Garret is Right on The Money

After reading a friendly piece in today’s Indo by John Cooney in advance of the new RTE series to mark the former Taoiseach’s birthday, I turned to Garret’s weekly column in the Saturday Irish Times. It is a most astute piece of commentary. Garret wants to reiterate the point that if Bertie Ahern is to be elected Taoiseach, when the new Dáil convenes after the next election, it will be because of Sinn Féin votes. There are two choices presented to the electorate at the moment; a government led by Bertie Ahern that will need the votes of independents and Sinn Féin (he discounts the PDs chances of getting back in sufficient numbers) and a Rainbow coalition led by Enda Kenny. This assumes there will not be a much greater shift in opinion beyond that reflected in recent polls.

The Rainbow and Fianna Fáil blocs will be fairly close so this time the independents will not have the luxury of abstaining as four of them did last time. They will want the leverage that goes with support for a minority government. The same applies to Sinn Féin. Therefore, as Garret emphasises, a possible Fianna Fáil/Labour alliance is quite beside the point. He further poses the question as to why the clear-cut choice between the two alternative administrations outlined above has not yet emerged clearly into the public view. His answer:

First of all, the media has been preoccupied with trying to divide Labour by boosting the will-of-the-wisp idea of a Fianna Fáil/Labour coalition, and this has tended to distract attention from the actual choice that will face TDs in the aftermath of the election.

Second, the media also fell for the clever move made by Mr Ahern some months ago to distract attention from the fact that his return to power now almost certainly depends upon Sinn Féin support for his nomination as taoiseach.

He successfully confused all of the media earlier this year by giving an exclusive interview on this issue to the Sunday Independent, in which he said that he would not enter a coalition with Sinn Féin or make an agreement with it to support a Fianna Fáil government.

Outside of this column, that statement seems to have been accepted as excluding a Fianna Fáil government elected with Sinn Féin support, volunteered without prior agreement between the two parties.

By giving his statement exclusively to the Sunday Independent, the Taoiseach ensured that the paper that would have been most likely to expose this ploy would be silenced, at least temporarily, on this issue.

Fitzgerald predicts that when we come nearer to the election, and when Fianna Fáil’s difficulty in returning to office without Sinn Féin support becomes increasingly evident, the opposition parties will certainly hammer home the fact that the only practicable alternative to a new rainbow coalition would be a Fianna Fáil government put into office and kept there by Sinn Féin votes in the Dáil. We can therefore expect that the notion of a minority Fianna Fáil government dependent on Sinn Féin votes for survival will become a major issue during the election campaign.