New politics does not embrace Renua

Sinn Féin’s Private Members Bill on rent certainty (linking increases to the consumer index) launced this week was designed to look attractive to Fianna Fáil.

We are going to see a lot of this as ‘new politics’ becomes ‘old politics’: tick-tacking between two or three parties with a mutual interest to undermine another party.

These will be temporary little arrangements done on a week-by-week and day-by-day basis.

Some of it will be guess-work. Sinn Féin, for example, might pore through Fianna Fáil policy papers to see if they can find common ground on, say, a health policy. The private members motion will be framed in language that is uncannily similar to Fianna Fáil.

I would not be surprised if there are informal communications happening between the two main opposition parties to finesse their private members business to cause the maximum embarrassment to the Government when it suits.

New politics has become a cliche already but it does reflect that lots of things will be different.

Sometimes new politics just doesn’t work out how people want it to be. The public astounds the best-intentioned politicians with their ingratitude.

It looks like barely a year and a bit after its formation Renua is also facing the axe.

When Lucinda Creighton organised a public meeting in the RDS in the winter of 2014, she seemed to have captured a zeitgeist.

Creighton’s political outlook would not be everybody’s cup of lemon tea but unlike many others she managed to form a party. To its credit it also tried to develop a deep policy platform, with radical ideas.

But many of the ideas were more suited to the more partisan and divided world of US politics than to Ireland, where the gravitational pull of the centre is overpowering.

The idea of a flat tax was a good example. It was very different. But if you were mega wealthy you would be on a big winner with this with a much smaller percentage of your income going to the Revenue. At the other end of the scale those with very modest incomes would find themselves paying more tax.

While Renua included some correctives to this, it could not overcome the sense that it was deeply unfair to little people.

The party had other disadvantages. It grew out of the anti-abortion rump in Fine Gael and no amount of slick marketing could disguise that.

It also had difficulty finding the right calibre of candidate. It was a niche party and that niche was a small one. Indeed none of the new alliances made much ground, despite all the brave new world rhetoric.

The Social Democrats remained as they were; Shane Ross’s crowd gained one, and the Alphabet Alliance did best of all adding three (Joe Higgins, who was retiring, could not be counted).

As for Renua, Creighton, in particular, was a politician of great ability and will be a loss to Irish politics. I actually thought Renua had collapsed with Creighton's loss. It had no national politicians, just a handful of councillors, the best known of which was John Leahy in Offaly.

But it's a truth of Irish politics that the smaller the party the bigger the split. There are apparently two wings in the party - one Christian Democrat, the other Social Democrat.

The latter wanted the party to rebrand as a liberal democratic party and was fishing for a recently elected senator (un-named but obviously Michael McDowell) to become its leader. That effort seems to have been thwarted.

The chief mover among the modernisers was party president Eddie Hobbs. He resigned last night. That indicated the other side had prevailed.

Will this micro-party survive? Absolutely not. In fact, the only groups that have made real gains against the traditional forces are Sinn Féin and the Independents.

The latter group for everything, and nothing. They could not be said to be left, as some claim. If anything they are a little to the right.

For more onf Harry McGee's thoughts on the 'New Politics' see this week's digital edition here or download the Connacht Tribune App