There’s a famous line in the third part of the legendary Godfather trilogy when a despairing Michael Corleone laments: “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”.
Enda Kenny, you imagine, would empathise at the moment. His Government seems stuck in a bit of a rut that it can’t get “out” of.
These should be heady days for the Taoiseach. Three years into his tenure in Government Buildings, he is at the peak of powers.
The Troika has gone home. The economy has turned a corner. While consumer confidence is high despite spending being down, job creation is buoyant. The toughest budgetary decisions have been made. The opposition is fragmented and far from strong. There’s a plum job in Europe there for Kenny if he wants to forsake the obvious opportunity to become the first ever Fine Gael Taoiseach to be returned to office.
And yet, despite all this, there’s a sense, not just of government treading water, but of one that is no longer setting the agenda - that has become reactive, not proactive. Worse still, the coalition, and Fine Gael in particular, has become worryingly accident prone.
Ever since the Troika left last December, it seems the government has been on the back foot: making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Alan Shatter’s disastrous handling of the whistleblower allegations of Garda malpractice is the gift that keeps on giving to the opposition. As we saw in recent days, when the Garda Inspectorate report was published, it’s the story that just won’t go away.
And, for all the claims from Government ministers of Shatter being the target of a smear campaign, deep down they surely know the mess is entirely of the Minister’s own making.
Shatter is highly intelligent, confrontational and unafraid of being unpopular. It’s those traits that make him potentially such a good Justice Minister. But his arrogance in dealing with those who disagree with him is proving a serious problem. For Shatter, attack is the best form of defence - admitting error a sign of weakness.
Neither the whistleblower allegations nor the story of the potential bugging of the Garda Ombudsman’s offices should have been a particular problem for this government. But the Justice Minister’s mishandling of both has dragged him, and the coalition, right into the centre of the controversy.
And with the likelihood of a full-scale Commission of Inquiry to follow the eight-week investigation by senior counsel Sean Guerin into the whistleblowers’ allegations that controversy is unlikely to go away any time soon.
Arguably more worrying for the coalition is the drip-feed of stories emerging in relation to Rehab and its former chief executive Frank Flannery, a senior figure in Fine Gael for decades.
The revelations about Flannery being paid thousands by Rehab to lobby the government and various departments were deeply embarrassing.
The idea of Flannery - a senior, if unpaid, advisor to Fine Gael, with almost unrivalled access to coalition figures - being paid to lobby ministers is a deeply uncomfortable one.
The Government parties, when in opposition, loved to rail against Fianna Fáil’s so-called golden circles. How is this any different?
Senior ministers did point out that any lobbying clearly hadn’t worked as Rehab’s budget was cut like everybody else’s and Alan Shatter hadn’t given “an inch” on the ending of the Charitable Lotteries.
But that’s only small comfort. Privately, Fine Gael TDs admitted that the revelations made them look no different from the “last crowd”. And that’s not good news for the coalition. So much for the “democratic revolution” promised in the programme for government.
Like the whistleblower controversy, the Rehab story is not going to go away any time soon.
With the local and European elections only a couple of months away that should be giving headaches to government strategists. The reality is that, with the better economic picture, the Government has a decent story to sell coming into those elections.
However, if it’s constantly on the defensive, it’s not going to get a chance to sell that story.
Somehow, the government needs to regain the initiative – through a renegotiation of the programme for government, a cabinet reshuffle or whatever - and start setting the news agenda again, instead of simply reacting (often badly) to it. That won’t be easy. The momentum built up in the bid to be free of the Troika has been lost since the start of the year and it will be difficult to regain.
As of now, the coalition being returned to office in two years’ time still looks the most likely option – no other combination of parties looks viable. But if the next three months are like the first three of 2014, then it might be time to start reappraising that.
