Apple debacle cuts to core for the big two

Every cliché starts off life as a freshly-minted phrase. In the beginning, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee were grotesque twins in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ before the left turned it around to portray Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael as inseparable and undistinguishable.

Problem is that after a while they used no other phrase to describe the phenomenon. If you allow a Sinn Féin or Alphabet Alliance (the AAA-PBP) spokesperson more than a minute of time these days, you can be as sure as night follows days that Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee will flow from their tongues.

And it’s a ghastly cliché – but is it true? Like a lot of things, a little bit, but not fully so.

Since the foundations of the State, parties of the left have been calling on Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to coalesce, saying there’s not a cigarette paper between their policies or ideology.

By doing so, they argue, Irish politics can finally attain the left/right alignment that is the norm in other countries.

But in some senses, they are missing the point. The two big parties dismiss the ideological scale as arbitrary, and see themselves as essentially centrist, their free market tendencies tempered by a commitment to elements of a welfare society.

Let’s put an end to civil war politics, they exhort us. But it’s more complex than just two competing sides in that war carrying on the fight through the generations.

At the time of the foundations, both parties stood for different things and represented different constituencies. Fine Gael was the party of the establishment, lawyers, big farmers, the officer class in the Garda Síochána and the Defence Forces, Dublin’s middle classes.

Fianna Fáil was the party of the small holder, the rank and file members the Garda, Dublin’s working classes.

Their policies reflected that. Fine Gael was a pro-business party, promulgating ‘law and order’ and morally conservative.

Fianna Fáil was a little more to the left and populist – remember De Valera’s famous comment from the 1930s that “Labour Must Wait”. That related to the claim that it was Fianna Fáil that represented the working classes. It was also conservative.

Both parties have evolved – Fine Gael in particular – into something else. That said, both can still trace their roots in their current iterations.

But are they now indistinguishable.

Sure they compete against each other. But more often than one might expect, they compete together against the rest. The name of the game is maintaining the centre.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.