INSIDE POLITICS - WHAT'S ANOTHER YEAR ON 273 GRAND?

Politicians' pay has continued to dominate the agenda, especially since yesterday's volte face by the Cabinet. I was in the supermarket last night and people in the queue were talking about it; when I went for coffee early this morning, it was also been discussed by people at the next table. Most of the focus was on the fact that it had been deferred for a year - most people thought that it was a stunt, as simple as that.

I was surprised that none of the opposition leaders raised it during Leaders Questions this morning. Having said that the two topics raised (water charges for schools and extraordinary rendition) have merit.

Here is a piece of analysis I wrote for this morning's Irish Examiner

Last month the Taoiseach came out with a legendary Bertie-ism when he said that deferring THAT pay rise would be ‘smokes and daggers’.

So, two really bad opinion polls later in addition to getting it in the lug from Joe Public on the airways and newspapers, what does the Taoiseach do?


Um, he announces that the Government is deferring the pay rise.
Before we all go jumping to conclusions that what we have here is a classic case of smokes and daggers, the government wants to point out that, no it’s not, its something else entirely. Yep, it’s actually cloaks and mirrors.

The official reason is hilarious. The Government – wait for it! – want others to exercise restraint ahead of the new round of talks on pay and benchmarking and they want to lead by example. So the Taoiseach and his ministers has selflessly sacrificed the implementation of his E38,000 pay rise and their exorbitant hikes in salary until September 2008. So they’ll all have to slum it on salaries ranging from E214,000 to E270,000 per annum.

What was offered yesterday by the Chief Anorak and the shower that surrounds him was a sop, a wet drizzle of a sop – a pathetic attempt to retrieve some of the public support that it lost over this issue. It is a gesture and it’s meaningless.
And the Taoiseach and his chief loyalists yesterday trotted out the same old excuses (none of which stand up) as to why like the models in the L’Oreal ads they were SO worth it.

Backroom people in Fianna Fail must have been getting nervous when they saw the Ministers who were being put up to explain this to the public – Dermot Ahern and Mary Hanafin. They were two of the three ministers (along with Seamus Brennan) who presided over the shambles of a press conference during the election campaign, during which FF’s main economics adviser Colin Hunt had to ride to the rescue and publicly dig them out of a spot of bother.

And neither Dermot Ahern nor Mary Hanafin were well briefed yesterday
Before we get to that let’s stick to the facts.

This award was given by a group which compares the pay of the golden circle of the public service (ministers, judges, semi state CEO, university heads, top civil servants etc) with comparators in the private sector.

Two years ago it gave them an interim award of 7.5%. Sic weeks ago it gave them a further 15%, making a grand total of 22.5% since 2000.
First of all Ministers have tried to spin it that this was the only pay rise they got in seven years. Ms Hanafin was busying herself with the line last night; claiming on RTE’s Six One News that they have got just 2% every year.

But in fact, the salaries of all ministers have increased by between 130% and 145% in the last seven years. Bertie Ahern was paid E145,000 in 2000. After the latest pay rise he will be getting E310,000. Ditto with Brian Cowen. The Tánaiste’s salary was E125,000 in 2000. Now it’s E270,000.

When it was pointed out to her that the rise was in fact closer to 145% than the miserly 2% per annum she was claiming, she claimed that, yes, it was a substantial salary but it was a substantial job. And then she argued that we had to pay our politicians well so they are not susceptible to any outside interference (like dig-outs, for example, or spontaneous whip-rounds at functions in the North West of England?).

And the cloaks and mirrors continued with the extraordinary performance given by Dermot Ahern at a door-step interview.
It wasn’t so much the very tenuous argument he made that the Government was now exercising restraint (yeah, until next September) so that the unions might do likewise.

He also maintained the line that it was an increase of 22.5% over a period of 11 years (ergo, it was modest). This argument neglects the fact that politicians and ministers have benefited from every single national pay award (and benchmarking award) that have been going. And the cumulative effect of it all is that their pay has more than doubled in the course of only seven years.

It was the fact that he was completely and utterly aware that he had been awarded an interim pay rise of 7.5% of his Ministerial salary two years ago. For what it is worth, this is how much it was worth – around E7.500.
When the existence of this increase was pointed out to him, he said:

“That is not as a result of the examination by the independent review group (for higher remuneration).”

Well, yes it was in fact. A little later he said he did not recall that particular pay award. Well, he should have.

The net effect of this has been to prolong the kicking the Government has taken over this for another day. It also gave opposition leaders another field day.

Enda Kenny reminded us again of the following little factoid: “We have a situation where Taoiseach of this country is better paid than President Bush; better paid than Chancellor Merkel; better paid than President Sarkozy and better paid than Prime Minister Brown.”

He continued: “This is a hypocritical decision by a hypocritical government.”
Eamon Gilmore said they were still going to accept the lavish increase (if 12 months later) and that the Government’s handling of the situation showed how much out of touch with reality it was.

Dermot Ahern did say that there has always been a difficulty with politicians and their pay. That is quite true. And the difficulty has been this. Somewhere along the line greed has become the new currency for defining public service.

For how long more do we have to put up with people on a quarter of a million euro a year (plus gold-plated pensions and expense arrangements) telling us that they are not in it for the money?

INSIDE POLITICS - CHARVET ANORAKS

AT THE end of every Dáil term, I tot up the topics that have come up during Leaders Questions — the two slots every week where Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore ask Bertie Ahern a question without giving him notice.


When he’s in the chamber, Ahern has a large volume in front of him indexed A to Z. It’s a mini Bertie encyclopaedia and contains briefings for every imaginable issue that will come up — from crime, to anti-social behaviour, to finances, to house prices, to stamp duty, to nuclear power; to class sizes; to the Taoiseach’s pay; to the bill for Bertie’s make-up.




Yes, these days the Taoiseach is high maintenance. So high maintenance that you sometimes feel that he may have crossed the Rubicon and is now more Charvet shirt than St Bernard anorak. On that subject, let us digress for a second. He was at it again on Thursday, trying to justify his huge pay hike while telling ordinary workers that wage restraint was the order of the day. And when asked to justify his own €38,000 rise, he trotted out the same excuse that it was an independent body and that he hadn’t got a turnip for seven long years (if you forget the nice little interim award of 7.5% they got two years ago). And who wrote the independent body’s terms of reference? Erm, oh yes, the Government.

And so when they met the social partners on Thursday, we had utterly hypocritical posturing from him and from Brian Cowen — the wealthy who have just become even wealthier telling the poor why they must stay poor.

Now back from that side alley onto the main drag of Leaders Questions.

The issue that floats to the top term after term, year after year, is health. It comes up in different guises. You can be sure of one thing. The opposition will always use the word “crisis” and “scandal”. Ahern in his reply will always compare the amount of money his Government have spent on health compared to the Rainbow who preceded it. It is hard to clearly identify when the Rainbow last ruled.

Mediaeval historians place the last signs of that particular civilisation sometime towards the end of the 20th century but we can’t be sure. But it’s still the default comparison for the Taoiseach when unleashing a drizzle of statistic.

Traditionally, Ahern has responded to the barbs of the opposition in a very clever way. He will know that they have offered him a choice of questions so he’ll chose the ones that most suit. He will read out verbatim the brief written for him by a civil servant.

If there’s explaining to do, he will do it but in that unique smokes and daggers way of his that makes everything as clear as mud. And he will deliver it in that reasonable, sotto voce tone of his. It’s not pretty on the ear but it’s deft and has served him well.

There’s been a theory doing the rounds of Leinster House for the last couple of months, however, that his demeanour has changed, has hardened, that he has become arrogant and aloof. He has won his third election now and doesn’t care any more. There’s nothing more to prove electorally. All that matters is retaining the loyalty of his party, to hang on until it’s time to go.

Tony Blair underwent such a transformation in his third term. He changed from the politician who was eager to please everybody to the one who realised that wasn’t possible.

Since May, there’s been little evidence of the famous anorak. The arrogance began in the RTÉ studios on the night of victory and is still evident. Little niggling things are being said about him that were not said before — that he is obsessed with money and wealth; that he has become imperious; that he increasingly out of touch with real people.

He was certainly damaged during the Tribunal and he badly dropped the ball over provisional licences. His defence of the pay rise was indefensible. But the thing that really bolstered the notion for me was his performance at Leaders Questions on Wednesday.

Now maybe Eamon Gilmore provoked him by mentioning the unmentionables, Doctors John Crown and Maurice Neligan. What stood out from his response was his attack on the two medics and his jibe that one of them made more money than him. What had that to do with women who have just learned the horror of a misdiagnosis? There was no empathy. It was somebody else’s fault; not his.

In the past, that would not have happened. The apology would have been made within seconds. He has either lost his common touch or has become deeply complacent. Bertie’s become high maintenance with all the attitude to go with it.

This is my column from this morning's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - ANORAK WEATHER

After a couple weeks of clear blue skies, the mists started to fall yesterday and we found ourselves back in familiar climatic (more like bloody anti-climatic) conditions.

There are a couple ways you can observe that poor weather is on the way. One is a red sky at morning. Another is a dog eating grass. But perhaps the best one of all is Bertie Ahern telling the Dail that the Health budget has increased from E3 billion in 1997 to E14 billion today.

The moment you hear that, be advised that you need to run for cover. For you know that you are going to be drowned by an endless drizzle of statistics.
Once Bertie Ahern replies to a question by reading out a note written for him by a civil servant, beware! It's anorak weather.

It’s ceaseless stuff: BreastCheck is available in 15 counties. There’s high voluntary screening activity. The budget is E14 billion a year across 120,000. A 1% control of that is a small amount. There are enormous resources being put into the health servic3es. Most of that is for staff. There are 120,000 of them. The budget is E14 billion. Just in case you were not aware, the budget is E14 million. And by the way there are 120,000 staff.

That’s why they call him Anorak Man, because he needs to wear one to protect him from the deluge of information he gives out.

Yesterday’s Leaders Questions was as dull and dispiriting as the first damp evening after the clock goes back an hour.

The subject being debated was actually vitally important; the
heart-rending story of Susie Long who died last Monday. Both opposition leaders Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore raised her case and the fact that as a public patient she had to wait months for a scan that a private patient got in three days.

The problem for Enda Kenny is that it’s better to play the direct ball when asking the Taoiseach a question. Give him a selection of topics to address and instead of avoiding just one question he will avoid the lot, instead providing a bewildering array of statistics and non sequiturs.

In fairness, the Taoiseach had a couple of points to make. But he spluttered worse than a damaged exhaust and it was hard to know what he was talking about. He did say it was regrettable that Susie Long had been let down by the health services. But he argued that it wasn’t because she was a public patient. A doctor referring an urgent public case to the hospital for a colonoscopy would get priority. But as Eamon Gilmore pointed out how would you know what case was urgent until it the test was done.

The other point I think he made is that we shouldn’t lose sight of the woods for the trees, that the overall performance of a behemoth of a service like the HSE should not be judged solely on a number of individual cases or discrete problem areas.
At least I think he made it. Blue sky thinking it certainly was not.

INSIDE POLITICS - OPPOSITION STRATEGY

At the end of every term, I do a simple exercise, totting up the topics that have been chosen by opposition leaders for the twice-weekly set piece Leaders' Questions.

Over the last couple of years, the predictable issues have dominated - health, crime, and the Government's secret weapon of dealing with Limerick's gang culture: unleashing Willie O'Dea in the city's drinking establishment on weekend nights.

The dynamic has changed this time. There are now only two leaders entitled to speak during Leaders Questions and one of them, Eamon Gilmore, is new. With the smaller parties and indepedendents having been hoovered up by Government or gobbled up by the electorate, there is no longer a technical group. There is no Joe Higgins. The Greens have forsaken tofu abstinence for meat indulgence. And Sinn Fein - this was meant to be another breakthrough election; it instead became a breakdown election. Down from five to four. No Mary Lou. Pearse Doherty in the Senate rather than in the Dáil.

So where once there were five, now there are two. It's very early days and I don't think that any of the opposition parties have got their heads around what strategies they will adopt to down the Government over the next five years.

With Labour's Gilmore, there has been a difference of style and nuance rather than substance so far - he is less confrontational; appealing more to reason and to common sense than Rabbitte was. For Enda Kenny and Fine Gael, it's been more of the same, leaving off where they left off before the election.

Fine Gael's big strategy last time was that the election would be won or lost on three big issues - health, crime and value for money. The party was wrong on all three issues. The election was won and lost on the economy.

So can we expect more PPARS, more attacks on health, more 'we are tougher than Terminator' on getting the criminal gang scum off the streets.

Well on the crime front, yes. Listening to Enda Kenny and Charlie Flanagan yesterday, it was deja vu all over again. Kenny repeated a phrase three times: "Who's in charge Taoiseach, the Government or the gangs?"

That had tabloid written all over it. But when Charlie Flanagan started talking about bringing the army onto the street as back-up, that really took the pip. Brian Lenihan should have dismissed it out of hand. Instead, foolishly, the Justice Minister actually said he would refer it to the Garda Commissioner. I mean, if you follow that line of argument, the next thing is that we will impose martial law on the street and people will begin to consider the sense of Eoghan Harris's baublings about armed gardai shooting it out with criminals and the return of capital punishment.

Nobody actually openly accused Bertie Ahern of lying yesterday. But if you were to look up a thesaurus, you’d find that just about every possible alternative word for ‘lie’ was used by Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore when describing the Taoiseach’s evidence to the Mahon Tribunal.

There is a basic rule in the Dáil. The ‘L’ word may never be uttered. In the past, we have seen some creative words and phrases being employed: dissembling; misleading the Dail; untruth; ‘being economical with the truth’.

But yesterday was of a different order. The L word was never uttered. But during the motion of confidence – and let’s make no mistake about – it was clearly meant. There was to be no softening of the blows. To all intents and purposes – but without every actually saying so – Kenny and Gilmore accused the Taoiseach of lying and lying and lying again.

During a heated, angry and self-evidently bitter debate on the motion of confidence in the Taoiseach – the first motion brought since one against Albert Reynolds in November 1994 – Ahern found himself being accused of giving incredible accounts, of fabricating, of not being credible, of creating smoke screens, of gelling bizarre and shifting tales. And all of this was said under oath, during his 18 hours of evidence to the Tribunal.

The charges that Kenny and Gilmore laid were far more serious, far graver than most of us had anticipated. Not alone did they accuse him of the L word. They claimed that most of the events that he has based his entire defence on never took place. They contended that events recalled by Ahern in interviews and under oath to the Tribunal – the famous Manchester dinner, the dig-out from friends, the Michael Wall payment, the purchase of £30,000 sterling – never took place.

This was the core of Kenny’s argument in one of the best speeches he has made since he becoming leder: “Most of the events we were discussing never happened. In my view, in my opinion, they’re fictitious. Complicated stories, part of a web of complicated stories designed to mask hard facts. Constructed stories to fit known facts.”
Phew! That was strong stuff and potentially as corrosive as sulphuric acid. And though he didn’t say it either, what Kenny also suggested that Ahern was on the take when he lodged amounts between 1993 and 1995 that equated to €300,000 in today’s terms.

“We have heard no credible explanation from the Taoiseach for these lodgements. In the absence of such an explanation the deep suspicion must remain that these lodgements were a result of personal contributions made to the Taoiseach.”
And in a speech designed to – and which probably did – get under Ahern’s craw, Kenny quoted lines from Des O’Malley (“I stand by the Republic”) and Jack Lynch (“we cannot stand idly by”) to make unfavourable comparisons to Ahern. He also quoted from Charlie Haughey to make even more unfavourable comparisons.

Gilmore, making his maiden speech as the new Labour leader, went over the same ground. He recalled the Taoiseach recalling next to nothing about the dinner in Manchester and then pointed out that Ahern claimed on the Late Late Show in 1998 that one of his best attributes was a good memory.”

His recurring theme – in a speech that was serious and under-stated - was that he did not believe Ahern, that the Taoiseach was making up cock and bull stories.

“I don’t believe him. Most of his own deputies don’t believe him and the public clearly doesn’t’ believe him either,” was a phrase that was uttered more than once.
And this is Taoiseach’s big quandary. There’s a serious credibility problem there that can’t be explained by unusual circumstances or his marriage break-down or by what he described as his ‘unorthodox affairs’ during his marital separation in the 1990s.

Yesterday he again urged people to read the 18 hours of transcript. But anyone who reads it will be no clearer about all those information and credibility gaps. If anything they will be bewildered and more confused.

He – and all his Ministers who spoke – also argued that there was not a scintilla of proof to back up the central allegation made by Tom Gilmartin that he took payments from Owen O’Callaghan.

Joe Higgins was spot-on last week when describing the use of this particular blatant diversionary tactic. Higgins gloriously employed a famous Bertie-ism to describe Bertie dragging Owen O'Callaghan and Tom Gilmartin in:

“It’s throwing red herrings at white elephants.”

But it’s not about Tom Gilmartin any more. It’s about all these odd transactions, all these unremembered and half-remembered sterling and Irish sums passing through accounts controlled by him. And why his explanation of them is of the ‘the dog has eaten my homework’ type.

He was effective in pointing out the belated courage of both Fine Gael and Labour in going for his political jugular. “One day they blow hot and the next day they blow cold. Last May to them due process was an excuse not to comment but today, political accountability is the pretext for their questioning.”

He repeated his defence against allegations made in the Tribunal, rebutting allegations that he had delayed or not cooperated or dissembled. But it’s all a bit conditional. He said he waived confidentiality on bank documents and consented to the Tribunal obtaining discovery against AIB. But he forgot to mention yesterday that he only did so when forced to by the opposition.

And as for changing his evidence he asserted: “The fundamental of my evidence have remained the same. I have added some detail and elaborated in some areas for reasons which I shall explain…. It is a matter of reality that one’s recollection can be helped as new information comes to light.”

And in a day where little love was lost, where both sides strongly signalled that the 30th Dail will be a tenser, colder House, he accused his political foes of “stretching the available evidence with malign invention.”

The thrust of the Government defence, put most passionately by Tánaiste Brian Cowen in the closing speech (and boy does he sound like leader-designate) the opposition were hypocrites in that they had only discovered high standards and morality after the election, where before polling day they back-pedalled from BertieGate more quickly than a professional cyclist on dope.

“I know right from wrong. And the Tribunal will be the arbitrer. If we are to avoid arbitrary justice let the Tribunal proceed with its deliberations.”
Ahern sat through it all, uncomfortably. It’s clear he finds it all, as he said in his speech, unseemly and intrusive. For him once no evidence is adduced of payments from Owen O’Callaghan, the rest is nobody’s business. The payments were, as he put it, being “assisted by friends”. In his moral compass, he did nothing wrong. He made a big deal of paying back €100,000 but he only did that when he had to (in 2006), when the outing of the payments last year forced him to do that.

And if he was uncomfortable, the Greens seemed to be squirming in their seats. Trevor Sargent, Eamon Ryan, Ciaran Cuffe and Mareey White didn’t clap at the end of Ahern’s speech as the loyal FFers did, but we were later told that nothing turned on that. The opposition reminded the party of how quickly it had rolled down from the high moral ground into the swamp. Trevor Sargents excoriations of FF in the run-up to the election campaign were recalled. And when John Gormley finally made an appearance in the chamber shortly after 8pm, he said little more than he would wait until the Tribunal reported. He then resorted to the magician’s trick of misdirection by reciting Green policy objectives in Government. There are times to talk about climate change but last nights was not one of them.

The L word was never used. They didn’t have to. This was the most serious attack Ahern faced in 30 years of politics. Strategically, the Government banked completely on the Tribunal report. When it does report (will it be next year or 2009?) if it criticises him to any serious extent, he will be a goner. One senior Green Party person thought privately that it might be as soon as the Christmas break.

We have all gone through the disconnect between the media and Joe Schmo out there. But no matter how you look at this one, Bertie Ahern has been damaged.

INSIDE POLITICS - GREAT REFEREEING MOMENTS

AT THE last World Cup, Portugal and the Netherlands met at the knock-out stages of the competition.


I can’t remember which team advanced but one other detail of the game I can clearly recall. It was the most memorable refereeing performances of all time.

Valentin Ivanov was the unfortunate man who officiated at the game (and hasn’t taken charge at this level since). He made a decision that he wasn’t going to take any indiscipline from any side and that he was going to lay down the law from the start.




What transpired was a refereeing disaster of tsunami proportions. Ivanov administered a yellow card early on for a particularly bruising tackle. His mistake was this: the concept of discretion did not exist for the rest of the game. He applied the law rigidly, adhered to the standard that he had applied from the get-go. What we witnessed was an unravelling.

The game gradually descended into an unspeakable farce, a yellow and red card fest that just did not relent. By the time the game ended, 16 yellow cards and four reds had been shown. The four red cards were the most in a single World Cup game ever. In the last couple of minutes, players, pushed to beyond frustration by the referee, began making impetuous tackles and fouls.

And what was clear was this: the referee who had set out to show he was in control in such a strong fashion was clearly not in control. Any authority he had striven to assert had been shorn off him by the time the game began ticking into injury time.

I was reminded of all that watching John O’Donoghue endure his first day as Ceann Comhairle last Tuesday. One of the features of the last Dáil was the frequent clashes between his predecessor Rory O’Hanlon and Labour leader Pat Rabbitte, mostly over Rabbitte’s remote understanding of what constituted two minutes of speaking time. Very often Leader’s Questions would go 15 or 20 minutes over the time allotted to it. To be sure, one of the biggest miscreants when it came to time-keeping was the chief anorak himself on the Government benches but the Ceann Comhairle was never in the habit of telling the emperor about the state of his undress.

You could see where O’Donoghue was coming from. He wanted to impose himself like a strong referee from the get-go, hand out a yellow card for the first heavy tackle, and by imposing his authority early, the House would quickly come to heel.

His mistake was that he picked the wrong target. Enda Kenny was never the worst offender when it came to time-keeping — you could have counted on one hand the times that he and the chair had clashed over time-keeping.

And, despite the good-humoured and youthful smile that Kenny maintained throughout their exchanges, there is a bit of the old dog for the hard road about him (he is the father of the House after all — having been elected 32 years ago).

As O’Donoghue slapped him on the wrist for going over time, Kenny began gently goading him. You could almost see him light the match and quietly place it up to the very short fuse, put his fingers into his ear, and wait for the deafening explosion to go off.

He started off by telling O’Donoghue to be quiet. O’Donoghue was out of his chair quicker than dung off a shovel, and his complexion (always fleshy) began to deepen to scarlet with the heat being generated with his tongue.

The more he lambasted Kenny, the more Kenny and his troops began doing what the picadors in a bullfight too — sticking the spears into the flesh of the Bull O’Donoghue.

Before we get carried away with the ‘bull’ analogy, it’s time to return to football and to great refereeing moments of our time. Once he had brandished the first yellow card, there was no return. Within minutes, he was flashing them constantly and it was inevitable that the red card would have to be produced.

The problem was there was no saving face. If he backed down, he lost. If he persevered and ploughed on, he also lost. It was incredible. Arthur Morgan and Michael Ring joined the fray. The stuff with Ring was like a pantomime. You are leaving the chamber! Oh no, I’m not. Yes, you are leaving? No I am not.

Over the past four years since I first sat on the bird’s nest above the chamber, there have been some disruptive scenes. But it was the first time that the Ceann Comhairle provided the start, beginning and end of them.

To be sure, Fianna Fáil are going into government for a third time. But with the opposition benches packed to the rafters — and with a Ceann Comhairle as colourful as O’Donoghue — I think we will witness interesting times!

This is my column from today's Irish Examiner. (I am on leave for the next few weeks so blog entries will be sporadic!)

INSIDE POLITICS - THE SOUND OF SILENCE

The Dáil returns on June 14. We will have a Government then, one that you can confidently say will be Fianna Fail led, will also be Bertie Ahern led.

Right now, we are stuck in the political version of a holding pattern over Heathrow Airport. There is some movement but it is circular. The Labour Party parliamentary party is meeting today. The residue of a party once known as the PDs is meeting also.

Fine Gael have been busily selling the line that the FF win wasn't really that much of a FF win and that FG were the real winners, so much so that they might surprise us all and form the next government. To that end, Enda Kenny has met with just about ever entity that isn't FF or SF.

Even if he were to pull it off, and cobble together a government more complicated than the 1948 arrangement, it would be so precarious, so inherently unstable that it would hardly last a year. I think the current FG leadership is playing a longer game. On the one hand it's posturing a little, anticipating any leadership challenge, ensuring that Enda's leadership is a continuity one. The message: he's ready to step into the breech now and at any time as Taoiseach. Secondly, they are planting the notion in people's minds that if a FF-led coalition collapses, then it might not be necessary to go to the country.

Having said that, FF have the chips stacked on their side of the table. For once, I don't think we have to take a Machiavellian reading of Bertie Ahern's intentions. He wants the PDs and the independents first, and then the greens. The problem with the first constellation is question marks over Beverly Flynn €1.5 million debt to RTE. The majority will be wafer-thin - and it would be difficult for the government to last the course. I think the upper echelons of the FF leadership are not too gone on the Greens either - and it goes beyond its concerns about so-called flakey policies to the attacks that the Greens have made on FF's relationship with developers.

If there were an agreement with the Greens it might be more stable.

But looking at the numbers, you suspect that what FF might try for is a wider coalition involving FF, the two PDS, the six Greens, and one or two sympathetic independents.

FF and Labour? I just don't see it. Let's be real about this. Pat Rabbitte ruled it out. If there was wiggle room in what he has said in the past six months, its so infinitesimally small as to be negligent.

Fintan O'Toole's column in the Irish Times yesterday made a cogent argument for this set-up, saying it would guarantee both ten years of Government, could see the successors of Pearse and Connolly ruling the country at the time of the 100th anniversary of 1916. It makes sense for a Brian Cowen led FF. The problem with the thesis is that it's not a Brian Cowen led FF and won't be for at least another two and a half years.

And the Tribunals. It will cause Ahern trouble. Not now. None of his opponents have any appetite to take FF on for a third time over BertieGate. Ahern has already scored two emphatic victories over this. But the patterns in politics often mirror closely the patterns in sport - and yes, sport always provides a vivid dayglo metaphor for the human condition!. In championship fare, you often see teams demolish its opposition for three or four games in a row and then be set up as untouchable or as raging hot favourites. For all that, sometimes in the game that you least expect it, they put in an insipid performance and exit tamely. This might happen here. After the heroic seeing off of his detractors, the Taoiseach might be felled in the end by something small and seemingly insignificant - the piece of straw that will have broken the camel's back .

INSIDE POLTICS - ELECTION, THE OVERVIEW

By the times the polling stations closed at 10.20 last Thursday night, Bertie Ahern was exhausted. This had been his toughest campaign as Fianna Fail leader, physically and psychologically. The first one in 1997 had been hard but he was a younger man and also the challenger. The second in 2002 was hard too but his government was so strong, the opposition so divided that the outcome was predetermined weeks, maybe months beforehand.

This one was different. He always knew he would be going into this one as top weight, handicapped by two terms of office, economic uncertainty, and all the brouhaha surrounding his personal finances and his house.

Election campaigns are always intense but this one was bruising, nasty, divisive and personal – for the first two weeks, the questions surrounding his house were unrelenting and pitiless.

Ahern and those closest to him knew that they turned it, that the critical last ten days of the election campaign had belonged to them. But the effort to pull that off had taken his toll.

Sometime after the last vote was cast Ahern went to bed and fell into a deep sleep. He slept through the RTE exit poll at 7.00 the following morning. He slept through the tallies from the 43 constituencies. He slept through the first counts early in the afternoon, all of which told the same story.

And when he finally woke, sometime after 4pm on Friday afternoon, it was to a radically changed country. The first call he got was from his daughter, Cecilia, at around 5pm. She told him: it’s ok, everything is going well. For him, it must have been a transforming moment.

It’s a fair question to ask: what has radically changed or what has been usurped if everything remains the same, if the status quo is as it was.

But the drama of this election wasn’t that Fianna Fail held on, but the dramatic and emphatic nature of the party’s victory. They defied everything. The odds. The trust of the media punditry, which called it as going right to the wire. The expectations (over-cooked as it turned out) of all the other parties. This was a bigger victory than 1997. It was also a much bigger victory than 2002.

Sure, the numbers didn’t stack up as high this time. Fianna Fail came back with 78 seats rather than 80 but its percentage of support was actually higher. And now, not only was it facing a real alternative in the shape of the Fine Gael and Labour alliance, it also had to face down Sinn Fein – most of its gains in the marginal constituencies of Dublin and Donegal would be made at the expense of FF.

There was a mood out there all right, but it wasn’t – as the opposition parties believed – a mood for change. People were worried. About house prices. About health services. About transport. About public services. About quality of life. About the economic uncertainty that lies ahead. But the mood when it translated into votes plumped for trusting the incumbents more than the pretenders – or as Pat Rabbitte put it, a refusal to switch horse in mid-stream.

This was a fascinating election and one that will take many months to analyse. There were many factors that fed into the victory, some complementary, some harder to explain.

There has been a lot of talk this weekend about the air war and the ground war. The air war was the national campaign fought on the airwaves and in the media – the one in which Bertie Ahern took an awful lot of flak in the first fortnight; the one also that was turned around in the last ten days.

But Fianna Fail won the ground war, and won it hands-down. The party always seems to be ahead of the posse in terms of tactics and strategy. In the late 1990s it began maximising its chances of getting a seat bounce by ruthlessly minimising its number of candidates. This time round, it picked young, hard-working, presentable candidates, paying particular attention to the commuter-belt constituencies that satellite Dublin.

These were the constituencies where FF had taken massive hits in the local elections and in the Kildare North and Meath by-elections in 2005. The problems of these new suburban towns were manifold – marathon commuting times, no school facilities, no public transport, hassle getting childcare; class sizes, no real sense of community. The list went on. During the campaign, we heard of a family holding a birthday party for a child at 6.30am.

And how did these new communities vote? Overwhelmingly for Fianna Fail.
They picked up two in the three-seaters of Meath East (thwarting the high-profile Labour candidate Dominic Hannigan); Kildare South; Meath West; two in Kildare North, Longford Westmeath, and Wicklow; and three out of five in Carlow-Kilkenny.
And they held Dublin. Save for North Central (which was down a seat anyway) and North East.

But the ground war meant more than just candidate-selection. It was the incessant nature of the campaigning – two years of slog and constant canvassing. In the last couple of days of the campaign, Fianna Fail succeeded in dropping close to 1 million leaflets through letterboxes. That was awesome.

The air war had to be won too and it was in the last ten days of the campaign, FF managed to turn it around in its direction. Once Ahern issued his statement that Sunday, Fianna Fail finally managed to put BertieGate behind it. From there on in, it made sure it would not emerge again.

Brian Cowen (who was the real star of the show for FF) came out with an inveterate attack on Enda Kenny’s ‘contract’ the next day. Ahern was in Westminster the following day. By the time Ahern lined up against Kenny for the TV debate, the wind had changed. But as a senior FF strategist said yesterday, the debate became the ‘tipping point’, the moment in which it all swung back towards FF.

Kenny didn’t do badly in the debate and for many, the fact that he survived relatively unscathed was enough. But what Ahern succeeded in was raising real doubts about the alternative’s policies and figures. In a series of claims during the debate, he queried the costing of hospital beds, claimed the FG tax would favour the rich, said that a FG promise of 2,000 extra cops was only 1,000 extra cops. Kenny never departed from his script, was never prepared to go cross country to take Ahern on. And it cost him – because he left those allegations unanswered.

The FF big guns lined up on Friday and Saturday and pounded away with the same rhetorical artillery all weekend. This was an exercise in consolidating the advantage (privately, FF were furious that the media had not called Ahern a more clear-cut winner).

By the time FG (which has far fewer political heavyweights on its front benches than FF and Labour) got its act together – and it required considerable assistance from Pat Rabbitte – it was all over. FF had a lousy last Tuesday of the campaign – but by that stage it was too late.

Another feature that is staggering about this election is that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael do not seem to take each other on directly. Their seats are almost mutually exclusive. In 2002, when Fine Gael almost disappeared, they lost only five of their seats to FF. This time, they displaced Fianna Fail in Cork South Central and Cork South West, Dublin North East and in Roscommon/South Leitrim. The strange thing is FG gained more from Labour (and benefited hugely from its transfers) than FF. And it almost single-handedly wiped out PDs – taking all of its six losses.

Likewise, the real success of Fianna Fail this time round was in staving off the threat posed by Sinn Fein. If SF had succeeded in grabbing seats off FF in Donegal and in the three constituencies north of the Liffey, it might have been down to 74 or 75 seats and the whole dynamic of the election would be changed. And to be sure, while FG recorded a gain in Dublin South West, it was also a victory for FF which maintained its two by targeting the potential support of SF’s Sean Crowe (a strategy employed by Joan Burton with Joe Higgins in Dublin West).

For good measure, it also stole a couple of seats from independents, notably in Cavan-Monaghan, in Kildare North and in Tipperary South.

This became an election that was resolved by almost primal voter considerations. The environment didn’t really feature. Quality of life didn’t really feature. Nor did childcare. And was it a referendum on health? It became a contest of what Michael D Higgins describes as ‘managerialism’.

To me it seems people asked themselves the simple question about who should govern and gave surprisingly cautious, innately conservative answers to those questons. Better the divvil you know. Or the ‘cold feet syndrome’, to employ the words used by another potential David McWilliamesque corny phrase-maker.

Who should govern? When you are a smaller party you are not really in a position to provide an answer to that question.

A very senior FFer told me yesterday that this time round, voters voted for the politics of possibility rather than the politics of protest.

And distilled down, possibility could really express itself in only two configurations. Voters in 2007 asked the same essential question that voters have asked themselves since 1927 – Fianna Fail or Fine Gael?

And the answer to that question emerged in the hours of Bertie Ahern’s deep sleep. He woke to find a changed country, to find that he, the man in the anorak, would lead Fianna Fail into government for a third term.

He didn’t win an overall majority. But psychologically, it was a landslide.

A version of this appeared in this morning's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - SLEEP

It's strange the things you pick up on. But just about the most interesting thing about Bertie Ahern's interview with Gerald Barry on RTE's This Week (listen here )was his admission that he went to sleep after the polls closed on Thursday and didn't wake until 4.20pm the next day, missing exit polls, tallies, first counts, the whole nine yards. He woke up to be told by his daughter Cecilia that PS I won the election.

I wouldn't even compare our lot to that of politicians on the last furlong of a campaign (nothing is at stake after all except their jobs, their political parties and the whole future of the country). But even for us who follow and report, the last month in the run-up to the election was exhausting, and reminded me a lot of the intensity and pressure that surrounded the Leaving Cert.

On the day of the count I was up at 6am to do Newstalk and went to bed at 4.30 the following morning (after doing six hours of radio on RTE). I drove home, had a shower, changed clothes, snoozed on the couch for two hours,, and drove back into RTE again to meet the same people (Sean O'Rourke, Brian Dowling) who were there only three or four hours beforehand.

By tea-time Saturday, I was keeling over. I went to bed at 6.30pm and slept through until 8am Sunday morning.

This was my fourth general election campaign (and the first that I was working as part of a political team). It was easily the most exciting. There were so many moments; so many controversies; so much meat to put between the sandwich.

And unfortunately, because Michael McDowell can no longer be radical, he has no choice but to be redundant. He will be missed, as will Joe Higgins, another of the the Dail's great personalities and speakers. And so will Dan Boyle. I am very friendly with Dan and always had great time for his intelligence and strategic nous. The Green Party will sorely miss him too, especially if it is negotiating for government. I was sorry to see the great battler John Dennehy lose out as well. And Denis O'Donovan in Cork South West. Denis was a busy backbencher and took on a lot of extra work including the Constitutional Committee and the Judge Curtin Inquiry. That work may have cost him his seat.

Because of the geographical roots of my newspaper, I know the Cork and Kerry contingents well and and feel nothing but sympathy for those who have lost out. And Denis must felt hard done by losing out after only one term, having spent so long working to get in. It's a cruel cruel profession, where the atrition or churn rate eace five years is about a third of the 166.

Fianna Fail's victory will be parsed for months. It was more emphatic than 1997 and 2002 because of the very fact that the hurdles were much higher, all of Beecher's Brook difficulties. Here we had a government that was fighting for a third term, and being confronted with a regrouped opposition offering a credible alternative government. It also had to address full-on the serious controversy involving the Taoiseach's finances.

In addition there was threat from the flanks... the Greens and Sinn Fein were both capable of gouging seats from the margin. If the Greeens had won Wicklow, and if SF had taken seats in Dublin North and in Donegal North East, FF could have been left with 74 or 75 seats - and that would have changed the dynamic of the election entirely. In fact, FF took them on in Tallaght. They knew Hayes was coming back. They knew Rabbitte wasn't going to get ousted. So they targeted the one TD everybody thought was safe: Sean Crowe.

One of the things I'm writing about in today's Examiner is that FG and FF seats seem to be almost mutually exclusive. When FG lost heavily in 2002, FF took only five of their seats. Similarly this time around, the only gains FG made of FF were in Cork South West, Cork South Central, Roscommon-South Leitrim and Tipp North.

The other thing I can't understand is Enda Kenny's insistence that it's not all over. The final whistle has been blown. The other crowd have their fingers clasped on the cup. It's time to go home.

Oh yes. I had a corny joke about Fine Gael candidate and sandwich guru Brody Sweeney that I cracked at about 3am on radio but only Michael O'Regan picked up on it and chuckled. We were talking about the failure of the so-called 'celebrity candidates in the election. My comment:

"He mightn't have been much of a success in the polls but I can tell you one thing for sure, he was great on bread and butter issues."

INSIDE POLITICS - WHERE AND WHEN ELECTION WAS WON

About five six or days into the election campaign, when things looked bad for Fianna Fail and very very bad for Bertie Ahern, I bumped into Brian Cowen after one of his party’s morning briefing.

Things aren’t look good, was my blatantly obvious observation to him.

Cowen immediately responded by evoking the 1994 All Ireland. For people from his home county, it will go down in history as the ‘four minute final’. Offaly were trailing Limerick by five points with only four minutes remaining. In a late blitz, they scored two goals and four points to pull off one of the most memorable – almost unbelievable - reverses of all time.

And this was its political equivalent. The first two weeks of the campaign were a disaster for Ahern and FF, as they struggled – and failed- to put the BertieGate mess behind them. On that Monday, Cowen himself came out fighting with an imperious performance, a bravura demoltion job on Enda Kenny’s contract.

It proved to be the springboard for his party’s last gambit – a two-pronged attack that traded on Ahern’s statesmanship on the one hand and a no-holds-barred attack on what they identified as Fine Gael’s weak point – Enda Kenny’s American-style ‘Contract for a New Ireland’.

That three-day period that began with Ahern’s Westminster speech and culminated in the TV debate on Thursday night between him and Kenny proved to be pivotal.

In the wake of the debate, the media said that Ahern had shaded the debate (though, in defence of the Irish Examiner, we said that Ahern was the conclusive winner). But it wasn’t until the Irish Times opinion poll was published the following Monday that the disconnect between the media and the public became evident. The public had declared Ahern an emphatic winner. It wasn’t just FF sophistry. Joe Public out there agreed that he had dismantled Kenny’s ‘Contract’.

That wasn’t the only disconnect between the media and the public. It seemed that many people out there just didn’t share the media’s preoccupation (a justified one, nonetheless) with his finances. If he had strayed offside, it is clear they were ready to forgive him. The people have spoken – to employ the electoral cliché – and have spoken in a language that is foreign to that of the media.

But did a late blitz really turn around – in the space of two days - a possible FF loss into the party’s most emphatic election since 1977? Whatever, FF clearly consolidated its position after the Ahern victory, and never looked back. While the media was taken aback by the Times poll on Monday, it is clear its own private polls were telling it the party was close to an overall majority. On Vincent Browne’s programme on polling night, pollster Sean Donnelly, who conducts private polls for FF, predicted 76 seats for the party. Donnelly doesn’t exaggerate. FF knew it was going to have a good election.

David Davin Power’s great quotation of an African proverb is the summation of this election: “When elephants fight, the grass gets grampled.”

Everything converged back to the two civil war parties. All the smaller parties have got squeezed, suffered reverses – and in the case of the PDs – are facing extinction in the face. The concentration to the civil war configuration was staggering. Labour made no gains and lost one or two. The Greens were expected to make three gains but instead found four of its six TDs fighting for survival. Sinn Fein bellyflopped – gained zero and lost one seat, that of Sean Crowe in Tallaght. Only three or four independents will return. There will be no Joe Higgins. And as for the PDs, they have been salamandered – with only two TDs likely to return to the 30th Dail.

At the time of writing FF look good for 79 or 80 seats. In the cockpits of Dublin and Cork , it has retained comfortably – only in Bertie Ahern’s Dublin Central (where the vote management was lousy) is it in danger of losing.

It has also been a good election for FG but only in relative terms. It will ensure that Enda Kenny should be given the nod to continue leadership. For Pat Rabbitte and Trevor Sargent, there is much more uncertainty.

For Bertie Ahern, there is no such uncertainty. He has made history, a three-term Taoiseach with the prospect of serving for 15 years – an unprecedented feat for a leader in an age of political obsolescence.

INSIDE POLITICS - FINAL DAY

The flux of this election campaign has been unprecedented. What the opinion polls tell us – and not with any great accuracy – is not to write anyone off. Not Fianna Fail when they’re down at 34%. Not Fine Gael or Labour when they’ve ebbed from a high tide of 31% and 13% to a less impressive 28% and 10%. Not the Greens, who dipped. Not Sinn Fein despite Gerry Adams loose grasp of Southern economics. Not even the PDs. Especially not the PDs. Remember last time.

With just 24 hours of a 15-day election campaign to go, the country is still on an uncertain course. Five years ago, the race was over and the only imponderable was if Fianna Fail could pull off an overall majority for the first time since 1977. Now, nobody can call it with any certainty. To be sure, the momentum has trended towards FF for the past week – but the main opposition parties are adamant that the last poll wasn’t truly reflective of the mood out there.

The thematic battlegrounds of the election wasn’t as complicated and layered as we thought. For the first fortnight, it was dominated by the questions surrounding Bertie Ahern’s finances. That went to his credibility. Following his statement, Brian Cowen pumped up the volume with an attack on Fine Gael’s contract ‘con job’ last Monday week. But it didn’t sustain. FF’s was running the same campaign as it had in 2002 – but everything they turned their hands to seemed to spontaneously combust before their eyes.

In contrast, both Fine Gael and Labour were running clever campaigns. FG concentrated on Enda Kenny whistlestopping his way through the country. Labour relied on clever targeted messages, using Pat Rabbitte’s force of character to drive the message home in a punchy and quip-laden manner.

The slow turn started for Ahern in Westminster with a superb speech and the build-up to the TV debate on Thursday. What distinguished the 2007 showdown from the 2002 version was that it happened much earlier – with a full week to go – and the contest was much more finely-poised.

It was to prove to be a critical encounter. If the media view was that Ahern shaded it, it seems the public didn’t share it, plumping much more for the FF leader. Be they true or not, he had succeeded in getting some of his assertions outs there – on the veracity of FG’s claims on 2,000 extra cops; his claim that their tax policies favoured the top 3% of earners; and his jibes about their plans for 2,300 more beds. He planted a seed of doubt that went to the question of Kenny’s competence and wherewithal.

And FF followed up by using the basketball ploy of a full-court press, hammering home the points. It was only when the startling results of the last opinion poll appeared on Monday that the opposition parties came out fighting, screaming that the FF claims on tax were “lies”. It descended into a slanging match between Cowen and Rabbitte on Questions and Answers, that was so slapstick and vaudeville it could have come straight from a bout of the ‘World Wresting Federation’.

Yesterday was the last real day of engagement before today’s broadcast moratorium. The parties had their own message to sell. But the day was dominated by an amazing FF gaffe. After pounding away at the opposition for three days, FF was knocked out by a self-inflicted haymaker yesterday.

The carefully co-ordinated message for the press confererence were washed away in the rapids. And then the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern went onto RTE’s Six-One News and found a very different Bryan Dobson than the one he had encountered last autumn.

Dobson gave him a grilling. He back-footed Ahern on a 10 year promise to provide facilities for cystic fibrosis sufferers. It was in the famous €2.4 billion envelope for capital health projects, he said. But not specified. But he had written them a letter in his own hand, he pleaded. Not good enough.

Similarly, he was going backwards on that FF ad that claimed the only 3% of tax payers would benefit from FG and Labour tax cuts. That was semantics and shifting sands at its worst. Dobson forced him to admit that 100% of tax payers would benefit from the Mullingar Accord’s two per cent cut in the standard rate. Case closed.

Fianna Fail had a brilliant Monday. The alternative had a strong day yesterday. Has any of this swayed voters. We will find out tomorrow.


Part of the above appeared in this morning's Irish Examiner.

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE IN SLIGO

The following is from this morning's Irish Examiner. I travelled down there yesterday, to see how Bertie Ahern reacted to the opinion poll....

(Incidentally, we have a very good Election 2007 section on our website that includes profiles of all the constituencies, which you will find here.


The text that beep-beeped was from a Fianna Fail handler. It speculated on what tone Bertie Ahern might strike when asked about his reaction to THAT opinion poll in is only interview of the day in Sligo.

“I bet you he will do sackcloth and ashes today,” it read.

And that’s what the lips did. They underplayed it, toned it down and said lots of sensible things like: The few day ahead are crucial. I think we have been working harder. The only poll that matters is the one on Thursday.

But the lips were completely out of synch with the body. What the body did was a staggering sight to behold, a complete betrayal of the sobriety of the lips.
The body moved through Sligo town so fast that it left a vapour trail behind it. The two candidates for Sligo-Leitrim – Dr Jimmy Devins and Eamon Scanlon - had to trot to keep up with him for the doughnut shots for the papers.

Like a contestant in demented supermarket derby, he whooshed through Tesco, whizzed through Penneys, before sprinting through a car park, and through the underwear and children’s department of Next. Countless hands were shaken during micro-second encounters. The pace never relented.

It wasn’t just that Bertie Ahern had found the pep in his step. He was more than buoyant. His body language shouted: levitation (though high speed levitation if that’s possible). Nobody would have raised an eyebrow if he walked up and down on the surface of the River Garavogue that tumbles through the heart of Sligo.

On Sunday, Bertie Ahern cavilled with Gerald Barry when it was put to him the first three weeks of the campaign were insipid. But they were. And journalists who have coat-tailed Bertie Ahern this time have agreed.

And when this transformation happened, the pinpointed it to Cork on Friday night and Saturday. Up until then the crowds had been smaller and the tempo too low. But they came out in droves and greeted him with a messianic fervour. No matter that it was FF apparatchiks that were leading the chorus of ‘five more years’ (like Enda Kenny’s contract, this is another concept borrowed from US elections). The thing was that something had changed and Fianna Fail had succeeded in dramatically reversing their uncertain and grim course.

There will be endless debates about the accuracy of opinion polls. But it doesn’t matter. They create their own momentum. And the effect of this one is obvious. It’s like a team arriving out for the second half to discover that a gale has blown up behind them and half the opposition have been red-carded. Suddenly after weeks of trending to FG and Labour, they now find themselves back-footed and having to work hard to retrieve the situation.

Though he was a little coy about it, there was no doubt he though the ‘Bertie Bounce’ came from the TV debate and, to a lesser extent, his good day in Westminster.

“People were telling me what the experts were saying in the studio (after the debate) and what the people were saying. It was very different.

“It’s about the issues. These things are not beauty contests or personality contests. It’s about the issues. It’s about how we take the country forward over the next five years. Over the last eight or nine days, the real debate has taken place.”

Ahern and those around him clearly believe that their strategy of punching holes in Enda Kenny’s Contract for a Better Ireland. Yesterday, the heavyweights came out for a slugging contest. Brian Cowen versus Eamon Gilmore; and Pat Rabbitte against Ahern.
Rabbitte charged that the biggest lie of the campaign was FF’s claim that the Mullingar Accord’s tax policies would favour the top 3% of earners.

There was a stridency, a self-confidence to Ahern’s response that was lacking a week ago.

“He’s wrong and we produced the figures four weeks ago. Amazingly, it took Pat Rabbitte until the last Monday of the campaign to make a comment because he knew he was getting away with it.”

“I’ll put it straight back to him. Is it not true that under his policies, somebody on 45,000 a year would pay the same PRSI as somebody on E450,000. That’s true. That’s the answer.”

But it wasn’t the full answer. No sir, not a hope. Twelve days ago this was the man who gave us six second of silence. Now he was on a roll. Next came the bit if, em, gloating about Rabbitte.

“The fact is. I know he’s embarrassed. I know he’s upset that Labour got tied in with policies associated with Fine Gael.

“Since he mentioned it, the policies are progressively are anti the taxpayers who are paying low and middle income because of the PRSI figure.

“If he disassociates himself from Fine Gael policies then perhaps he will let us know what his policies are.”

As you listened to him an old saw of Mark Twain’s about rumours of death and exaggeration came to mind.

Not only was Ahern’s election very much still alive. It was walking on water.

INSIDE POLITICS - FF's JIM O'KEEFFE MOMENT

Well, Fianna Fail had their Jim O'Keeffe moment today.

The week before last O'Keeffe conceded at a Fine Gael conference that crime figures had not doubled between 1995, as claimed by his party, but had stayed the same. He then tried to distinguish between low-level headline crimes like bicycle theft and serious crimes like rape, murder and serious assualt, which he said had increased.

But the damage was done. And it was compounded when in the course of the TV debate Enda Kenny said O'Keeffe - his party's justice spokesman - had not been in possession of the correct statistics. It was a bad moment.

Since then, the FF big swatters have swung into action, especially Mr Brawny from Offaly. They've slid in hard on the 2,000 extra cops claim, the 2,300 beds and the allegation that FG and Labour's tax proposals would benefit the top 3% of earners.

No matter if the claims are true or not. The name of the game is to get them out there, to sow seeds of doubts about the ability and competence of Enda, his party and its partner. Did Enda ride all those tackles as well as he could? It seems the public didn't think so. And FG and Labour took too long to counter-attack and do it with the ferocity of the FF push against them since last Thursday.

It was only in the wake of yesterday's poll that they came out fighting. Rabbitte and Richard Bruton called the FF 3% tax claim a blatant lie. But was it all a little too late.

And then just as Fianna Fail was getting into a hubris frame of mind and patting itself in the back for punching holes in opposition policies, it went one step too far and punched a massive hole in one of its own policies.

The three Fianna Fail ministers at the top table today - Dermot Ahern, Mary Hanafin, and Seamus Brennan - opened their mouths just long enough to take one foot out and put the other foot in.

The context was this. Last night on Question and Answers Brian Cowen had finally come up with a figure, telling how much co-location would cost the taxpayer. €70 million per year over seven years was his response.

Then this morning, Brennan and Hanafin said it would cost €40 million between now and 2011. When asked to clarify this, total confusion reigned. Seamus started to talk about it being difficult to pin down the cost on tax breaks. When pressed further, a note was passed up from the sides.

And finally, Colin Hunt, the FF economic guru, had to step in from the wings to explain it all. Not everybody in the press corps were sure who he was. But he explained that the project would cost E47 million per year but the net cost would be E40 million. He also said that Cowen had referred last night to E40 million being the net cost.

There were a couple of snide remarks from journalists asking if Mr Cowen had had the right statistics to hand last night.

And predictably FG and Labour quickly went to town on it, with the usual barrage of verbal heavy artillery.

We're less than 48 hours away now. Tomorrow is a broadcast moratorium day. Embarrassing as it was for the Government, did it come a little bit too late.

INSIDE POLITICS - IRISH TIMES POLL

I texted a friend of mine who works for one of the opposition parties.

"Totally grim" was his terse response.

That sums up the poll. 41% for Fianna Fail is... well let's think... something along the lines of hurtling to earth after your parachute doesn't open. And then when all looks doomed, you fall into a massive hay stack.

FFers were jubilant last night. They pointed out that TNS mrbi adjust for overstated support for FF. They think the election is now in the bag - that the party will coast home...

But not so quick. The findings could be aberrant or rogue - it goes against the SB Post and Sunday Indo polls from the previous day. Granted, neither of those fully capture the TV showdown on Thursday. But surely, that in itself couldn't account for a five per cent jump. If people felt sorry for Bertie or if it reflected his Westminster speech on Tuesday, that would have been picked up in the Sunday polls.

It's curious. It has stunned everybody. Gerald Barry on This Week described the FF campaign as insipid for the first few weeks. How right he was, though Bertie quibbled with him over it. But since Thursday (and what he himself saw as him wiping the floor with Enda Kenny) Ahern has been a Born-Again Anorak, with a newly-found spring in the step.

I'm accompanying his canvass to Sligo tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how much he plays it up or down.

INSIDE POLITICS - THE ANORAK OR GORETEX

Modern politics is like high street garments. They are designed for obsolescence. Like a Kate Moss cutaway dress or a practical blue Anorak, you’ll get a couple of good years out of them if your are lucky and then they are chucked.

But ten years? Or fifteen years? That’s an eternity.
The evidence is self-evident. In Europe over the past few years, we have seen a rake of two-term and three-term leaders getting the flick from the electorate or their colleagues.

José María Aznar retired after nine years in Spain. Silvio Berlusconi got the guts of a decade in Italy before getting the heave-ho. Gerhard Schroeder had eight years in Germany before . The messianic Jacques Chirac got the heave-ho (even though he managed to last 12). And even Bertie Ahern’s closest foreign ally, Tony Blair – the man whose career has mirrored his own in lots of ways – was given no more than a decade before he got the order of the boot.

A year or more ago, when Ahern began to creep into the record books for running second only to de Valera in terms of longevity, there was an assumption that, like Mr Tony, he would get his third term and his shot at 15 years. Like Mr Tony, election number three wasn’t going to come as easily as election number two but he was still going to limp home. It was a very neat assumption and had a nice symmetry to it. Problem was that it was wrong.

I went out earlier this week to see the various parties canvass. And what struck me was that it was like 2002 all over again except that all the hype and goodwill was now following Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte and not Ahern. We all know that Kenny can shake more hands in an instant than a packed church offering the sign of peace. But the reaction to Rabbitte was more interesting. He is diffident and a bit wooden on the stump with none of the ‘howya horse’ gregariousness of Kenny. But people were actually seeking him out, shaking his hand, wanting to talk to him. And during the course of the day, I heard a phrase that will fall on Fianna Fail ears like poison:

“Maybe it’s time for a change”.

And that’s what may fell this Government in the end. Not the health services. Not BertieGate. Not the record on crime. Or eduation. Or health. Or decentralisation. Or e-voting. But for a far more visceral reasons - because they have been there too long and there’s a need for change.

The Anorak has been there for a long time and has given some service. But it’s beginning to let in the rain. And would it be much better to plump for brightly-coloured Mr Goretex - newer, more modern, and much more lightweight.

With the exception of Richard Bruton and one or two others, the Fine Gael front bench isn’t exactly rippling with top talent. Its promises, for all its hard sell, doesn’t amount to that much. Enda’s contract with the people is just a political promise dressed up in another way. Sure he’ll not seek the office of Taoiseach again if he doesn’t fulfil it. But who’ll be the judge of that? Himself, ultimately. I’m sure there will be many mitigation factors to be found if those 2,300 beds are not built or the 2,000 cops (or is it only 1,000) aren’t pounding the beat. That’s what politicians do. They make promises. They break them. They explain them away by talking about new priorities and review.

I must say that I have huge problems with FG’s policies on crime which are Pavlovian, knee-jerk, cynical, hysterical, scaremongering and populist. (And neither FF, the PDs or Labour do much better sadly). Boot camps. Drunk tanks. Electronic tagging. Tougher remission laws. Sounds real tough. All I can say is thank goodness for our constitution. And thank goodness some of the more lunatic ones will never see the light of day.

Having said that, Fine Gael’s revival has been stunning. From a hair’s breadth away from extinction in 2002, it is now but a hair’s breadth away from government. And their recovery has borrowed heavily from the triangulation techniques perfected by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (where else have they featured this week). So, well have they positioned themselves that the choice offered to the electorate is a simple one between the Bertie Ahern of Fianna Fail and the Bertie Ahern of Fine Gael.

The policy choices, the implementation, won’t change that much despite all the promises. Because many of the difficulties in health, crime, education, infrastructure and all the other things in the mix are long-term, complicated, multi-faceted and subject to drawn-out procedures. But they promise they can do it differently. That’s the rub.

Consider this stale but relevant cliché. Governments lose elections, Oppositions don't win them. The Fianna Fail campaign has been shockingly fragmented, incoherent and all at sea. Last Monday, Brian Cowen came out fighting with a full-frontal attack on the Mullingar Accord’s spending plans. But they couldn’t sustain it, even for 24 hours. It would take a further two days for the party to seize the initiative and that was with the showdown between the two leaders on PrimeTime. Ahern looked tired but for the first time we saw a hunger and desire there after two and half weeks of being on the back foot and being out of sorts.

But victories in TV debates are not decisive and determinate. Fianna Fail and the PDs had already leaked gallons of support to the alternative. On second viewing, my own view that Ahern was the clear winner of the TV debate was reinforced. But by surviving almost unscathed Kenny also won big. He can now say that he wasn’t the corporal who by some outrageous stroke of fortune became a lucky General.

It’s going to be very tight, knife-edge close. The key electorate, the floating voters, are wavering about if 10 years is long enough, or whether there’s another couple of years wear left in the anorak.

INSIDE POLITICS - THE DEBATE

It’s staggering how often a hugely hyped and over-anticipated event like the World Cup Final has turned into a tense defensive battle.

And in a way so it was in the head-to-head between the two potential Taoisigh of the country, Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny last night. Presenter Miriam O’Callaghan described it as the “climax” of the election campaign but you felt that perhaps the denouement will not come until next weekend.

Nevertheless, it was intriguing, somewhat bruising, and told us a lot about the two leaders. It might have lacked the venom and sound-bytes of the previous night, but there was far more engagement on issues with both scoring heavily on key issues.

If there was a winner it was Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who had the edge when it came to challenging Mr Kenny on his health costings, his tax proposals, as well as getting Mr Kenny to admit that his justice spokesman Jim O’Keeffe did not have the correct information at his disposal last week.

The biggest stumbler Mr Ahern faced was when Miriam O’Callaghan prefaced the next section with a reminder that the Government was in power for ten years, had record resources at its disposal but hadn’t delivered on the particular area, be it health, crime or education. On a couple of occasions, he found himself in the uncomfortable territory of admitting that promises had not been achieved.

Mr Kenny showed he has travelled a massive distance in terms of dealing with intensive and detailed debates of this manner. Like Mr Ahern, he relaxed quickly, recovered from any gaffes or admissions, and was assertive without being aggressive.

While acquitting himself well, he found himself very much on the back foot on a few occasions when it came to explaining the details of his promises.

He found himself in difficulties explaining how promises in his contract would be realised – the 2,300 extra hospital beds; the medical cards for under fives in particular. Impossible, said Mr Ahern for both, an argument Mr Kenny never fully managed to nail down. Mr Kenny also never address Mr Ahern’s assertion that FG’s tax policies would most benefit the richest 3%.

His worst moments, surprisingly, came on crime. When it was put to him that his justice spokesman Jim O’Keeffe had admitted there was no increase in crime rate, Mr Kenny had to essentially dress Mr O’Keeffe down on air, with an excuse that Mr O’Keefe did not have the statistics to hand. No matter how he phrased it, it was always going to look bad.

And the Taoiseach also scored heavily with his argument that the 2,000 extra gardai promised by Fine Gael provides funding for only 1,000 plus those who will go into training in Templemore this year. This was a biggie. While the Government has struggled (and arguably failed) to get 14,000 cops by the end of this year, Kenny's plan provides not for 2,000 but for 1,000 extra on top of them. It's promise of 2,000 but based on them being additional to there at the moment not including those in Templemore.

However, for many of the arguments – with both going into detail – the results were marginal or inconclusive. Both men were relaxed but Mr Kenny kept a polite and friendly composure throughout, compared to the edgier and slightly more aggressive pose struck by the Taoiseach.

Mr Ahern did find himself in difficulties on health, especially on a question Ms O’Callaghan asked about cystic fibrosis. Mr Kenny was strong here, especially in his portrayal of the “gargantuan failure” in A&E and primary care, as well as the failure of government to provide 3,000 beds. He also gouged a bit at the edges on the huge amount of public monies that was spent and wasted on PPARS - Mr Ahern's general response about the huge numbers in the health service didn't convince.

On other specific points, he was also able to successfully argue that the Government had failed in its promise to build a metro for Dublin by 2007. He was also marginally stronger on the issues of stamp duty and on quality of life.

The format was as five years ago, with both leaders making a pitch at the start and then debating five pre-agreed topics including health, education, crime, value for money, and the economy.

In his opening response to Ms O’Callaghan the Taoiseach, looking relaxed, spoke about his record over the past ten years and made an effective pitch by pointing to his working class roots in Drumcondra.

The Fine Gael leader immediately confronted by one of his Achilles Hells, lack of ministerial experience, answered confidently by referring to his time as Minister for Trade and the leadership qualities he has shown since becoming FG leader.

When the subject turned to priorities, Mr Ahern said that a strong economy was paramount. Mr Kenny agreed but said that it was the last Fine Gael government which sowed the seeds.

Mr Kenny quickly turned to his contract and his promise that he won’t seek re-election if he doesn’t achieve all its goals. Ms O’Callaghan asked the obvious question about who would judge if he achieved or failed. He answered that it would be self-obvious.

The presenter then honed in on the controversy surrounding Mr Ahern’s finances. Again there were close uncomfortable questions but he answered them relatively comfortably.

“I gave the matters to the Tribunal confidentially. And they were leaked straight out. That was my only objection,” he said.

It was clear that Mr Kenny did not want to engage in this. And it was also clear that the propensity of the debate would remain well-mannered.

As the debate moved to the most fractious issue, the Taoiseach accepted there were issues in A&E and primary care but put it in the context of huge improvements over ten years.

The debate then moved on the economy. Again the exchanges were technical and detailed. Mr Kenny agreed that the Taoiseach had “presided” over a successful economy but argued that Ireland had lost competitiveness. Ahern again referred to the achievements of his Government. This was home turf for him and he easily dealt with the details. Though Mr Kenny showed himself much improved when it came to specific and tricky questions in this area.

Ahern shaded it on the actual debating points. There can't be any doubt about that. But these debates are also about demeanour, composure and delivery. And Kenny never looked like a politician incapable of taking on the role of Taoiseach. Both will take something from it.

INSIDE POLITICS - THE BIG DEBATE

It wasn't lacklustre. It wasn't boring. Sure, we didn't have the quips of last night or the venom. But it was more muscular and robust than I had thought it would be.

Kenny's performance was very impressive, especially compared to the guy who was wiped by PrimeTime six years ago. He held his own, scored a couple of points, and may have quelled many of the questions surrounding his competence. He also came across as a decent man, less aggressive than Mr Ahern.

But Bertie Ahern edged it. He was put on the back foot every time Miriam O'Callaghan put it to him that the Government was in power for ten years, that we had record resources, but had failed to deliver key promises in health, crime etc. He was particularly uncomfortable on
1. Cystic fibrosis and the fact that the mortality rate is much higher in the Republic than in the North
2. In admitting the mess surrounding John Daly, the prisoner in Portlaoise who made a
Funnily enough, when it came to his personal finances and BertieGate, he dealt with that comfortably - no issue emerged. Of course, he was aided by Kenny who again reciled from getting engaged on this issue.

Where Ahern scored most heavily was on the following matters in order of ranking.

1. Forcing Enda Kenny to give Jim O'Keeffe a public dressing down when he admitted his justice spokesman did not have the correct statistics to hand last week.
2. Successfully planting a seed of doubt over FG's promise to deliver 2,000 extra guards. Is it 1,000 or 2,000? It seems it's 1,000 patched on to 1,000 already committed by this Government. This was a biggie.
3. Bringing up a point raised by Bryan Dobson last week about FG's promise to deliver free health care to under 5s. Ahern argued it would be impossible to implement, something Kenny never rebutted wholly.
4. He also had a fruitful sally at FG's tax plans. Kenny never got round to responding to Ahern's argument that FG's tax reform plans would most favour the richest 3% of voters.
5. He also raised some doubts about the ambivalent costings and time scales of FG's and Labour's plan to provide 2,300 hospital beds. In fairness, Kenny responded strongly with a direct attack on the Government's co-location plans.

Other areas produced mashed or inconclusive results. Both showed themselves capable of drizzling us with stats on the economy without delivering a killer line. Kenny dealt competently with one of his Achiles Heel questions - his lack of experience in Government. He also threw in a bit of Irish at the end which did him no harm at all.



But these debates are not only decided by moot points or small incremental victories. The body language and demeanour, composure, confidence and decency, are also important. And Kenny did come across as an essentially decent man. While he may have lost on a close points decision in my view, there was nothing to suggest that he doesn't have the wherewithal to become Taoiseach.

Earlier in the day, there was talk that Ahern and FF were all at sea and had given up the ghost. This will have galvanised him and those around him. In what is shaping up to be the closest and most determinate elections for a long long time, this was a determined and defiant (at times too aggressively defiant) performance by that may put FF back in the chase.

It was good stuff. From the off. In fact, meatier and more robust than last night. And both leaders, both parties will have taken their positives from it.

But my own opinion remains the same - Ahern shaded it.

INSIDE POLITICS - LATEST POLL

The Irish Times/Tns mrbi poll results tonight will give the three main parties a little to boast about and a lot to chew on.

The results are: FF 36 (+2); FG 28 (-3); Lab 13 (+3); SF 10 (-); GP 5 (-1); PDs 2 (-1); other 6 (-).

(Read more on its Breaking News site)

FF will be happy that it's got a little bounce. It will help galvanise the troops, get the likes of Cowen to thump the hurley onto the dressing room table, telling them that they're still in the hunt.

But 36% is low. Worse ever low. FF tend to go down as well in the election campaign but they've rarely started off a campaign as uncomfortably low as they are now.

The two worst performances were under Albert Reynolds in 1992, and under Bertie Ahern in 1997. In fact Bertie's first election as leader was pass remarkable - what hid over the sclerosis was slick vote management. Last time around FF attracted transfers from everywhere - it's not going to happen now.

FG has fallen three but it's still happy with 28. Even the party's most enthusiastic strategists (why does Frank Flannery come to mind?) were saying that looks a bit high. So it's not too put out by the fall, unless it's a sign of a trend (and the Sunday Business Post poll on Sunday will tell us that).

We've been talking about Sinn Fein and the Greens for two years now. But Labour is the story of the past month. The party is buoyant. Pat Rabbitte has had a good first ten days of the campaign. On 13% it will make gains at the expense of FF, and some of the targeted gains of FG and the Greens (who are not at 5% - showing some signs of decline in recent months).

Rabbitte and Kenny are at the highest level of satisfaction. FF got a mini bounce this time in sympathy for Bertie, but nothing like last October. SF look solid, and Gerry Adams satisfaction rating has jumped, a direct reflection, I would guess, of the feelgood factor around Stormont on Tuesday.

Shows how fluid, how volatile and how fickle it's all going to be. There's a fortnight left. There will be a lot of skelping!

INSIDE POLITICS - ENDA KENNY

I was looking at Enda Kenny waltzing around the midlands this evening and I thought to myself - in a fortnight's time this man could be Taoiseach.

One of the party pieces of the great Tyrone novelist, journalist and broadcaster Benedict Kiely was 'The Man from God Knows Where'.

It could have been written for Enda. Or to employ some other cliches that have been hacked around about him - 'the man who rose without trace' or 'the overnight success after almost 30 years'.

Somebody was interviewing him over the last couple of days (so much is happening that you lose track of everything - I think it was Sean O'Rourke) who described the Department of Tourism and Trade during his time as a 'happy' place (see how strong we political hacks are on detail). Ok, I know I'm hanging on a thread here but the gist of the interview was that Enda was a great motivator and that he energised those around him.

I'm sure that's true. He's got a fantastic personal touch. He's friendly, tactile, completely unaffected and very engaging.

A small diversion and then I'll make a point. Like checking out Blogorrah most days, I can't resist posting those satirical parodies like the Simon Cowell one two posts below this one. It's juvenile, cheap and usually very unfair. But it's good clean fun, as the man says. And the point? Well the X Factor satire kind of suits Enda. Because he has that hard-to-describe quality that Bertie has and that Bill Clinton had in spades. The presence of people, the thought of working a room, seems to electrify him.

But - and this is the question - does he have the mettle, the grist, and the granite to become Taoiseach. I remember an interview David Nally of PrimeTime did with him when he contested the leadership with Michael Noonan in 2001. Nally filleted him on the specifics of economic and tax policies.

He has improved over the past couple of years and tends to be very well briefed. But his grasp of detail can still let him down (unlike Bertie who can slew out statistics from morning to night) and he can get caught bang-to-rights when asked tricky supplemental questions.

In the past week, he has kicked to touch on the nurses dispute by saying that an imaginative solution is needed and talking in general terms about benchmarking. Is he in favour of the 10% increase or the reduction of hours to 35 per week? We just don't know.

He also tends to defer to Richard Bruton when the likes of George Lee and Brendan Keenan start asking tough and specific questions. And he has also done a bit of a Pontius Pilate act on the BertieGate saga by, well, not really making a judgement other than the sterile one that the Government is 100% souped.

The reason that Labour and Fine Gael have whistled and looked the other way is that they all got roasted in the polls last autumn. I personally think there was something very strange about the timing of this Quarryvale module, and the Tribunal's insistence on circulating Bertie Ahern's statement on the last Thursday of May (they were very naive if they believed that they wouldn't be leaked).

But once the statements were made public and open to scrutiny (irrespective of the fact they left Ahern playing against a stacked hand) they did raise genuine questions that go to the credibility of the politician who holds the first office. It was inevitable, cut also wholly legitimate, cruel as it is for him

I'm sure that Enda Kenny is well able to deal with all the issues above. But if Ahern's credibility is in question, the big puzzler that has always surrounded Enda Kenny is that of competence - does he have what it takes to become Taoiseach?

I thought of it tonight as I watched him waltzing around a hall in the midlands. I'm sure he has all the qualities (he's been very impressive this year; and he has a formidable presence like Rabbitte riding shotgun for him) but if BertieGate rumbles on for another week, that mettle might not be tested until he drives for the first time into Government Buildings in Merrion Street.

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE'S SUNDAY SWOOP

Like Enda Kenny I was caught on the hop by the pre-dawn swoop by Bertie Ahern yesterday morning. The FG leader was only in Mayo. Unfortunately for me I was in Lisbon without a computer.

You have to play with whatever hand you are dealt. And so I wrote the analysis piece below in a cafe in the Baixa using my mobile phone. It's not exactly a mobile. It's a Nokia 9300 smart phone. It's the size of mobile phones from circa 1999 and opens to reveal a very very small QWERTY keyboard. You can't touch type with it and it's hard going when you have chunky fingers like me... but in an emergency, it's great.


Sorry for being so boring about the technical details but one of the great things about blogger.com is that you can post your scribbling by email. So it;s great when you are in an area with internet connections as zippy as a tranquilised three-toed sloth.

And here's the piece I tapped out on it in great haste (verging on panic) yesterday. Apologies for unspotted typos!

Ireland woke up yesterday morning to discover that the tactics of the pre-dawn police raid had been transferred to the world of Irish politics.

 

As the citizens rubbed sleep from their eyes, they opened their curtains to see a changed landscape. Like a fresh fall of snow, almost every lamp-post in the country has now been comandeered and festooned with somebody's beaming portrait.

 

And talk of a surprise move by Bertie Ahern. Five years ago - without warning - he arrived into an almost empty Dáil chamber late at night during an adjournment debate to dissolve the Dáil.

 

This time round the chicanery was even more convoluted. For months he has strung people along about the actual date of the election. He was adamant that the election would not be held on a Friday. But besides the Taoiseach dropping a couple of hints about the Dáil returning for at least a week after Easter, there was no real certainty about the date. Most zeroed in on May 24 but with caveats and qualifications. For when Bertie Ahern is playing a tight game he tends to use a stapler to make sure his cards are close to his chest.

 

The big surprise wasn't May 24 but the dawn raid on Áras an Uachtaráin. In hindsight it makes perfect sense of course. The only piece of legislation that was essential from a credibility perspective was the Criminal Justice Bill, which passed all stages in the Dáil on Tuesday.

 

From that moment the clock was ticking. The minimum time allowed for a campaign is three weeks. And so when it wasn't called on Thursday, we knew that Thursday May 17th was a goner.

 

One of the curious anomalies of the Irish electoral system is that strict rules and limits apply to spending during the election campaign. But before it's called, parties can spend any amount, infinite amounts is they have them.

 

That's why it seems that every billboard and poster site in the country has been given over to those messianic (and photoshopped) images of Bertie for the past month. That's why Fianna Fail favours minimum campaigns to allow it maximise its pre-campaign campaign spending, if you follow my drift.

 

Most commentators assumed it would be Tuesday or Wednesday of this week when Bertie would go to the country, to allow a bare three weeks. But in the event, there's now 25 days between the opening and closing of the race.

 

And why it makes sense is that the President was leaving for a trip abroad yesterday. While the Taoiseach could have signalled the dissolution of the Dáil to the Council of State in Mary McAleese's absence, that would have seemed shallow and mean-spirited for such a formal and serious duty.

 

But then, you would tend to think that Mr Ahern might have almost had a change of heart after seeing the poor showing for his party in the latest opinion poll on Friday. But there's a school of thought (and a persuasive one) within Fianna Fáil that believes that the party needed to go at the earliest possible moment. They argue that in 2007 the name of the game would be about cutting your losses. For them, even May 24 was too late - it should have been May 17or 18.

 

The notion of a strongly regrouped opposition has been trending since the local and European elections. After a swerve back to the Government last autumn, the momentum has seemed to swing back to the Mullingar Accord parties again.

 

The latest national poll suggests that Fine Gael is breathing down Fianna Fáil's neck but that scenario - huge FG gains; FF wipeout - isn't really borne out by the Red C constituency opinion polls conducted for Thomas Crosbie Holdings titles.

One opinion poll does not an election make. But the trends - and the unmistakable vibes being transmitted by the growing self-confidence of Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte - all point to one of the great political clichés being flogged to death in the next few weeks ... yes, it's going to be too close to call.

 

Arguably, since Alan Duke's Tallaght Strategy of 1997, Irish politics has not been characterised by a clash of ideas; rather a clash of personalities, styles and credibility. When you compare economic policies, for example, the parties have all converged into the centre and agree the same fundamental principles (low taxes, both personal and corporate). Sure there are differences (stamp duty, auction politics etc) but they are nuanced - most are so subtle to be indistinguishable.

 

When it comes to crime, the three mainsstream parties are all slurping out of the same trough, out-toughing each other. The proof of that particular pudding is that both FG and Labour tacitly approved Michael McDowell's hardline criminal justice legislation by abstaining when the vote was called in the Dáil last Tuesday.

 

It's only in health where there's a bitter row over Mary Harney's plans to build private clinics on public land that we see real gap in terms of thinking and ideology.

 

Is all that sameness and uniformity healthy for democracy?

 

The choice that faces the electorate is akin to the choice between two banks or two mobile phone operators. In some of their policy choices, parties have been too influenced by focus groups, running scared of alienating the massive swathe of innately conservative and careful voters who occupy the middle ground. It's for that reason, I'd argue, that Sinn Féin and the Greens are doing so well. Each has an easily identifiable, clearly distinctive, message that brooks no ambiguity.

 

People forget that for all his undoubted charisma Bertie Ahern achieved only 39% of the vote in 1997. That was exactly the same as Albert Reynolds five years earlier. Why was Reynolds considered a disaster in 1992 and Ahen a triumph in 1997? Improved and ruthless vote management gave the party a huge seat bounce.

 

Will this be as bad as '92 or as disastrous as 1982 when Charles Haughey almost allowed FG become the largest party in the State for the first time?

 

It's fascinating to see that in spite of his travails and blunders during BertiGate, Mr Ahern is still his party's greatest asset. Mr Kenny will struggle even now to convince people that he has the mettle for Taoiseach whereas Mr Ahern can just point to his track record. Having said that. the FG leader has travelled a long way.

 

Of course, there'a a presidential flavour to all parliamentary elections these times. For FG, its biggest project has been to build Mr Kenny up. For all his mercurial abilities as a debater, there were doubts about Mr Rabbitte's populist appeal. But if he's not loved, he is respected, and that's backed up by the deference accorded to him on the streets.

Michael McDowell also personifies the PDs. In survey after survey people profess to despise or loathe him. But like Nicholas Sarkozy he sets out to be deliberately divisive or provocative because he knows that at the same time as he alienates some, he attracts others. But will it be enough to save his party from the meltdown that has been widely predicted?

 

For SF, it is Gerry Adams's face we will see though he's not a candidate and not as major a player in Southern politics as he likes to think. The Greens will be only party that will trade on its message rather than on Trevor Sargent's image. Both parties will do well, so well in fact that they will prevent a clear-cut overall result either way. The green message - be it republican or environmental - has huge potency with the Irish electorate right now.

 

If Fianna Fail win through, it will mean Bertie Ahern will be the longest leader in office since de Valera. Perhaps people have not yet tired of Bertie but have tired of his ministers. One of the imponderables (until polling day that is) is if the Government retains enough affection or if people have finally tired of this administration.

The picture will be complicated. We now face 25 days of claim, counterclaim, attack and counter-attack. What is certain is that on May 24 the people will speak. It's only then will we know if the status quo has prevailed or has fallen. Or, more likely. that we're entering into the limbo of a hung Dáil.