Fintan O’Toole: Irish people do not get to elect a government

When it comes to Irish elections, the bloody obvious is usually wrong. The most obvious thing about this election is that, on February 26th, the Irish people will go to the polls to choose a government. And it is simply not true.

We don’t get to elect our government. We elect a parliament which in turn votes a government into office.

Once we’ve cast our ballots we have absolutely no control over this process. So when we’re told over and over that we must think very carefully about which government we choose, it’s a big lie.

If that’s what you think you’ll be doing on February 26th, you are suffering from delusions of grandeur.

The honest reality is that none of us really knows what our elected representatives will do after they take their seats.

We know what they say they will do, or in the case of Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, what they say they won't do.

But we can’t believe a single word of it, including “and” and “the”.

Since the era of single-party government definitively ended in 1989, when Fianna Fáil abandoned its “core principle” of refusing to contemplate coalitions, the formation of governments is a process of deal-making.

The deals made bear little relation to what voters are led to expect. How many admirers of Des O'Malley or Dick Spring thought they were voting for Charles Haughey to be taoiseach in 1989 or Albert Reynolds in 1992?

How many Green voters knew they were expressing a democratic wish for Bertie Ahern to continue in 2007?

The fiction that we elect a taoiseach and a government was surely exposed in 1994 when the 27th Dáil replaced Albert Reynolds with John Bruton without a general election.

The rule of thumb is to discount everything every party says about the formation of a government.

There is a magical solvent that dissolves all pre-election pledges: the national interest aka the proximity of power. Everything that has been ruled out can be ruled in again when the lure of office – sorry, the needs of the country – is dangled.

Do we really believe that Sinn Féin, which has governed happily in coalition with Ian Paisley, could never bring itself to sit in cabinet with Micheál Martin?

Or that Fianna Fáil, which needs power like a vampire needs blood, would resist an offer of seven cabinet seats from Enda Kenny if that's the way the numbers fall?

You can write the script yourself: spirit of 1916, overcoming the legacy of civil war, putting party feelings aside for the good of the nation…

Wriggle room

And this rule of thumb applies, of course, to

Michael Lowry

. Just listen to Enda Kenny’s interview on Morning

Ireland

last week.

There’s a period of about two seconds when he seems to give a definitive answer to whether he might do a deal with Lowry: “No.”

And then he says that he won’t be doing a deal with any Independents and that if and when he does deals with Independents they will be published for us all to read. The definitive answer has more wriggle room than a worm farm.

The moral of this story is: don’t get distracted by the stuff you can’t control. Journalists love the “process” stories about what happens after the election but for voters that’s just what they are – stories.

What we actually know are two quite boring things. One is that a government will be formed.

The other is that it will be formed within what we might call the Whitaker consensus.

For my entire lifetime, the three pillars of that consensus have shaped Irish government: attract foreign investment, be in the European Union and seek to solve the "national question" by consent.

Let’s not kid ourselves: any conceivable government after February 26th will operate within those parameters.

That's where stability lies – not in some claim to unique economic competence that in any case evaporated last week when Sinn Féin turned out to be more honest about the infamous "fiscal space" than Fine Gael.

Political expression

So what is the job of voters, if not to elect a government? It’s to make their votes more than chips for other people to bring to the post-election poker table.

Democracy is the political expression of equality or else it’s an empty game. And that’s exactly what is at stake in this election: what party or parties is going to give real meaning to a democracy of equals?

Democracy is not compatible with the growing economic inequality that devalues ever larger numbers of citizens.

It is mocked by a health system that even the governing parties describe as a form of apartheid.

It is not compatible with a largely unreformed political system of command and control. It is not sustainable in a society in which child poverty has doubled. It cannot function when oligarchs are allowed to accumulate power.

And it can’t abide in an EU dominated by unaccountable technocracy. Our job as voters is not to elect a government, it is to demand the real democracy of which voting should be merely a token.