It is, after years of coalition with the PDs, Independents and the Green Party, a party without an ideology. Good times robbed Fianna Fáil of its need to prioritise spending, projects, and resources, instead of governing with a plan or policies it just threw money at issues, groups, and troublemakers to keep everyone happy.
Now, in bad times, Fianna Fáil has no idea of what to do and it finds itself propping up a flawed economy with public money rather than trying to address the broader, more dangerous, issue of planning for the future. Fianna Fáil in government is like a pinball, careening from one crisis to the next without a goal and without a soul.
How else could Fianna Fáil withdraw €10 million in funding for a cancer vaccine yet pledge billions to banks which are largely responsible for the current crisis that we face? To put this loss of soul in perspective you only have to note that Jade Goody (27 ) is dying from the same cancer that Mary Harney refused to pay €10 million to prevent killing Irish girls.
From the onset of the recession Fianna Fáil members have spoken at length about protecting the vulnerable in our society, yet the first people targeted by the Government for cutbacks have been the old, the disabled, and the young. Now they have moved on to the public service, following a very successful media campaign of scapegoating public servants of which even Goebbels himself would be proud.
It is the easiest thing, when times are bad, to identify a minority of society and heap upon them the blame for everything, it matters not that the public service facilitated the boom rather than harmed it, it matters not that the public service is one of the most efficient, small, and reasonably paid in the EU; they were an easy target for the Government who could be sure of playing upon the fears of nervous private sector workers by pointing out the guaranteed job security and pensions of the public service as the enemy of the taxpayer.
The real villains of the day are the banks, the developers, the solicitors, and auctioneers who all colluded with Fianna Fáil to create a huge property bubble which simply had to burst, and this coupled with institutionalised banking corruption facilitated by the Government leaves us in a bottomless recession. But the Government will take no action against them.
What the Government have forgotten is that the public service workers are taxpayers too and more importantly they are voters, as are the elderly, as are the disabled, as are the parents of those children affected by cuts to education. The Government could afford to lose the support of one or two of these sections of society but not all of them. Fianna Fáil is doomed to lose seats on a Tory party wipeout scale at the next local elections and next general election.
But that is the price to be paid by any political party which loses its soul. It happened to the Tories in the UK, it will happen to Fianna Fáil here. You cannot serve both God and Mammon nor can you serve Mammon at the expense of the people.
