Fianna Fail: Who's the real party animal?

Daily Features

Taoiseach Brian Cowen

If the Fianna Fail party organises here, what would it mean for the SDLP and Sinn Fein? By Maurice Hayes

Thursday, May 15, 2008

At the risk of rattling some arthritic old bones, I return to the question of the incipient courtship (if that is what it is) of SDLP and Fianna Fail. Speculation about who made the first move seems to centre on SDLP, who have more need of companionship than the main southern party.

If so, SDLP approach the encounter not in the first flush of youth, but rather as a widow who has lost her man and is in need of support. The man in this case, to extend the metaphor, is the combined leadership who over three decades kept the light of decency from going out in Northern Ireland politics, and who at great personal cost maintained a space in which democratic politics could eventually begin to flourish.

The founding fathers, for all their qualities, did not produce a successor generation and the party, doubtful of its future, divided on its choice with uncertain leadership and lacking a central organising structure. Most of all it lacks a solid base in Belfast.

It can only be a matter for regret that those who contributed so much should have to watch, virtually from the sideline, as others enjoy the fruits of their labour.

Whether the answer is a merger or even a closer liaison with Fianna Fail is a matter which not only concerns, but may divide the party.

On the wider political front, it raises the question of what the Good Friday Agreement was about, and what sort of politics the North needs now. For most of those who voted, the Agreement was about bringing peace to the island, about providing a breathing space in which politics in the North could settle down, and the parties there could begin to learn to live together and build a stable economy and a better society. It was for this that the southern electorate voted for constitutional change — a polite way of saying so-long rather than a bid for further and closer engagement.

In this context, any incursion by Fianna Fail whether as a partner of SDLP or in its own right, having subsumed that party, would alter the political calculus to the extent of destabilisation. At a time too when the priority is to get the institutions bedded in, it could be seen as a distraction.

It is likely to arouse suspicions among unionists of every hue that they were being railroaded in directions in which they do not want to go, against which they bought into the Agreement as an insurance policy.

It could also create difficulties for the DUP in particular, at a critical point in their developing relationship with Fianna Fail and the Irish government. That relationship has blossomed on the basis of a personal rapport between Dr Paisley and Bertie Ahern. Now that they are both going, the relationship seems secure, if more austere in the hands of two practical men, Brian Cowan and Peter Robinson. North/South relations are to be conducted through the Ministerial Council and, for an appropriate range of activities, the North/South bodies. It would be disturbing, to say the least, if in a future administration, DUP were to find Fianna Fail ministers sitting on both sides of the table.

A decision by Fianna Fail to organise in the North would bring pressure on other parties to do so too, and UK parties as well. While this might not be the worst outcome in the long-term, in the short and medium-term it can only risk fragmentation of what is still a fragile construct. More importantly it could break the cross-party consensus on the North in the Oireachtas which prevented the issue becoming a political football in southern domestic politics. This consensus, which can be traced back to Lynch and Hillery through Garrett Fitzgerald and Dick Spring to Albert Reynolds, Bruton and Bertie, was an important stabilising factor over the years. John Hume, in particular was careful to keep his lines open to all parties in the South.

There are said to be some in Fianna Fail who wish to deny Sinn Fein's claim to be the only all-Ireland party. But, on the evidence of the last elections, the southern electorate may not be ready for such a party. Indeed, there are those in Sinn Fein who would attribute their lack of success to a northern leadership out of touch with the mood of the electorate and political realities in the South. There is therefore little added value for Fianna Fail in such a liaison, and every chance of devaluing the important role of the government in North/South affairs. There is a role for the SDLP in the constituency which they honourably served over the years, but they must work it out for themselves.