Pat Leahy: Government has Dáil majority to tough it out but does it have will?

It was a rare enough sight. The massed ranks of Sinn Féin deputies looked queasy while Ministers boomed away at them, Government backbenchers cheering every barb aimed at the Opposition, who are normally so good at giving it, but not so fond of taking it.

“Whatever way the wind blows, Sinn Féin goes,” said Heather Humphreys, “answers for everything, solutions for nothing”. Following days of breathless – and, it turns out, misguided – speculation, a chunky 19-vote majority followed. Mary Lou McDonald couldn’t get out of the place quick enough. The delight of the Government benches was unmistakable, heightened by the glum faces in Sinn Féin.

Didn’t last, of course. The mood wasn’t long changing on Thursday morning when the results of the latest Irish Times/Ipsos opinion poll landed. “How bad is it?” texted one Government insider. Very bad. Alarmed early-morning texts and Whatsapp messages flew around Government. Slumps for both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. The Greens stuck on 3 per cent. Satisfaction ratings for the Taoiseach and Tánaiste and the Government as a whole nosediving. Sinn Féin soaring to its highest-ever rating. In pure numerical terms, it was the worst poll for the Coalition in the two years of its existence.

As a mood-killer and momentum-buster, it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Coalition, just as the Dáil was rising for its summer break and with Government TDs happy for the first time in a long time. Instead it was Sinn Féin that skipped off with a song (possibly, “Come out ye black and tans”) in its heart. It was a lesson for the Government that it really shouldn’t have to relearn: most of the time, what happens on the floor of the Dáil doesn’t matter a whole heap.

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What should really worry the Coalition parties, however, is what the poll says about what might be coming in the autumn. You wouldn’t have to be the greatest political analyst in the world to draw the line between the squeeze on people’s pockets because of inflation and the falling ratings of the Government, but it’s painted in primary colours by the poll data.

Living standards

Any Government that presides over falling living standards is going to find things very difficult. Faced with a relentless and nimble opposition, with a penchant for populist messages and the clean record of never having been in power (in this jurisdiction anyway), the Coalition has a rough autumn and winter ahead.

Some Government politicians understandably wonder about the pervasive narrative of the most distressful country that they hear from Sinn Féin and see in the media. Things are so bad, jokes more than one insider, that people are flocking to the airport to escape the country. Try to get a restaurant table in Dublin or a holiday home in Kerry for a week, they say.

But it is possible to go on a foreign holiday and still think the Government has not adequately tackled rising costs, or done enough to mitigate them. You might be given to stuffing your face in swanky restaurants in Dublin and believe that welfare rates aren’t enough to live on, or the fuel allowance won’t heat people’s homes, or the back-to-school grants don’t remotely cover the costs of the schoolbooks that keep changing and getting more expensive. You might think that the Government should be doing more for people less fortunate than you. It’s not only people without houses that are worried about the housing shortage. Sure, some politics is just self-interest; but lots of it isn’t. There is such a thing as society.

All of this and more besides will become more acute in the autumn as inflation bites deeper. Prices will continue to rise, rents will go up and once the European Central Bank gets into its stride on increasing interest rates, mortgage payers will start to feel the pinch too. That’s before you consider the prospect of energy shortages.

Giveaway budget

So what do you do if you’re the Government? Sure, Paschal Donohoe and Michael McGrath have some firepower to apply – they will unveil a whopper of a giveaway budget in September, almost certainly the biggest ever non-Covid one.

But this will be mitigation at the edges, not wholesale compensation. The Government can’t – and shouldn’t – try to chase inflation, however many extra billions in corporation tax land in its coffers. There isn’t a way of getting through the inflation crisis without people suffering a squeeze on their real disposable incomes. In the country of the foreign holidays and the full restaurants, let’s face it: a lot of that hardship will be tolerable. Unwelcome, of course, but tolerable.

If there is a way for the Government to navigate through the politics of this – and maybe there isn’t – it is to level with people. And to target its reliefs towards those who absolutely need them most, and exercise restraint elsewhere. That means limiting the universal giveaways, not buying off the public sector with a big wage increase and keeping a grip on the public finances.

As we learned this week, the Coalition has the Dáil majority to tough it out. It has the capacity; but does it have the will?

The tendency of Irish politics to fixate on tiny details and ignore the big picture never ceases to amaze me. For the 10,000th example this week, I give you the turf controversy. But dealing with the economic challenges that are now unfolding is a very big matter indeed. It will require courage, political nous and a willingness to accept short-term pain for longer-term gain – things at which Irish politics has often failed conspicuously.

And there is no guarantee that adopting this approach will result in an eventual resuscitation of the Government’s political fortunes when inflation eases and growth picks up. But it is pretty certain that doing the opposite will guarantee that won’t happen.