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No respite yet for Cowen
20 September 2009 By Pat Leahy
The shape of the huge challenges facing the government parties - individually and collectively - became a little clearer last week. For the Greens, the big hurdle is the National Asset Management Agency.
For Fianna Fáil, it’s the budget. The odds on the government clearing both can’t be much better than evens.
Lisbon aside, given that government worries eased a bit with last weekend’s Sunday Business Post/ Red C opinion poll, these twin challenges will not just dominate the coming months in Irish politics - they will decide the remainder of this government’s term.
The very public wrestling with itself has demonstrated the extent of the Green Party’s problem with Nama (see below). But Fianna Fáil will have a very big problem with the budget - perhaps an even bigger one than the Greens are having with the bank rescue plan.
Last week, most government departments responded to the Department of Finance’s request for preliminary budget plans for next year. These will involve cuts of an estimated €3 billion from current spending next year - a political earthquake following the years of automatic spending increases.
The fact that these spending cuts will come at a time when the government is paying billions of euro to rescue the banks only makes the politics of it more toxic.
Big spending increases had become ingrained in the Irish system of government. Even last year, when the recession had taken a firm grip, the October budget planned increases in spending. Only last April’s emergency budget reversed that position, and then the overwhelming balance of the adjustment was borne by higher taxes.
Now the government has decided - and Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan reiterated this last week - that the rest of the adjustment needed to bring down an unsustainable deficit will be made up of spending cuts.
That will put immense pressure on Fianna Fáil TDs, in a way that Nama won’t. Nama is general; budget cuts are specific.
In Athlone for the party’s autumn away-day gathering of the parliamentary party, most TDs were gloomy, worried and fearful. Some seemed tired even before the Dáil term resumed. ‘‘I was elected seven years ago," said one. ‘‘Then, you didn’t have anyone coming into your clinic in August. But this August was as busy as any other month." When asked what the next few months were going to be like, he grimaced.
Farmers and students protested outside the pleasant lakeside hotel, built on the former home of the Lenihans, as Mary O’Rourke told her colleagues. Now to another of the Lenihans, the third generation of the family to sit in the Dáil, falls the task of formulating the budget that may sweep his party from office for who knows how long. The trade unions have promised a campaign to resist cuts, clearly aware that the government will consider further reductions in public sector pay.
TDs know that, before long, the protests will be outside their constituency offices, pressuring them to break the line and vote against the cuts that the budget will bring. Some appear flakier than others.
‘‘Loads of backbenchers don’t realise what we’re going to have to do. They’ll all say they agree with the general aims, but they’re still coming into the office saying, ‘Oh, you can’t cut that, cut something else’," said one cabinet minister.
‘‘People are not realistic," a junior minister said. ‘‘Long-term, I think we need to change the electoral system."
‘‘The backbenchers haven’t grasped it at all," said another cabinet minister. ‘‘It’s the same old stuff from them. No sense of realism. They’re still lobbying us. You just end up talking about ‘Fianna Fáil values’."
If any more TDs defect over the budget cuts or Nama, the government is finished. However, the same minister doesn’t believe that more TDs will follow their colleagues. ‘‘I don’t think they’ll go. They’d be canvassing up to Christmas Eve."
Another senior political source was also guardedly optimistic. The TDs would stay because they knew that most of them would lose their seats if they went, he said.
‘‘If they were going to go, the time to go was last year with Joe Behan.
Too late now. They have to stay with it. Lots of them will jump up and down about individual things, but they won’t go overboard."
Ask the TDs themselves, and one response is common. If we can get through the next few months, they say. If only we can.
But the more foresighted ones know that the difficult 100 days that Cowen talks about will be followed by another tough 100 days in early 2010, in which they have to pass the Finance Bill and the Social Welfare Bill, and then by another 100 days in which they’ll have to prepare for another tough budget in December 2010.The problems this country has backed its way into won’t be solved easily, and there will be a political price to be paid for them.
The Greens will probably get whatever they want in a new Programme for Government - not just because they are playing hard, smart coalition politics, but because Fianna Fáil no longer has the will to resist them. Seldom have the polls been in such agreement about the outcome of any possible election; it would be the historic undoing of Fianna Fáil. The most successful political machine of post-war Europe is on its knees. It must avoid an immediate election.
Then it is up to the Greens to keep their side of the bargain. It’s one that Gormley should be able to sell to his members: policy concessions that the Greens would barely have been able to dream about - a ban on corporate donations, placing the country’s insane planning laws on a sensible and sustainable footing, a carbon tax and many others - in return for supporting a Nama plan that most people don’t like but aren’t sure whether there’s any real alternative.
Enacting Nama and passing Lisbon would not give Brian Cowen the right to claim that his disastrous premiership has turned the corner.
But it would give him his first good results since he became leader. In this shaky and unsure government, that qualifies as significant progress.
Last week showed the government - and its beleaguered supporters on the backbenches - that there is maybe, just maybe, a path to the future. They don’t absolutely have to fall off a cliff. Get Nama passed. Get Lisbon through. Squeeze past the budget.
If the government can manage all three of these hurdles, then it can perhaps begin to think of serving out its full term of office. It’s a long shot. But it got a little shorter last week.
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