Four year anniversary gives way to dawn of real battle

The old saying that 'eaten bread is soon forgotten' is particularly true about politics – because even if you have come up with policies in the past that have turned water into wine, it's not going to have any purchase with voters unless they can be reassured about the here and now, and about the future.

So when Enda Kenny, Joan Burton and company displayed the metaphorical cake on Tuesday to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the Fine Gael and Labour coalition, for some it was a simple act of blowing out the candles – for others it was fanning the flames.

Four years ago, we had what was promised as a democratic revolution. You don't need to be a placard-carrying water protester to know that that claim could be challenged under misleading advertisement regulations.

The Government gave itself 'gold stars' galore earlier this week. It's one of the pro forma events we have become used to – self-congratulatory, lacking objectivity and predictable. It was long on all the achievements (exiting the Troika, economic growth, jobs) and low on the equally long list of failures (referendum losses, water charges debacle, failed promises on taking on our euro partners).

You hardly expect a political party to go out and don sackcloth and ashes in public… but you expect the slightest bit of modesty to temper all the self-patting and self-indulgent purring.

Having said that, it is much easier to be in opposition; you can be 100 per cent negative 100 per cent of the time and get away with it.

In opposition, there is no onus on you to come up with thought-through solutions, with one important exception.

That is at election time, when everybody is expected to do the John the Baptist thing about what they will do in government.

For a Government, it’s trickier. You get the odd politician like Leo Varadkar who can be different in approach. To do that, Varadkar has had to forge a reputation as a straight talker.

That means he had actually to work on building that reputation. It would allow him to admit an initiative had failed, or a policy had not met expectations, without being absolutely filleted. But that has taken work.

For the rest, any admission of failure or weakness will be seized by the opposition. The upshot is that Governments tend to defend themselves by droning out a long list of achievements and then comparing the situation now with the situation when the last crowd was in government.

When Bertie Ahern was Taoiseach, his standard speech was to list all the things that were better under his watch compared to the Rainbow coalition of a decade previously.

This Government begins any defence of its record with an invariable compared-and-contrast with the situation it found itself four years ago, when the country was on the point of ruin etc.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.