Haughey. Every one was dancing to his tune.

For where could the other Southern parties go? The revisionists of Independent Newspapers don’t have to scrabble for votes and the Irish opposition parties know their electoral bread is buttered in East Limerick not East Belfast. They could legitimately murmur their doubts but any scepticism had been swamped by the momentum of the ceasefire. No Southern political party could expose themselves to the charge that they had an interest in civil war and the collapse of the ceasefire.

But Cullen’s defection went further; it effectively questioned the whole purpose of the P.D.’s. After ten years,the original reasons for their existence may no longer apply. The feuds between the Haughey and Lynch factions within Fianna Fáil are now history; the P.D.’s can no longer present themselves as the only party to keep Fianna Fáil honest and off the stroke.

Of course, the loss of Cullen has been represented as a purely personal matter. P.D. aplogists cite his personal ambition. They’ll even accept that there was a breakdown in personal communications. Indeed I suspect they’d confess anything but admit their party faces a major crisis of identity.

Obviously Des O’Malley’s departure as leader

and his messy replacement by Mary Harney counts. Neither Cox nor Cullen would have quit while the former could still realistically hope to be party leader. But even O’Malley would have found it difficult to withstand the tide flowing against the P.D.’s.

They’ve already lost two of their three major issues. They can’t so easily play the social liberal card now Fianna Fáil combine with Labour and have ceased to be an insuperable obstacle to progress on that front. Similarly the party that had presented itself as the voice of flexibilty and non-Nationalist sanity is now dragged on by the momentum of the Downing Street Declaration. As long as Albert Reynolds controls the agenda, they’re effectively paralysed.

This mightn’t be so damaging if they and Fine Gael hadn’t flirted with the revisionist agenda. By all means have Unionist contacts but both parties seemed totally out of touch with Northern Nationalists, especially those informed about Sinn Fein. Of course, we may yet face a turbulent ride. I suspect there could be a very dangerous phase in about nine months if the most hardline Northern Nationalists feel they have been conned. Even so, it seemed, however unfairly, as if both parties had a partisan interest in continued conflict. The ceasefire alone justifies this Coalition; the public may well rightly conclude that peace wouldn’t have come with a Rainbow Coalition led by John Bruton that also included the P.D.’s.

Nor can the Progressive Democrats preen themselves as Ireland’s political version of Sir Galahad; the Pat Cox saga definitely dirtied the bibs of the self-styled party of integrity. And immediately he was elected Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds acted to unify Fianna Fáil by bringing into his cabinet, two old Lynch followers, David Andrews and Joe Walsh. No more Fianna Fáil feuding; again the P.D.’s were stymied.

Ultimately Mary Harney’s party are left with two issues : lower taxes and howling at Fianna Fáil’s grubby standards. Neither impresses the electorate as once they did. They’re far from inspired by the politics of the perpetual whinge.

Tax-cutting may play to both the Fine Gael and P.D. core constituencies and tempt some prosperous and wavering Fianna Fáil supporters but other voters are suspicious of the sums. Tax cuts can also entail cuts in government subsidies and public service jobs. Even pragmatic Irish conservatives don’t want to follow the U.K. example. Too many Irish people have first-hand experience of the ravages of the Thatcherite ideologues. The P.D.’s really can’t follow Michael Portillo.

So the Sunday Business Post speculated that the P.D.’s would propose the privatization of both water and electricity. Given the unpopularity of water charges, this didn’t sound very bright since privatization means everyone must pay for water. As for privatizing electricity, one of the P.D.’s best hopes for a new seat is Senator Kathy Honan in Laois-Offaly. How would she explain that policy to workers on peat-fired stations vulnerable to redundancy?

And scandal-mongering isn’t the trump it once was. Certainly the opposition parties might be wiser to be more selective.The passports row was typical. In one Dail speech, Michael McDowell went nuclear, likening Albert Reynolds’ administration to Papa Doc’s Haiti. Doubtless, he’s been shivering ever since waiting for Maire Geoghegan-Quinn to send round the Connemara Gaeltacht wing of the Ton Ton Macoutes. But then perhaps McDowell believes all Arab businessmen are carpet-salesmen from Bongo Bongo Land. Would he have so outraged if the investors in the Reynolds family petfood business had been Irish-American friends of Tony O’Reilly?

McDowell’s high and mighty dudgeon is even more peculiar since the Progressive Democrats pose as a business-friendly party. Small-businessmen just might conclude that the barrister, McDowell, is parrotting the prejudices of the professional classes of Dublin 4. The people with old money who’ve never had to bother to find friendly investors for their projects. The P.D.’s should perhaps hesitate before so zealously targetting this self-made Taoiseach.

The P.D.’s economic problem is their accountant’s mentality; tax cuts are their panacea; they just don’t propose other policies for prosperity. And like Bruton’s Fine Gael, they’re also resolutely stuffy. Neither party has begun to speak the political language of computers. The politicians of the Irish Right have a professional and agricultural – not an industrial and engineering – background; they haven’t even started to understand the appliance of science in the Irish economy. It’s their own fault that Michael D. Higgins has been so easily allowed to set himself up as the Minister of the Media, MTV and All Things Post-Modern.

The Right might also stop hunting with the Independent Newspapers hounds. Both the Irish and Sunday Independent are massively successful commercial operations but the latter’s appeal may be more based on its lifestyle coverage; on Terry Keane not Cassandras like Conor Cruise O’Brien. If so, its columnists may be giving both Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats a seriously deceptive mirror of Irish public opinion.

Furthermore, the Irish Right is never seriously intellectually challenged exactly because so many sections of the private media share its agenda. Of course, they can still be undermined by the politics of personality but John Bruton will be condemned for his roar of a laugh not his party’s lack of ideas. Curiously the Irish Right may be floundering exactly because it’s had such an easy ride. Its very sense of superiority over Fianna Fáil may have made it complacent and beggared it of original ideas.

As of now, they’re cornered while Albert Reynolds controls the Southern agenda. But what does that mean for Dick Spring and Labour?

A fortnight ago, Reynolds and Spring were

spin-doctoring their own phoney war. “Labour sources” were leading us to believe that the Tanaiste wasn’t speaking to the Taoiseach because he was so miffed that Attorney-General, Harry Whelehan, was slated by Fianna Fáil to become President of the High Court.

From the outside, it all seemed a rather stupid media ploy, another artificial political soap opera to demonstrate the independence of Labour in government. Matters became even more farcical once it was learned that Labour’s candidate, Supreme Court Justice, Susan Denham didn’t want the post and hadn’t even been informed that she was being promoted for it.

Besides, what might have looked a smart story for the Sundays looked hopelessly ill-judged by midweek and the crises in TEAM and Irish Steel. Albert and Dick weren’t talking to each other. If not, why not? Didn’t they have a country to run?

One needn’t be bothered by all their jaunts abroad. Spring, after all, is Foreign Minister and there are phones and faxes. A government need not always be managed from the Taoiseach’s Dublin headquarters. Bertie Ahern, Ruairi Quinn and Brian Cowen were the ministers delegated to oversee the two industrial crises. Furthermore the programme managers had set up systems intended to defuse potential crises.

Reynolds and Spring really didn’t need to know every last detail of the fraught negotiations. The notion, as proposed by John Bruton, that personal appeals by either or both, could defuse the resistence of the craft workers in Cobh or Dublin Airport was laughable.

Yet both Reynolds and Spring looked lost in the diplomatic ozone. RTE mounted dramatic coverage of the two cliff-hanging disputes and Reynolds was relegated to the second half of their bulletins, cast as the Minister for Meeting People, the man who dined for Ireland! As for Spring, the Tanaiste seemed to have forgotten he was also the leader of the Irish Labour Party.

On the big issues, Labour was getting sidelined again. Indeed there were interesting parallels with 1932 when De Valera first brought Fianna Fáil to power. Of course, Fine Gael and the P.D.’s shouldn’t be compared to Cumann na Gael and the Blueshirts but in ‘32, Fianna Fáil gained its ascendancy through the Dail support of Labour and the benevolent neutrality of Sinn Fein/I.R.A.. By 1940, De Valera could cast aside their life-belts and comfortably govern without them.

A similar process could occur. By joining with Labour, Fianna Fáil had defused those social issues that produced such vicious hostility against the party among young voters. The national issue was also under Fianna Fáil control. But on economic issues, Fianna Fáil also had the upper hand over Labour. Whatever the merits of the craft workers’ cases in both semi-state disputes, Labour was perceived as joining Fianna Fáil in hastening their redundancies.

So as Foreign Minister, Spring was in danger of being marginalized, cast as the diplomatic valet to the Reynolds/Hume/Adams troika. He may have had his own good reasons not to be photographed with that trio; to be perceived as the man who could reassure Unionist suspicions. But even in that role, he seemed more sensitive to those same Unionist middle-class concerns that so bother Bruton and Harney. As Foreign Minister, he is the Irish government’s messenger to Mayhew; as leader of his party, he has yet to take any Labour line to the Shankill.

In that context, the non-communication between the pair looked even more foolish. While Reynolds was rubbing noses with Maoris in New Zealand, Spring was meeting with Sir Patrick Mayhew in the Anglo-Irish Conference. Surely the Tánaiste needed to brief the Taoiseach about the results of those talks.

Besides if he needed to bring Reynolds to heel, Dick Spring had picked the wrong issue. The choice of President of the High Court may have important long-term consequences for the country but it butters no parsnips for the poor. Workers and their families in Irish Steel and TEAM weren’t reported celebrating in the streets over Spring’s demarche.

So was Spring attempting to restore the tarnished ethical sheen to Labour? If so, he was yet again demonstrating how vulnerable his Nineties strategy is to being overtaken by economic events.

The function of the Labour party is to increase

employment and to protect and, whenever possible, improve the living standards of the workers who vote for it but as of now, that Kerry eye seems off the ball. Nor did Spring help himself by his association with the initial shaming conditions, fortunately forgotten, that each individual worker in Irish Steel write a letter of surrender to the company’s board.

All isn’t gloom for Labour. In certain ways, the party has been safeguarded by their political alliance with Fianna Fáil. Few workers believe John Bruton’s commiserations while Fianna Fáil in opposition would have played havoc with any Rainbow Coalition moving against workers in the semi-state sector. Opinion polls may place Labour beneath their ‘92 election peak but they are still way above their ‘89 ratings. The one consolation must be that they will lose seats to their left not the right as voters opt for the Democratic Left, Greens and perhaps maverick radicals of the Tony Gregory mode.

But Labour must take heed. They may have been right to warn off Reynolds when he sought to slip the Whelehan nomination through the Cabinet but high politics doesn’t produce jobs. While Albert Reynolds flys off, high on the improbability of it all, Dick Spring has to get back to his roots.

Next time he meets Bill Clinton, Dick Spring might remind himself of the U.S. President’s mantra in his campaign against George Bush - it still is the economy, stupid!