The word coalition is no longer a dirty word in Irish politics

Coalition governments have been part of the Irish political landscape for almost eight decades, even if the word coalition was itself initially taboo.

And with the current political fragmentation unlikely to be reversed in the immediate future, coalitions are likely to be a fixture of political life for years to come.

The Irish State was more than a quarter of a century old before it had its first coalition government, but, for political reasons, it wasn’t called that.

David McCullagh, presenter of RTÉ’s Six One News, is a historian who has literally written the book – A Makeshift Majority – on that first coalition, the Inter-Party government of 1948.

“One of the interesting things with the Inter-Party government is that it was called the Inter-Party government because de Valera had succeeded in making ‘coalition’ a dirty word, so they were really nervous about calling it a coalition, hence the name,” he said.

“It was five parties, plus a bunch of Independents, some of whom were very odd, including Oliver J. Flanagan.

“You had Fine Gael, right-wing, pro-Commonwealth; you had Clann na Poblachta, republican, left-wing, well, what ed for left-wing in those days; you had not one but two Labour Parties because Labour had split over accusations that it was becoming communist, if you can believe that; and you had the Farmer’s Party, Clann na Talmhan.”

In effect, Dr McCullagh said it was every party in the Dáil except for Fianna Fáil, and some independents.

“They agreed to form a government to get rid of de Valera and to get themselves into power, and even though they covered the political spectrum — which wasn’t very wide at the time — they were able to agree on policies which were based on increasing public spending, particularly capital spending on housing, land reclamation, that sort of thing, and they were able to do that because they were able to access loans from America.

“They were able to agree on two things: one was to get themselves into power instead of Fianna Fáil, and the second was to spend money on things that were regarded as good.

“They held together for three-and-a-half years, most people expected them to last six months, and were reasonably reforming and reasonably effective.”

Template

He believes that if Ireland’s first coalition government set any template for those that followed, it was a negative one.

“Discipline was fairly lax, Cabinet collective responsibility was ignored, ministers made statements in public disagreeing with their colleagues, which was regarded as a bad thing, so there was a sense that that shouldn’t be repeated in future coalitions.”

Theresa Reidy, political scientist at University College Cork, agreed that early coalition governments did not have much in the way of cohesion, and were often made up of parties with wildly divergent worldviews.

“As a result, they could be very difficult to manage, and they could be very fractious.

“That starts to change, though, and the Fine Gael and Labour coalitions of the ’70s and ’80s were a little better in the sense that there was a common purpose at least, in of the direction they wanted to go, particularly under Garret FitzGerald, but I think unfortunately circumstances were such that they never really got to do anything that they wanted to do because of the economy,” she said.

“The Fianna Fáil/Labour coalition [January 1993-December 1994] is much maligned because it fell apart, hugely acrimoniously, but it’s important in coalition because it marks the start of when we really begin to pay attention to how a coalition government should be managed.

“If you go back to Sean Duignan and Fergus Finlay’s books, the much maligned programme managers were put in place, and they were external people who were put in place to ensure that policy got implemented more effectively, and that was the start of the process of making coalitions work better,” Dr Reidy said.

Lesson

Gary Murphy, professor of politics at Dublin City University, also cites the 1993-1994 coalition as a lesson for the incoming government, and its Cork Taoiseach.

“They had a massive majority, and it all went belly-up because Albert Reynolds couldn’t handle coalition.

“Micheál Martin is certainly different, and Fianna Fáil from Bertie to Micheál — forget about Cowen in the middle — know how to work coalitions now, and Micheál was there in that early 1990s period,” Prof Murphy said.

Dr Reidy said she believed the evolution over the past several decades of the importance of programmes for government has helped to make coalition governments much more effective.

Early programmes, she said, were mostly short documents listing points of agreement.

“Now they’ve taken on much greater significance, they’re much longer, they’re much more detailed, and if something is in the programme for government, it’s much more likely to go ahead.

“The other thing is, if there’s a dispute, the programme for government is the final word.

“If a thing has been included in the programme for government, then you need really serious reasons for why it can’t go ahead,” she said.

Priority

Professor Murphy said that his impression was that Mr Martin’s overarching priority in negotiating the programme for government was that this istration survives for five years.

“Micheál is going on 65, and he’s going to be taoiseach for the next two years and nine months or so, he’d hardly be taoiseach again after that, so I think he’ll have wanted to make sure he’ll get a good run at it,” he said.

“I think he wanted to make sure that this government would go the full distance.”

He added that the decision to offer two super junior ministries and three junior ministries to the Regional Independent Group TDs, as well as a junior ministry to Michael Healy-Rae, was a mark of Martin’s desire to ensure the coalition’s longevity.

“Now, maybe they were a bit too cautious, because no Independent wants an election any time soon, but tying them in the way they have will almost certainly mean it goes to full whack.”

He felt that Mr Martin has learned the lessons of Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern, and their opposing views on coalitions.

“Fianna Fáil has got a lot better at doing coalitions, that’s the big lesson that I would take.”

Dr McCullagh noted that in the Inter-Party government of 1948, independents were represented in Cabinet by James Dillon, who was agriculture minister.

“They sold their fairly high, and that, Independents in Cabinet, wasn’t repeated until 2016, so for a lot of the intervening years, independents — for instance Jackie Healy-Rae and Mildred Fox and all in 1997 — traded their in essence for constituency deals rather than for national power.

“The deal that the Regional Independents have done now would seem to hark back more to that James Dillon idea, or the 2016 idea, that independents would have influence on national policy, rather than just on constituency issues,” he said.