This week’s election of Verona Murphy as Ceann Comhairle of the new Dáil further confirms the direction of travel towards the formation of a government in the New Year. The decision by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to support Murphy’s candidacy was a signal that both parties are confident they can do business with the Regional Independents group of which she was a prominent member. The relative ease with which she was elected suggests that Micheál Martin and Simon Harris are both in firm control of their respective parties and well positioned to negotiate the shape of a next cabinet.
When, as now seems inevitable, those negotiations are successfully concluded and the government is formed, what sort of an administration will it be? What will be its priorities, its objectives, its principles and its red lines?
To judge by their manifestos, the two main parties, subject to external economic factors, will forge ahead with plans to invest in infrastructure and services while also allowing for reductions in personal taxation and possibly additional supports for businesses. Those policies will hardly cause a difficulty for their new Independent friends. That will limit the scope for the Opposition parties to attack from the left, although they will undoubtedly do so.
What seems less likely is that this government will be as committed to social reform as some of its predecessors, which introduced significant legal and constitutional change in areas ranging from abortion to LGTBQ+ rights and gender equality. These reforms were often at the instigation of a smaller coalition partner such as Labour or the Greens. The bruising experience of this year’s referendums has dulled the appetite of the two larger parties for further initiatives. And with no smaller coalition partner to drive them on, issues such as assisted dying, hate speech and abortion reform may be allowed slip down the agenda.
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In that sense at least, the next government could represent a perceptible shift to the right. But any such adjustment will be characterised less by new policy proposals than by a greater reluctance to act at all. That would offer an attack line for some opposition parties, though not necessarily for Sinn Féin, which appears to be in the midst of a strategic repositioning of its own on some of these matters.
Where masterly inactivity would be most damaging is on climate.Despite the pressure exerted by the Greens in the last Government, the State is on course to fall drastically short of its legally binding emissions targets for 2030. Based on the rhetoric emanating from all its constituent parts during the recent election, the new government is singularly ill-equipped to take up the challenge. If that proves to be the case, it would be a historic misfortune with potentially disastrous consequences.