And so a new party is born… ish. Lucinda Creighton is to take the plunge and will use the help of 100 volunteers”Š—”Šincluding Eddie Hobbs”Š—”Što found a new political party in the next eight weeks. The venture is so young that there are only a handful of policies, and no name”Š—”Šthe rest, we are told, will come after a series of nationwide meetings in the next few weeks.
It’s difficult to appraise any political movement’s chances of success until we know what it stands for, and at present we don’t know a whole lot about the policies of this new party (known only by its #rebootireland hashtag).
But in the Sunday Independent, Creighton declared that the party would be in favour of water charges”Š—”Šhaving voted against the Water Services Bill, apparently because it still opposes Irish Water as an entity. She also decided that the party would abolish the Universal Social Charge”Š—”Šbut quite how it proposes to do so is unknown, given that it will not “prop up” either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael in government, and instead expects those two parties to coalesce in power after the next election.
This is part of the danger in setting up a new party”Š—”Šespecially at a time when so many people seem keen to see one.
The biggest single round of applause at the Reform Alliance meeting was when Lucinda Creighton mentioned the abortion laws as the reason she and six others had been forced out of Fine Gael. If abortion was the lightning rod that got nearly a thousand curious observers into the room, any failure to adopt a stern pro-life policy won’t do much to stop those people from looking elsewhere.
But has the opposition to USC been agreed at some sort of party level, or has Creighton (or Hobbs) simply decided this will be a red-line issue? Has the support for Irish Water been similarly agreed”Š—”Šor has it been foisted upon the party’s newcomers, to the point where John Leahy deleted a criticism of Irish Water from his website?
But tax and water charges are just two issues”Š—”Ša full manifesto before a general election needs to deal with a couple of dozen. As yet we have no hint of the party’s policies on finances, health, education, or the EU to name but a few.
And what happens when a thousand voices express a range of different views on the EU? What happens if some of the room wants better EU integration as a means of ensuring a deal on Ireland’s banking debts, while the others advocate an immediate default to eliminate our other debts? What happens if some of the room want to leave the Eurozone and revalue an Irish punt, and the rest scream bloody murder?
And what happens if those who ‘win’ the internal debate on EU policy then lose the debate on the party’s preferred healthcare model? Or those who ‘win’ on both health and EU are unhappy with the final policy on education? Or public funding for the arts? Or the state’s role in subsiding agriculture? Or for its tax policy?
If someone wins in half of the policy debates, and loses in the other half, will they remain involved in the party? If someone’s attended foundation meetings for a new political party, and then object to half of its manifesto, will they even vote for it? Or will the party end up only agreeing a set of policies so narrow that it won’t have a mandate to govern on any other matters?
With 21 political parties in the field (not to mention the other alliances lying in the long grass) setting up a 22nd will be a monumental challenge. Yes, there is an unprecedented appetite for something new, the field has never been more crowded. Even if the party manages to overcome the legal hurdles for fundraising and builds a robust infrastructure to withstand the inevitable rainy days, it then runs up against a fundamental problem with a fragmented market: unless an aspiring supporter is on board for all of the new party’s policy, they could well find themselves looking elsewhere.
If Creighton can pull together a political party to overcome all that, she’ll be doing very well indeed.
Gavan Reilly is Today FM's Political Correspondent. This is a shortened version of a longer post you can find here. twitter.com/gavreilly
