PERHAPS the most salient point about the shameful failure of the putative new Dublin coalition is its failure to address the unity question.
That Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are essentially partitionist parties is a simple statement of fact. Down through the long, bleak, violent years of partition, the parties’ relationship with the North has been rather akin to that of Dracula’s with the cross – it occasionally has to be confronted, but only with a hiss, a snarl and a hasty retreat.
The rise of Sinn Féin not only as an electoral power in the South but to dizzying levels of popularity – at one stage polling in the mid- and high 30s, almost double the Civil War parties’ figures – has in the past decade forced Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael into a panicky rethink as it became clear that most people agreed that partition has been a horrible failure. The idea of a new Ireland captured the zeitgeist – particularly among the young – in a suddenly prosperous small country finding itself to the fore in a reconfigured post-Brexit Europe.
The response was the desperately unambitious Shared Island Initiative of 2020 which was designed to do just enough to suggest sympathy with the idea of unity without scaring the British horses. With depressing predictability, Leo Varadkar, at the beating heart of the debate both as Taoiseach and Tánaiste, suddenly found his voice as a passionate new Ireland advocate at exactly the same time as his political career came to an end.
The descent of Sinn Féin in the polls to a position of approximate parity with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and the resultant shambolic coalition that’s about to take power has catapulted us backwards to such an extent that the timid Shared Island Initiative now looks like a golden age of daring and hope. The priority in Dublin now is to find a way to keep the many and varied actors in the new government drama happy. The Programme for Government was drawn up not with the best interests of all the citizens of Ireland at heart, but with a view to finding a way to keep the ragtag coalition staggering on for five years.
As an added expression of disinterest, the glacial pace of the promised move towards widening the vote in the Irish Presidential election to the North and to the global diaspora has not only slowed further, it has been brought to an abrupt halt.
Add to that the ditching of the Occupied Territories Bill and its replacement with an as-yet unidentified commitment to dealing with the issue of Israeli imports from illegally occupied land in Palestine and we see the deeply anti-progressive nature of the administration about to take the reins.
It may well be that this coalition – whose creation has been at times comically chaotic – will surprise us all up here by proving a success and turning its attention in time to the national question. But if you believe that, we’ve a peace bridge to sell you. If this government lasts it will only be by dint of pleasing its various constituents, none of whom are renowned for seeing beyond the border.
