The Government was trying to be too clever by half. It wanted to ban the dissemination of the most impartial information available to the voters so that the pronouncements of politicians and parties could dominate in the run-up to polling day. It wanted to control the power of the media to gather independent information for voters, all the better to manipulate opinion for the politicians. It set out to hit the messenger, not the message, by purporting to take on the perceived interests of newspapers. But it ended up shooting itself and the whole political system in the foot.
The Government decided, at the eleventh hour yesterday, to withdraw the proposed provision to ban the conduct and taking of opinion polls in the last seven days before polling day, only because it had been caught out in a ham-fisted, self-serving and probably unconstitutional act. The end-of-term conspiracy - contrived at a Dβil Committee meeting with Fine Gael - had been unravelling for days as public anger and media protest gathered. Senator Shane Ross provided the cover for not proceeding in the end when he detected a flaw in the wording of the Bill.
The idea of banning opinion polls, the most scientific material at the most sensitive stage in the election process, was bad politics and bad law and the public outcry confirmed that the voters saw it for what it was. The Minister of State, Mr Robert Molloy, maintained that the measure was considered by Government on a number of occasions in the past year. It did not make its way into the Electoral (Amendment) Bill, 2000, when published. It was taken on board only when Fine Gael - panicked by the prospect that its candidate could have lost the Tipperary South by-election if voters had responded strategically to the TnaG poll - made the proposal. The cosy consensus would protect the politicians.
Never once was it acknowledged, until it was reported in The Irish Times, that a former Attorney General, the current Attorney General and an independent senior counsel had advised that it could cause constitutional problems. It was never foreseen that the President, Mrs McAleese, might be petitioned by senior politicians and by the National Newspapers of Ireland to consult with the Council of State about testing its constitutionality. There was a collective loss of judgment and of political instinct in the unseemly haste to push the proposal on to the statute books.
There were no high-minded motives - technical or otherwise - behind the Government's last-minute decision to step back from its attempt to ban these opinion polls. There was, instead, the base object of protecting its own vested interests in an election year. Apart from Amendment 59, the bulk of the Electoral (Amendment) Bill, 2000 allows increased spending limits by individual candidates and 1 million extra by the Fianna Fβil Party in the next general election. It sets out the conditions for the maintenance of corporate donations.
There is one great irony in it all. The Government deleted Amendment 59 in the Seanad yesterday, believing that the Electoral (Amendment) Bill had completed its passage through the Oireachtas. It would take effect shortly.
Only later did it come to realise that the Bill, now with out the proposed ban, has to go back before the Dβil in the autumn because it has been changed. That scuppers the construct of the right scenario for an autumn election - if the Coalition parties were tempted to do so. Mr Ahern and his collaborators were too clever even for their own good.