PD local councillor Cait Keane has joined Fine Gael in Dublin South. There is by-election coming up and with Tom Kitt steppign down in 2012 Fine Gael might lick their chops at a potentail third seat.

ITs a good week for Red C to take the latest tracking poll for the Sunday Business Post. Markets are falling like stones (Friday has the potential to be another massive dead cat bounce) and the government don’t look to have stamped authority on many aspects of policy.

REcently concludd partnership talks have the ingredients to annoy rather than placate businesses and workers alike while George Hook is busy rising the blue-shirts around him. FF will at least be using these events to cover a sharp drop in their numbers.

FF (-4) 36%

FG (+3) 28%

Lab (-1) 9%

Green (-) 7%

SF (-1) 9%

PD ( +1) 3%

The obvious irony of PD support rising as they exit stage left is overshadowed by the seriousness of a further drop in Labour support in the week their campaign HQ emailed all suporters to highlight an article extolling GIlmore as the real leader of the oposition. In the current economic climate with Cowen and his government failing to secure people’s belief the Labour leader will be very dismayed by the poll. If he is not then the job is not for him. Enda will be pleased for this sort of support next June might keep him his job.

Good riddance. Or as WorldbyStorm writes over at Cedar Lounge Revolution, ‘The PDs get a a four week reprieve. Then they die.’ Can’t come soon enough. The only downside is that we’ll have to endure a plethora of obituaries telling us how the PDs made a difference, how they shaped whole governments regardless of their size, how a tiny party drove the ideology of a nation. However, when future historians cut through the bilge they will find an opportunistic party that actually free-loaded on what little social democracy there was in this country. It is an indictment of the quality of political commentary that they have been swept along by the PDs own self-important propaganda. For the truth is a little more banal, and as uninteresting as the PDS are ( and, thank god, soon to be ‘were’).

A party of fiscal rectitude? Yeah, right. The first time they entered government, we witnessed the accelerator being applied to government spending. During the brief Fianna Fail minority government in 1987-1989, public expenditure was kept low (though the accolades being showered on the ‘tough decisions’at the time are also the stuff of myth which I will develop in a subsequent post). In the three budgets in that period, current expenditure was kept almost static - from €12.2 billion to 12.4 billion - a minuscule increase of 1.6%. When the PDs, under former Fianna Failer Des O’Malley, entered Government Buildings, public spending shot up. Spending over the next three years jumped by €3 billion - a massive 24%. This was the biggest three-year increase - either in nominal or percentage terms - in the history of the state.

What does this say for the PDs? Very little. They were free-loaders. The change came about because of the personal hammering Charlie Haughey took during the 1989 election campaign (the famous RTE radio phone-in where caller after caller gave out about the state of the healthcare system and Charlie replying he wasn’t aware how bad it was). So bad was the hammering and the subsequent election result that Fianna Fail jettisoned their most sacred principle - no coalition. They did the deal with the PDs but were determined never to be caught out again. They rampled up government spending. And the PDs went along.

The PDs weren’t so much the party of fiscal rectitude as they were the party of fiscal indifference - best exemplified by Michael McDowell’s comment prior to the last election that stamp duties could be abolished because the Exchequer didn’t need the revenue. Yes, they could spend with the best of them, they could create screaming headlines on tax - it was all the same to them. Fiscal rectitude was the handmaiden of vote-getting - and the poor maiden was rarely summoned from her closet.

The party of privatisation? Oh, yes, they did call for that. But that’s all they did. It was Fianna Fail, slip-streaming in the global neo-liberal gale, that did all the privatisation. Not one major privatisation came through a PD ministry. It was Fianna Fail, anxious to shed itself of its statist past (they were, after all, the chief architects of public enterprise-building), anxious to show that they, too, were part of the new world order, who drove that agenda, an agenda shared by so many parties, even of the Left (the Democrats dumped the New Deal, Blair dumped Clause 4, the German SPD came late but came with a vengeance with Hartz IV). So victorious was the neo-liberal agenda that privatisation no longer a pragmatic instrument but proof of one’s identity with a politically-conforming modernity.

The party of low taxes? The tax cuts came courtesy of a right-wing Fianna Failer - Charlie McCreevey. The idea that he needed ideological guidance from a small outside force is derisory. But clearly the PDs whooped it up - wanting more and more. How was this viable? It was due to the massive economic growth generated by multi-nationals whose presence here was courtesy of public sector policy - namely, the IDA’s new industrial strategy of picking winners in winning sectors. That’s hardly an advertisement for the invisible hand of the unregulated market.

And the tax cuts continued to flow - courtesy of Fianna Fail’s speculator-friendly policies. No one could claim this was a PD invention. Fianna Fail has been playing that game for a long time - all the way back to TACA. The PDs participated in the feast, but they didn’t come up with the recipes, never mind cook a single dish. At best, they brought polemical condiments.

The final argument that’s often used is Mary Harney and her effective privatisation of huge swathes of the health service. Surely this is proof of their neo-liberal driven agenda which was imposed upon an unwilling Fianna Fail. Oh, I wasn’t aware that Fianna Fail championed a public health-care system in recent times. They hobbled it so badly in the late 1980s that much subsequent investment was merely a catching up exercise. They stood over a system that subsidised the wealthy and the insured at the expense of the public - the famous two-tier system. Harney’s co-locationism was only a logical progression of fundamental Fianna Fail policy and their larger agenda - to reduce the scope of public investment.

But Fianna Fail could play this co-location game like real professionals. If a constituent complained to the local Fianna Fail TD, s/he could just shrug a shoulders, roll an eye - and blame it on ‘those PDs’. When a new health service came to town they would, of course, take credit - the spirit of de Valera alive and well. A good puppet-master knows when to let the odd string go this or that way - it’s part of the act. An act that Fianna Fail has mastered no matter who sits beside them at the cabinet table.

The PDs played at being neo-liberals. But they hadn’t a patch on the economic conservatives that dominated the Free State - the Ernest Blythes and cutting pensions, or Patrick McGiliigan declaring it wasn’t the job of Government to create jobs (and he was Minister for Industry!). These were hard men, true men - they practiced tough love without the love. The PDs, by comparisons, were wimps.

Ultimately, the PDs were runaway strays from the Fianna Fail kennel - a kennel that most will return to. To overlook this is to overlook the PD dynamic. For they merely aped their masters. The Fianna Fail boat has two oars and they can use one or the other or both or neither as it suits them. They have a strong right-wing, they have a one-nationist Lemassian wing; and both are trotted out and meshed when it suits them. Many on the Left don’t get Fianna Fail. They claim the Soldiers of Destiny have no ideology, just a relentless, ultimately pragmatic, pursuit of power but in fact the opposite is true - they are fiercely ideological and more class-conscious then any other major Irish party. How else could they so expertly balance their broad class alliance for decades - leading all others among the working class, the middle class and farmers? What other party could so easily move between Labour and the PDs and the Greens (Sinn Fein will be a doddle)? The Left tries to define Fianna Fail in terms of European cleavages - Lefts and Rights that emerged out of industrialisation. But Fianna Fail just laughs. And the Left still don’t get it.

Let’s, at least, get it right with the PDs. They could call for tax cuts, they could call for privatisation, they could oversee substantial expenditure increases and suck at the taxpayer’s teat (when subsidies were flooding in from the European taxpayer - over €30 billion since 2007 - the PDs stood on no other principle but ‘Please, sir, could I have another’), they could call for swingeing public spending cuts, they could support social partnership - something that hardly features in the neo-liberal lexicon (when in Enterprise, Mary H. brought in the national minimum wage over the screams of the business community). What’s more they could swing between the two larger parties. After all, their first electoral outing after they were elected to the Dail saw them in an electoral pact with Fine Gael, and Fine Gael was never off the agenda (surely there’s some kind of lesson here for Labour and the Greens).

In short, the PDs did all the things that Fianna Fail has done so expertly. Truly, they were their teachers’ students. Yes, they did split - the political tensions intertwined with Haughey’s polarising personality (was Charlie right-wing? Centrist? Corporatist? Or just plain Bonapartist?). They split, but as a right-wing Fianna Fail rump, when most of that right-wing stayed in Fianna Fail and is happier than any rump can be. They split, but like so many teenagers, they never strayed too far. They kept ringing the parents for money. And now their crib has collapsed, they’ve lost their jobs, there’s not much of a future in the cold world. They have no option - they’re returning home.

And when they do, you’ll never be able to spot the difference.

In a great day for Irish and European democracy, the Irish people, on a higher turnout than Nice II, rejected the illegitimate and anti-democratic Lisbon Treaty by 53.4% to 46.6%. In doing so, they have struck a blow for freedom and against remote, unaccountable and undemocratic rule by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. They have shown great courage in the face of an Establishment media blitz by Independent Newspapers, the Irish Times, the Sunday Business Post, The Tribune and others who bombarded us with a relentless torrent of black propaganda about the “disaster” a no vote would be for Ireland. As I pointed out on a previous post, the final day before polling was marked by a disgraceful attempt at scaremongering on the front-page of the Irish Independent, claiming that a “No” vote would accelerate rising unemployment. It is interesting that while the margins were not as large on the day, the poll on the Independent’s own website and the story’s comment pages were deluged by angry criticism of the story and support for a “No” vote.

This outcome cannot be separated from the context in which it takes place, which relates to one of my biggest grievances against our party-political culture - namely the culture of the “cosy-consensus”, in which like the ideological equivalent of a business-cartel cornering the market by refusing to compete with one another on price, the political-elites insist on refusing to compete with one another on a certain set of political issues. The Irish elites insisted - like with immigration - on refusing to represent the huge segment of public opinion that has historically opposed closer European political integration. Never has that been more true that now, with the elites continuing to display open contempt for our decision. Only yesterday, Una Claffey, former government spokesperson, argued that in Lisbon “we” had gotten all we wanted. Who is the “we” in this? This mantra continues to be repeated by members of the FF elite, who insisted during the referendum campaign that “we” had gotten all our “redlines” in the negotiations. Again who are “we”? The answer is clear - they are referring to themselves - the elite. Never in the history of Irish politics as an independent country have our political-class be so out of touch with the people they claim to represent.

It is infuriating to me, as a “no” voter, to hear Barroso, Wallstrom, Polish PM Donald Tusk, French Secretary for Europe Jouyet, German Foreign Minister Steinmeier and others insist that the ratification of the Treaty must go ahead. On the contrary it must not go ahead, and most certainly must not apply to Ireland in its current form. The Irish people have said “no” and if the elites persist in trying to railroad us into ratification by trying to isolate us by getting the other 26 governments and parliaments to ratify Lisbon, then it will only reinforce Irish and European public opinion of Brussels as a remote and anti-democratic project. While a pro-European myself, I had not choice but to vote no due to a number of factors including those I have described in the previous post. The French and Dutch peoples have already said no. Now the Irish have said no. You don’t need to be a rocket-scientist to deduce how the British would vote had they been given the opportunity. When the Irish politicians tell the other states should continue ratification, what they really mean is that the governments and parliaments of those countries should do so - for not one of them will dare put this to a referendum in their respective countries due to the certainty of a “no” vote. Sarkozy said as much in a meeting with journalists some months ago.

Our decision on the current package is final. Another tarted-up copy of the rejected formula rejected by the Dutch, French, and now Irish is a non-runner. We Irish are tiring of the “permanent revolution” of European integration. We want to remain in the EU and the euro, but not at any price. The recent reintroduction of the annual 1916 parades have served to remind the Irish people of what was sacrificed for our freedom, and I believe a richer Ireland is now more self-confident and inclined to defend its sovereignty in a way that was not the case in the past. If they come back to us again with a new package, we must insist it be radically different - at least in its application to Ireland - from the one we have rejected. That must include the deletion of the self-amending Article 48 that allows for treaty ratification without referenda, the retention of our Commissioner and voting weight on the Council, an opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights like Poland and the UK obtained, and the retention of our national vetoes on issues like energy, public health, and tourism and sport. Anything less deserves the same answer we gave on June 12th.

The report today from Central Mental Hospital Carers’ Group, the Irish Mental Health Coalition and Schizophrenia Ireland about the desirability of moving the Central Mental Hospital from Dundrum to Thornton Hall emphasised two major things for me - the first political and relevant, the second trivial, unoriginal and selfinvolved.

The first point is that this site at Thornton Hall looks like it could turn into a nasty problem for the government, they paid well over the odds for the site and will shoehorn this onto the area to extract value from the decision by selling land in Dundrum. That decision will end up doing damage to the status of sufferers of mental health and according to Dr Harry Kennedy (director of the Hospital, not consulted about the move) impair recruitment. Check out the bebo that has been set up to get a million signatures together to protest.

Mental health is an issue that is treated appallingly in this country, we lose 500 people a year to suicide but spend a fraction of the amount spent on road safety on preventing suicide and addressing its wider mental health issues. Politics doesn’t respond to those with no voice, I suppose.

While the Green party were at pains last night on Q&A to emphasise their return to focussing on their ministries and a narrower agenda (perfectly entitled to do that), I did find a statement on this issue from a year ago on the Bebo site above;

We regard this Government’s plans to re-locate the Central Mental Hospital to a site alongside the planned Thornton Prison as being totally unacceptable. Such a move will accentuate the stigma and isolation/social exclusion of the mentally ill.

I hope they raise it at Cabinet at the very least, more here.

The second point is that the debate today, invariably featuring Jim Power but excellently done by Vincent Browne on his Nightly News was of the highest quality. John Moloney was on with VB and many of his points are worth listening to, primarily his admission about the role of cost in this decision and his avoiding explaining how Harry Kennedy was not consulted. It didn’t come across well but wasn’t awful, perhaps because of the issue at heart but also Moloney’s straight forwardness at times (when it suited him admittedly).

Yet there is little or no way to get it streaming onto any blog or news site without a great deal of tech. Politicians wont cry, neither probably will media (ask RTE who have kept ownership of so much content) but it is something that really needs to change or get left behind. I admitted this is a self indulgent point but one that is increasingly relevant. I know Simon and others are pushing this and they are right, politics needs it.

Cowen’s political positioning of the government is very much the slowly slowly affair befitting of a month in May. The cabinet reshuffles were quite deft, keeping the big names happy but at arms length from a putsch while the junior ministries gave the backbenches more hope than Bertie ever dared. It is a mark of confidence as much as anything else to trust Fianna Fail with a meritocratic approach. Beyond this though, we have seen some utterances on policy.

His speech at the grand homecoming was laden with community solidarity, the needs of others, the common good and the necessity of good government. If Bertie never did the “vision” thing or the ideology then Cowen was brimming with the stuff for his first few days. The approach to social partnership, as a microcosm of his tack towards the trade unions, is likely to become easy shorthand for the differences between Ahern and Cowen. Ahern isn’t gone a wet week when we read the news that the HSE will allow about 1,000 jobs to go in natural attrition.

The management structure at the HSE has come in for a huge amount of criticism as disprorpotional to the level of care and the number of doctors. Indeed it is one of the rare points of unison among all critics of the public health system. Jobs that go need to be streamlining delivery, not cost-saving for its own sake. That means somebody (anybody?) knowing what the hell people are supposed to do and who they are reporting to. The voluntary redundancy measure was on the table at the formation of the HSE only for Ahern to intervene and assure unions the jobs were safe.

Harney won’t speculate on the scale of job cuts in the service - and rightly so, the last thing people want is to see the return to the binge-purge approach to Health provision - but putting the service on an even keel in the ratio of service providers to managers is a necessary step to do this. This returns it back to the realm of industrial relations, cutting jobs doesn’t need to bring the house down around our ears and just how much hardball gets played is going to be important.

By 50% + to 49% +

Congratulations to Ciaran Cannon on a personal level but asking the obvious question but how did the votes really play out? Because that is what will determine if the party unites behind him or goes its separate ways. I acknowledge that I’m guessing here but if I’m wrong about one area then it has a knock on for the others.

Baseline information that we know at this stage.
Oireachtas members 40% - I think we’re guessing a 2:2 split here
Cllrs and senior figures 30% - we were told that the cllr were breaking for Cannon 2:1
Party members 30% which would imply the membership broke for O’Malley 2:1

Below I outline my possibilities of how it happened

Alternative scenarios
Alternative A
Change in the Oireachtas members 40% - I can’t see Grealish or Cannon voting for anyone other than Cannon so the only other possible outcome here is 3:1 for Cannon with Harney supporting him. Which means that O’Malley just have won both the membership and cllrs vote by almost 2:1 to come as close as she did. Which would be a major turn up and a problem for the party if those lower in the political pyramid on whom the party depends had chosen one person but it was undone by the sitting leader and minister. I would rate this option as unlikely.

Alternative B
Oireachtas members 40% - I think we’re guessing a 2:2 split here
Cllrs and senior figures 30% - we were told that the cllrs etc were breaking for Cannon 2:1, but maybe that didn’t happen as was suggested and he just won convincingly more here than O’Malley did, but not 2:1. However -
Party members 30% - that still implies O’Malley won almost equally more of the membership. And they are the ones relied on canvass leaflet drop etc, will those that supported O’Malley come out if they suspect that their cllr went the other way?

B is the more likely scenario in my view

Alternative C
Oireachtas members 40% - I think we’re guessing a 2:2 split here
Cllrs and senior figures 30% - we were told that the cllrs were breaking for Cannon 2:1, but maybe that didn’t happen as was suggested and in fact was a very even split.
Party members 30% and that means we almost have to have a very even split in the membership.

C is a less likely scenario in my view than B but marginally so. But it would still leave on a local level the same problem as B but to a lesser degree, the mindset would be - I as member voted for O’Malley but I suspect/believe/feel it my water that my councillor voted the other way and I’m not so inclined to help him out as a result. With such a reduced membership this could be fatal for the chances of many of the cllrs in terms of mobilising over the next 12 months.

Alternative D
Oireachtas members 40% - I think we’re guessing a 2:2 split here
Cllrs and senior figures 30% - we were told that the cllrs were breaking for Cannon 2:1, but maybe that didn’t happen as was suggested and in fact it was all nonsense and O’Malley romped home amongst the cllrs etc. Some of whom may now decide the jig is up and depart the scene between now and 2009 locals
Party members 30% but that means that Cannon won the membership convincingly. And that if cllrs depart he has eager members ready to enter the battle next year.

Alternative D is the most hopeful one for the PDs but it seems bar far the the most unlikely.

I’m open to people giving alternative options but can they relate them to how the numbers played out in the electoral colleges?

Perhaps out of worry that the High Court will not find in his favour after tomorrow’s case or perhaps out of that deep-seated predisposition to change his mind more often than the weather, Ahern is widely reported as considering only giving sparse detail to the Dail tomorrow. I am not sure we would have known the difference to be quite frank, however it seems that discussions with Senior Ministers has confirmed (if such a thing is even possible at this point) in his mind that he should only give the bare minimum to the Dail and wait for his next Tribunal hearing.

There is a side of me that thinks some of Ministers would have to advise him of that course. Should he go and tell the Dail everything, after first stating he would not be doing so and getting his Ministers to defend such a course of action, he makes them look like prize clowns whose sole purpose is to do Bertie’s bidding and defend all sorts. By heading into the Dail and giving some degree of clarification, all those who wish to “see the tribunal’s proceedings respected” simply end up with a bit of egg on their faces.

This is hardly just a political judgement on their part, they are perhaps keen to see Ahern exert some degree of authority at this point. He appears absolutley incapable of controlling the agenda on this story and his tried and tested mechanism of “brass-necking it” hasn’t done him many favours so far. Perhaps most worrying of all is that the Dail may become a site of ongoing inquiry into what might be seen as questionable political practice. The process of a Tribunal has always been used to remove much of the political heat and sting from a bad news story. It places the problem at a distance from politics, carried out by judges with no legal standing other than finding facts. It is not a trial or a court proceedings, it doesn’t determine innocent or guilt. Most importantly, it takes a long time.

Moving the site of such an inquiry to a dedicated, well-financed Dail committee which would inquire and find in a brief time once a complaint was made to it would put the fear of God into many politicians. Allowing for the ongoign precedent of Dail challenges on the basis of his Tribunal evidence to continue may not be the desire of any who might be king. However it seems to me that there really is no choice on this one.

As I have stated above, Ahern is not in control of this story. He doesn’t know what is going to come at him next and he doesn’t know when. The next appearance on May 20 is nearly two months away, with a trip to Congress in between. That trip may be overshadowed by some tribunal leak or fallout from the High Court case. His position is being undermined by a drip-drip effect and a failure to respond with convincing stories to what emerges. Not giving a statement Wednesday is not only a smack in the face to the Dail, it is also giving a political hostage to fortune for six weeks. Those are gambles that Ahern has not been winning of late.