Cantillon: FG and FF government would have to share spoils and responsibilities

You’d hardly think there was a country to run. The ambling pace of talks on the next government suggests urgency is in short supply in political circles. No one expects anything to happen until well after the Dáil resumes on Thursday. But the time for shadow-boxing will soon be over.

At one level, the absence of distress on markets points to confidence that a deal will be done eventually. Moreover, gains by Sinn Féin and the anti-austerity campaign do not betoken anything like a decisive shift to the hard-left by the electorate.

At another level, however, the calm on markets may suggest investors are under-estimating the magnitude of the cultural shift required to fuse Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Policy differences between them may be negligible (at most) but the absence of trust is not. This is a crucial question for settlement in days ahead. For all the earnest talk with smaller factions and Independents, the sense remains that the ultimate discussion will come down to FG and FF. A minority FG-led adminstration would be hampered from the outset by real threats from the other side of the house. Even if a budget agreement is reached, there would be very little scope to do anything else without the constant risk of political interruption and eventual collapse. All of that reflects FF’s power in the new Dáil, power which FG is reluctant to underwrite in a minority government scenario. This raises, in turn, the question of whether FF feels it would only underwrite FG power by entering into formal coalition.

This may well boil down to the “deal” that may or may not be done, something which would require each side to share both the spoils and the responsibilities. That’s a tall order, but not so tall as to be an impossibility. This is politics, after all. But there’s no getting there without talks of some kind. That’s the first step.