ANALYSIS:The medical cards fiasco poses a real threat to the stability of the Government, writes Stephen Collins
THE CHAOS in Fianna Fáil over the budget decision to abolish the automatic entitlement of the over-70s to a medical card has struck a serious blow to the authority of Taoiseach Brian Cowen, and now poses a real threat to the stability of the coalition Government.
It has also raised profound doubts about the ability of Fianna Fáil to govern in the very difficult years ahead. If party discipline cannot withstand the first serious controversy of the current economic downturn, how will it possibly cope with the inevitable succession of unpopular decisions to come?
The Government may be able to find a way of extracting itself from the mess it has got itself into over medical cards for the over-70s, but the more serious issue is whether it will be able to recover its nerve. The evidence of the past few days does not bode well.
The political ineptitude that has characterised the handling of the medical cards controversy at every stage has been astonishing.
For a start, there seemed to be little appreciation of the storm the initial budget announcement was bound to generate.
Then, as the controversy developed and grew, there was a succession of clarifications about the income thresholds at which the cards would be lost, but people are still none the wiser about what the final state of play will be. The Taoiseach made his second intervention to try and quell the controversy yesterday.
However, he may have fallen between two stools by signalling that the income thresholds would certainly change, again, while failing to provide enough clarity to kill off the controversy.
Cowen's decision to postpone his official trip to China was a clear indication of just how serious the controversy has become, but it is now doubtful if he will be able to put it to rest by the time of his new planned departure date tomorrow evening.
With hindsight, the decision to bring the budget forward to October was probably the source of the problem. In the rush to consider a raft of cuts and savings from different departments, the penny never really dropped at Cabinet just how much opposition the move was certain to generate.
It appears that Minister for Social and Family Affairs Mary Hanafin cut up rough at Cabinet and successfully resisted pressure to either tax child benefit or adopt significant cuts in the young child supplement scheme.
By contrast, Mary Harney made a serious effort to come up with cuts in her department and the proposal to end the automatic entitlement to the over-70s medical card was one of them. The intention was to claw back the exorbitant fee extracted by the doctors for the scheme back in 2001, but it was the pensioners who suffered.
If a way could have been found of removing the wealthiest 10 per cent of pensioners from the scheme and leaving it at that, things might have been different but, instead, 90 per cent of those who had been given the medical cards on age grounds were removed.
The storm that has raged since the announcement is not surprising, but the way it has affected the Government has been astonishing. The most surprising thing of all is that it was the Fianna Fáil party that buckled first, not the Greens or the three Independents who back it. Naturally they had to get in on the act rather than be outflanked, but the panic started in the senior Government party.
That introduced all sorts of pressures into the coalition. Harney was reported to have threatened resignation on Friday if her scheme was abandoned as Fianna Fáil backbenchers wanted. Brian Lenihan stuck by Harney in terms of the principle of ending the universal entitlement of the over-70s to medical cards. In fact, the unaffordability of universal benefits in general was a wider theme of his budget.
The resignation of Joe Behan and the open revolt of a number of other Fianna Fáil TDs prompted reaction from Independents Finian McGrath and Michael Lowry.
Then, not to be outdone, the Greens who had appeared to be quite comfortable with the budget, staged their demonstration of unease.
The Taoiseach had to go on the 9 o'clock news on Friday night with his offer of talks with the Irish Medical Organisation to stop the situation spinning out of control.
Relationships within the coalition will never be as comfortable again. The Greens and Independents have been burned and will be more wary in future, while Harney has been made the scapegoat and there must be some doubt about how long she will remain as Minister for Health.
The biggest surprise of all is that Fianna Fáil has appeared so weak. The nerve of the party, which has dominated Irish politics for decades and whose discipline through thick and thin has been its overriding characteristic, suddenly crumbled.
One of the problems is that most of the party's TDs don't have any experience of ruling in difficult economic times.
After a decade of Bertie Ahern, which involved appeasing any and ever interest group, they seem to have lost the ability to govern. The notion that the party's county councillors would meet to pronounce on whether they find the Budget acceptable is something that would not have been entertained in earlier years.
The implications for the country are profound. If Fianna Fáil proves incapable of taking the tough decisions urgently required to get the country out of its present difficulties then we may be in for a time of extreme economic and political fluctuation.