Triangulation to ensure FG gets the angles right

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

Triangulation – it sounds like something to do with the boy scouts or orienteering instead of what is now accepted as a standard political strategy.

The former US President Bill Clinton did not invent it but he perfected it. So did Tony Blair who used it expertly when creating the hybrid beast known as New Labour.

Now, in the Irish situation, there is clear evidence that Fine Gael’s strategists have decided to sprinkle it liberally over their concoction of policies.

So, how does the technique work? Well, firstly, it relies a lot on focus groups.

These are smallish groups of people selected by polling companies. They are representative of wider society so you get young, old, country, city, poor, rich, well-educated, poorly educated.

They are brought into a room and they talk about a range of issues, usually steered by a professional pollster. Those issues can range from immigration, to tax, to crime, to public services, to health. The name of the game is to tease out what the prevailing sentiment is on those key issues.

The second leg to the school is to scavenge your opponent’s policies. When the New Labour project was in full flow, the party essentially appropriated Tory Party policy on issues like, say immigration or crime. It would take the Tory policy, take on board what had been said by the focus groups, water it down a bit to make it more palatable to Labour supporters, and then sell it as New Labour.

New Labour was in many ways old Tory but with a nod to its own socialist background.

Thus its policies on crime (tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime etc) were almost indistinguishable from those of the Conservatives. As was its relatively hardline stance on immigration.

For Fine Gael in this context, it’s been a multi-pronged approach.

The first element is its relationship with Labour. The parties have been in coalition and both say they wish to go into government again. That said, they are not campaigning on a united front but as individual parties. So while they are partners they are also opponents in that sense.

And this is where you can see the triangulation and focus groups kicking in.

The funny thing is that both parties use almost exactly the same arguments when talking of the Opposition. Both present the choice as one of stability and continuing the recovery versus instability and chaos.

But each knows that they will be competing with each other too. Fine Gael has a sniff of an overall majority. People say it doesn’t have a hope of getting there. Perhaps that’s true.

Nonetheless, you have to factor in the following. The reality is that Enda Kenny is the only possible Taoiseach and Fine Gael is the only party big enough to bid for power. All other possible combinations just don’t seem to work (unless Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin do the unthinkable).

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.