The backbenchers on either side raised the occasional roar but it couldn’t mask the fact that everyone was going through the motions as the final week of the Dáil term was marked by a motion of no confidence in the Government.
The Taoiseach began with a speech that was as much an attack on Sinn Féin as a defence of the Coalition’s record, but the main Opposition party didn’t really rise to the bait. Mary Lou McDonald’s contribution was rather muted, by her standards. An increasingly bored TD texted: “I’ve emails to be responding to.”
A Minister of State seemed on the verge of nodding off. Mattie McGrath tried to enliven things, but even his heart wasn’t in it.
The truth is everyone would have had a heart attack if the no confidence motion had succeeded and they had all been pitched into a mid-August election. The debate meandered on to its inevitable conclusion before 7pm, with the Government winning extremely comfortably – by 85 votes to 66 – when the votes were counted a few minutes later.
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But the debate still illustrated three important things about the state of Irish politics, and the immediate future it faces.
Firstly, there is an acute division between Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael on one side and Sinn Féin and the other. That division is political, policy-based, cultural and ideological. It is not the sort of rivalry between the two old parties that defined Irish politics for so long. This is different; it is sharp, acute and very often bitter. It will continue at least until the far side of the next general election. And maybe beyond then.
Secondly, this Dáil is very unlikely to take down this Government as long as the three parties stick together. The results showed not just that, as predicted, the Government’s working majority is bigger than its paper majority. In fact there’s an elastic quality to it – it can stretch to accommodate the demands of it. That might be important when the budget and other crunch votes come in the autumn.
The Government got a few votes from Independent TDs even though it didn’t need them, but there is more than a suspicion around Leinster House that if the Coalition needed a few more Independent votes to survive it could have gotten them. At the very least it could persuade a few more not to vote against it.
But it is also clear that pressures between the parties are inevitable, and probably sooner rather than later there will be acute tensions between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael on one side and the Greens on the other. This is likely to come once the impact of carbon emissions ceilings on individual sectors, especially agriculture, become clear.
Further down the line Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will have to manage the approach to the next election, in which they will be competitors for votes, while co-operating to make the Government function. That’ll be complicated.
Thirdly, there is a significant challenge for Sinn Féin to define the change for which it so tirelessly advocates. The party didn’t really have all that much new to say today, just a restatement of the attack lines that it used throughout this year at Government Ministers in the Dáil.
This has been effective, for sure. But the litany of legislation and policy implementation that the Government trumpeted for itself demonstrated that the Coalition still retains a big political howitzer – the tool of executive action. Governments can do things.
If it is to lead the next government Sinn Féin will need to convince voters not just that the present crowd are desperate altogether, but that it has the capacity, ability and programme to do better. That remains a work in progress.
