Inside politics: Two issues will overshadow the opening weeks of the political term: Brexit and the future of the Government
With putative presidential candidates jumping out of the bushes with rather alarming frequency in recent weeks, perhaps it’s been hard to remember that August is a month-long vacation from politics. From serious politics anyway. But the holidays are over now.
Monday signals the beginning of a busy political term. Sinn Féin will meet for its parliamentary party think-in in Cavan, and Fine Gael in Galway later on in the week. Fianna Fail and Labour (that should be interesting) gather the following week. The Cabinet meets again next week after the August lay-off with a lengthy agenda. Budget meetings are being slotted into the planning grid in the departments of Finance and Public Expenditure. The Brexit talks are back in earnest since yesterday. It’s back to school, all right.
Two issues will overshadow the opening weeks of the term: Brexit and the future of the Government.
In a way, they are intertwined. Fianna Fáil does not have much appetite for granting Fine Gael another year in power, much less two, while the Taoiseach and some of his Ministers like the look of their polling numbers these days. They fancy they could hit the low-to-mid 30s in percentage terms in a general election, yielding them perhaps the mid-60s in seat numbers. This looks optimistic to me, but it would place Fine Gael in a probably unassailable position to lead the next government, whatever its exact composition (another matter, and column, entirely).
At the same time, both Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin know that to trip the Dáil headlong into a general election, leaving the country with an uncertain leadership at exactly the most crucial point in the Brexit process, would be colossally irresponsible – and likely to be punished by voters.
A corollary of this, of course, is that if and when the terms of the UK’s exit are settled – and we will know that by the end of the year – the Government’s time will more or less have run out. “Once Brexit is clear, there’s no real reason to keep the Government…
