Trust is a scarce commodity in the 34th Dáil. Anyone who believes the dispute over speaking rights, which provoked chaotic scenes last Wednesday, will be resolved this week will be quickly disabused of that notion when TDs return on February 5.
There have been remote video meetings last Friday and on Monday of the ad hoc Dáil Reform Group set up to examine ways to solve the impasse.
So far they have come to naught, mainly because the infamous Michael Lowry insists that members of the Regional Independent Group (RIG) who aren’t ministers (including of course himself) can be constituted as an Opposition group with speaking rights.
This, despite the fact that Lowry led the coalition negotiations with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and told journalists that “we would function as a group, that we would act as a group… as part of that negotiation we also said we had to be working within the government, not from the outside”.
Yet he still wants to be on the outside at the same time. The Opposition are having none of it.
In the week since last Wednesday’s uproar, at least two developments have become clear.
First, Micheál Martin and Simon Harris’s attempts to lay the blame at the door of Sinn Féin have failed. Their sanctimonious, high-flown rhetoric about “subverting the constitution” has backfired.
By Sunday the media had agreed the crisis was of the government’s own making. It was Martin and Harris who agreed to Michael Lowry’s ‘stroke’, despite it being patently in contravention of Dáil standing orders.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly for politics in the south, the Opposition parties showed they can act as one.
Martin and Harris as usual trying to pin the blame on Sinn Féin as the bogeymen plainly couldn’t work when Mary Lou McDonald, Ivana Bacik and Cian O’Callaghan, deputy Social Democrat leader, stood together expressing their resistance to ‘the stroke’ and posing for photos.
Anyone watching the proceedings in the Dáil on Wednesday would also have spotted Bacik and McDonald cooperating on the floor of the House, consulting each other regularly.
In short, the grubby behaviour of Martin and Harris and their dealings with the notorious Lowry, whose condemnation by the Moriarty Tribunal has been revisited in detail inside and outside the Dáil, have strengthened the Opposition.
Public opinion is now behind them. Two-thirds of people polled oppose the deal Martin and Harris agreed at the behest of Lowry.
There’s yet another aspect of the overall ‘stroke’ which Lowry pulled: the election of the inexperienced Verona Murphy, a member of RIG, as Ceann Comhairle.
It was Lowry who first suggested the plan to Murphy. She admitted she thought he was joking when he proposed it. Martin and Harris agreed to that.
As a result, no matter how hard she tries to be fair and even-handed, many will continue to regard her as Lowry’s stooge.
Given the bitterness displayed towards the new government, there will be many controversial decisions Murphy will have to take.
Don’t be surprised if at some point in the coming months, Mary Lou McDonald and Ivana Bacik stand up and tell Murphy they have no confidence in her.
She will have to resign, for the Ceann Comhairle must have the confidence of both sides of the Dáil.
There is precedent. In 2009 Labour leader Eamon Gilmore told Ceann Comhairle John O’Donoghue he had no confidence in him: he resigned.
On the broader view, however, last week demonstrated that there is an opportunity for the Opposition to come together and win public support in doing so.
It’s not as if the government was swept in on a wave of popularity. They have the lowest FF/FG share of the vote in the state’s history.
A fractured left facilitated that with Sinn Féin, Labour, Social Democrats and People Before Profit all at each other’s throats and not transferring votes.
There are many matters on which the parties on the left could agree; housing being one of them. The government is going to fail to deliver on housing because they are going to do the same as they have been doing and last year didn’t reach their new-build target. House prices are rising at 9% per annum.
There are chances to separate the RIG from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael on a range of matters.
Self-preservation is the primary goal of Independents. Martín and Harris have no guarantee some of them won’t cut and run to avoid being tainted by government failure.
Sinn Féin, Labour and the Social Democarts need to remember what Donald Tusk advised Varadkar in Dublin about Brexit in December 2017: ní neart go cur le chéile. There’s no strength without unity.
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