New politics has same agenda as the original

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

For the third week in a row, we have seen the Government lose, or back-pedal, on a vote on an Opposition motion – it’s what they call the new politics, folks.

And it’s very like the old politics – the same old scrap accompanied by lots of shouting and roaring.

But what’s different is that the Government parties don’t win every fight any more.

New politics is too grand a term for what’s happening in the Dáil at the moment.

It’s more like what we have seen in the GAA. The Northern teams came with new systems and methods that disrupted the traditional two powers (Dublin and Kerry) and put them onto the back foot. Gradually the big two readjusted and reasserted their authority, but never to the same level as before.

It’s the same for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. They remain the big two and will be like that into the foreseeable future. Their difficulty is that their opponents are employing Tyrone GAA tactics and it’s eating into their hegemony.

The fault-line for this phenomenon in the current Dáil has been private members’ business.

A private members’ Bill is a piece of legislation that is proposed by an Opposition party or technical group. It happens every week. It is tabled on a Tuesday and a total of three hours debate is allowed, over Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. A vote is then taken.

In the last Dáil, the Government never lost the vote. It had such a big majority there was never any danger of doing that.

What it did was it usually amended the Bill that was tabled so that it accorded with Government policies. The Opposition was powerless to prevent that happening.

Occasionally, if the Bill tallied with Government policy, the Bill was accepted at second stage and (nominally) pushed further into the process.

All of this did not stop the Opposition from regularly tabling Bills that were designed to embarrass Government Deputies, especially those in the Labour Party.

There were numerous iterations of Bills to repeal the 8th Amendment of the Constitution on abortion, tabled by Independents such as Clare Daly or by smaller parties like the Socialist Party.

Their purpose, from a political perspective, were simple – to put it up to uneasy Labour backbenchers to defy the Government fiat or to do the “walk of shame” through the Government lobby when it came to the vote.

The Bills always caused huge unease among the more liberal Labour backbenchers who had campaigned for this issue for the general election but could not now support it because it did not form part of the Programme for Government.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.