The past week's negotiations have not only been a waste of time, but could probably be described as a travesty of the wishes of the electorate. Nobody voted for a Fianna Fáil/Greens coalition. This option was not only off the table during the recent election campaign but, by virtue of the ideological programmes, expressed intentions and body languages of the two parties, was implicitly or, more often, explicitly ruled out.
Why, then, have we had a week of media frenzy about an FF/Greens government? Because it sells newspapers and gives journalists a glimmer of hope that they may have some influence after all. Having the Greens in Cabinet would allow journalists to exercise their pesudo-moralistic muscle, demanding on virtually a daily basis that the minority party "restore credibility" by "keeping Fianna Fáil honest" and so forth. As I wrote last week, having the Greens in government would be like having certain journalists sitting in Cabinet. And Labour, which throughout the campaign explicitly ruled out partnership with Fianna Fáil, would be just as bad.
It is high time that we found a way of putting an end to this disgraceful tendency to adopt post-election arithmetical quirks as somehow representing the will of the people. There is, in fact, no single, overweening "will of the people", but a confusion of intentions based on the complex wishes of individual voters.
It is most unlikely that even one voter voted for a Fianna Fáil/Greens coalition. The option was not canvassed and was, moreover, so implausible as to be next door to impossible. But once again a bogus notion of "stable government" has, from within hours of the count, caused the wishes of the electorate to become obscured. The voters indicated a wish for a government dominated by Fianna Fáil but including a few additional elements. On the basis of the campaign, the only entity which the electorate was given the option of including in such an arrangement was the Progressive Democrats, whose reduced representation must be taken as an expressed wish to moderate the influence of the PDs in government. Since Fine Gael, Labour, the Greens and Sinn Féin were all ruled out as prospective partners of Fianna Fáil, we are left only with Independents.
The argument is frequently advanced in media contributions that having a minority government supported by Independents is inherently undemocratic. This usually precedes an analysis pointing towards some new abuse of the wishes of the people. But there is a world of difference between a handful of Independents seeking to exploit a happy accident of arithmetic and an opportunistic party seeking to appropriate the Fianna Fáil mandate to impose its faddish obsessions on the country.
Firstly, Independents do not seek places at the Cabinet table. Nor, in the main, do they pursue macro-policy input. Independents who hold the balance of power tend to drive hard bargains for their constituencies, but they rarely seek to usurp the democratic process by bringing policies which have been rejected by the electorate into government by the back door. Put another way, Independents come cheap, whereas parties with ambitions and media influence far outweighing their electoral appeal come very dear indeed.
In the second place, there is nothing undemocratic about a few Independents assuming the right to hold the balance of power. In fact, this has happened so often in recent political history that it must now be regarded as the most obvious alternative, once the major coalition power blocs have failed to make the numbers on their own.
Even if you are wary, as I am, of the idea of a single electoral intelligence, there is sufficient evidence in recent political history of the way the voters tend to perceive and deploy Independents to support an argument for their holding the balance of power. Since at no time during the recent campaign did any of the Independents currently mooted as supporters of a minority FF/PD government explicitly rule out this possibility, there is no ethical reason why such an arrangement should not be pursued, and indeed no reason to conclude that the electorate has not expressed a subtle preference for something along these lines. Moreover, since there is significantly less chance of such a coalition being prone to manipulation by external elements, it represents both the most stable and the most democratic option.
I return, therefore, to the point I made last week. Fianna Fáil has not three options, but one: a minority administration supported by the PDs and Independents. Ideally, this arrangement would see the influence of the PDs considerably reduced from last time, although this may prove difficult given the arithmetical configuration. The difference between this and the suggested options of coalitions between Labour and Fianna Fáil or the Greens and Fianna Fáil is that it was never excluded from the menu. Unless we are to decide that the people did not wish to have a government, we are forced to conclude that this, approximately, is what they voted for.