AS FAR as the major parties are concerned the necessity to protect the national interest with a Yes vote in the Lisbon Treaty referendum will push all other political considerations out of the way for the week ahead, but after that, it will be back to normal politics with a vengeance.
The doomsday scenario of another No vote is something nobody at a senior level in politics wants to contemplate. While the latest Irish Times poll has given the Government and the major Opposition parties grounds for quiet confidence, none of them will be counting chickens in advance of the count next Saturday.
If there is a Yes vote, the Coalition parties will immediately plunge into their review of the programme for government. The outcome of the negotiations between Fianna Fáil and the Greens will determine whether the Coalition will survive, and although the general expectation is that agreement will be reached, things could easily go wrong if either side attempts too much brinkmanship.
Brian Cowen and Fianna Fáil will take some encouragement from their modest recovery in the Irish Times poll. While the party is still far off its historic rating as the biggest party in the country, Ministers and TDs believe that support has finally bottomed out and can only go up. That little bit of renewed confidence could well impinge on the negotiations between the Coalition parties, particularly if there is a solid Yes to Lisbon. Fianna Fáil may feel a little more bullish about resisting some of the proposals being put forward by their Green partners “transformational changes” in the way Irish politics operates.
The converse is also true and the Greens may be emboldened by their poll rise to insist on including some of their pet ideas in a new programme. It is a once in a lifetime chance for the party to get some of its cherished values installed at the core of Government policy. The Greens will want to use that opportunity as it may never come around again.
There will be just one week for serious negotiations, if the Greens stick to the plan to hold a convention on October 10th. If anything goes wrong in that short space of time, the future of the Coalition will be at immediate risk. Given that the Greens will almost inevitably push their luck, it will certainly be a tense week in politics.
One of the issues in the back of the minds of both parties will be that, even if they do agree on a new programme, it will only be the prelude to serious talks at Government level about the shape of the budget. The Greens will have to decide whether to get some of their budgetary retaliation in first by getting firm commitments in the programme on specific areas of public expenditure.
Education and social welfare are two key concerns of the party and they will be loath to sanction budget cuts in these areas. However, if they insist on tying the hands of Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan on such expensive items, they will limit his room for manoeuvre, and that, in turn, will make his task of devising a coherent budgetary strategy almost impossible. Lenihan is already having to face the deep reluctance of some of Fianna Fáil Ministers to implement big chunks of the McCarthy report. The problem is that McCarthy’s motivation in identifying a wide range of options for cuts in public spending was designed to improve the public finances and to begin the long overdue process of public sector reform.
While it would be perfectly feasible from the point of view of the public finances for Lenihan to ditch McCarthy and adopt across the board cuts in public sector pay and/or welfare, the consequence would be that the inefficiencies and bad practices endemic in the public service would continue in perpetuity.
One way or another Lenihan probably has no option but to go for some of the big across the board cuts. However, if he is forced to jettison McCarthy in the process it will be a missed opportunity to begin genuine public service reform.
Ironically, the Minister’s problem on this front does not come from the Greens, who believe in public service reform, but from some of his Fianna Fáil colleagues.
Tánaiste Mary Coughlan attracted a lot of attention with her statement in the Dáil that there were many aspects of McCarthy which she did not like but she didn’t demur from the overall target of making savings in the region of €4 billion in the budget for next year. Many of her colleagues share her views on McCarthy, but they all know that there are no easy solutions.
One politically attractive but economically dangerous option would be to concentrate on tax increases rather than spending cuts as the way out of the crisis in the public finances. Many Fianna Fáil backbenchers would favour this approach rather than the one being pursued by the Government, but it appears the argument has been settled. Back in July Lenihan got the approval of his Cabinet colleagues to focus on spending cuts as the main thrust of his budgetary policy.
Over the next two months Lenihan will have to devise a strategy to meet his budget targets and, assuming the Greens stay on board, the only question is where the emphasis will lie.
With the Government facing so many difficult choices there is always the possibility it could come a cropper, not on a major policy issue, but over some event that comes out of the blue. The re-emergence of the Fás scandal in recent days is a reminder of “the little things” that can trip up a Government.