Floating a grand Coalition – or filling the silly season?

The last week saw the prospect of a grand coalition floated and an end to Civil War politics – so is it a silly season story or is there a real prospect of the unthinkable happening in the Irish political context?

This grand coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael has been called for by the left for generations now – to satisfy a claimed need for the ‘realignment’ of Irish politics into left and right.

I have long held that the simple left and right division no longer has purchase in Irish politics. We live in a settled democracy with an increasingly complex society. The distinction between middle and working class constituencies are now as clear as they were.

The problems confronting society will increasingly move away from creating jobs to searching for jobs for people, in a world where anywhere between 20 and 40 per cent of current jobs won’t exist in a generation’s time.

It is clear there must be alternatives offered to the current policies of the Government. We have seen the huge desire for that in the Labour Party in Britain where the old-fashioned left-winger Jeremy Corbyn has raced ahead of his rivals – three identikit New Labourites.

But this is the problem with the left. The slogans sound good, but the maths just don’t add up. It’s all very well promoting a message of anti-austerity but when you boil it all down, it still needs to be paid for by somebody.

When you get to the end of the rainbow promised by anti-austerity parties you miraculously find a pot of gold, which has just appeared out of nowhere, and will provide all our needs.

Corbyn’s ultimate argument is for grand scale quantitative easing, in other words printing of money. There is a thin divide between a stimulus like that and a pyramid scheme.

The other flaw with the left-wing approach is that the thinking has remained static for fifty years or more. Centre and centre-right and centre-left parties have reshaped their messages and their approach to address the more complex needs of more complex societies, as circumstances change and the social and cultural outlook evolves.

When I listen to some of the megaphone megalomaniacs roar and shout, it’s the same kind of rhetoric I heard on college campuses a quarter of a century ago. The politics apply to circumstances that have not really pertained in Europe since the 1950s.

That said, let’s have a look at Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Of the big four, you could say without fear of contradiction they are the closest ideologically. There may be some quibbling on details but their economic policies are very similar.

Indeed Fine Gael has essentially continued the harsh economic programme introduced by Fianna Fáil in 2010. Sure there are differences but they take too much explaining and are ultimately not core.

Fianna Fáil is a republican party and its views would be more strident on the Irish language, on the North, and in promoting a particular form of Irish identity.

That said, as we have seen, it would be wrong to portray Fine Gael as a monoculture Redmondite party – it has its own republican wing, of which party leader Enda Kenny would probably belong.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.