ANALYSIS:Cowen now faces the choice of soldiering on or going to the country on the four-year plan, writes STEPHEN COLLINS
JIM McDAID’S decision to resign from the Dáil has raised serious doubts about the Government’s ability to make it to the end of the year. Its fate is now in the hands of two Independent TDs, Michael Lowry and Jackie Healy-Rae.
Given the inevitably unpopular nature of the decisions on spending cuts and tax increases due to be announced in the Government’s four-year plan in the next two weeks, followed by the 2011 budget in December, the willingness of the two Independents to keep supporting the Coalition must now be in doubt.
Fianna Fáil TDs consoled themselves yesterday with the thought that at least McDaid would not be around to vote against the budget on December 7th but that only obscured the fact that the Government has lost control over its own destiny at a critical time. With some of the toughest budget decisions in the history of the State to be decided on by the Dáil in the next six weeks that is a very precarious position for the Government and the country to be in.
In recent months the Government’s majority has slipped to four on a number of votes and with the departure of McDaid its assured majority has dropped to three. The Coalition can muster 82 votes in the 161-member Dáil, excluding the Ceann Comhairle.
That majority is made up of 70 Fianna Fáil TDs, six Green Party TDs and Mary Harney. Three more Fianna Fáil TDs outside the whip – Jimmy Devins, Eamon Scanlon and Mattie McGrath – also vote with the Government as do two Independents, Michael Lowry and Jackie Healy-Rae, to bring the total up to 82.
As against that there are 79 TDs who compose the Opposition. It is made up of 51 Fine Gael TDs, 20 Labour Party deputies and four from Sinn Féin. Four Independents, Finian McGrath, Maureen O’Sullivan, Noel Grealish and Joe Behan bring the number to 79, although they do not always vote together against the Government.
It is hard to see any of the Opposition Independents moving over to support the Government on contentious issues such as cuts in welfare payments or public service pensions. That means the Coalition will rely on Lowry and Healy-Rae to get the budget through the Dáil. On the face of it there is little incentive for the two to continue to tie themselves to an unpopular Government implementing unpopular measures in its dying days.
One of the stratagems adopted by the Government in an attempt to drag itself into the new year in one piece was to schedule next year’s budget for December 7th. The tactic was to present wavering TDs with the appalling vista of an election in the week between Christmas and the new year if the budget was defeated.
While a Christmas election would be a nightmare for politicians there is no reason to believe that the public would find it as horrific. Given that the country virtually shuts down in the week after Christmas it might be the ideal time for an election with a new Dáil and government in place for the new year.
In any case the decision of the European Commission to insist on the publication of a four-year plan in the middle of this month, incorporating detailed elements of next year’s budget, has put a different complexion on things. If the main elements of next year’s budget are going to be published in mid-November there is no good reason, apart from political gamesmanship, to delay publication of the budget itself until December 7th.
In fact it can be argued that by leaving an interval of three weeks between the publication of the four-year plan and the budget all that will be achieved will be to put Fianna Fáil backbenchers, as well as the Independents, under intolerable pressure.
Taoiseach Brian Cowen has repeatedly said that he intends to lead his Government into next year and beyond. That ambition was in serious doubt before yesterday but the departure of Jim McDaid has made it even more unlikely that the Coalition will make it far into 2011 even if it makes it to the end of this year.
The dilemma facing Cowen at this stage is whether to soldier on, hope for the best and trust to good fortune to get the budget through or, alternatively, to seize the initiative and go to the country on the four-year plan.
An election on the four-year plan would focus the minds of all the parties and the electorate on the stark choices now facing the country and it would give a new government enough time to settle in before the State goes back to the international money markets to borrow in January.