The influence of GroenLinks is clearly felt outside the government buildings.
In the courtyard on Upper Merrion Street, two new bicycle sheds have been installed and the grass in the quadrangle is slightly longer for biodiversity. Tackling climate action, bicycle spokes and blade of grass at the same time.
In the building proper, the Greens appear to be just as confused as their coalition partners.
A suspended Green TD does not know if she will vote for the government in Sinn Féin’s motion of no confidence this week.
Neasa Hourigan, the Dublin Central TD, lost the party whip for six months after voting against the government in favor of the Sinn Féin motion over the National Maternity Hospital.
In the intervening two months, she has not voted at all in the Dáil, so if she turns up for the vote this week it will be quite a surprise.
Although Hourigan does not support the government of which her party is a member, she has retained her role as chair of an Oireachtas committee, a bonus from her party in government. The Oireachtas committee chairmen come up with an extra €10,000.
Usually there is a bit of a penalty associated with losing the whip. It’s quite a big deal and you don’t want to encourage people to try it.
Traditionally, this meant that TDs or Senators lost their positions and rights as party members, including office space allocated to the party, speaking time from Dáil or Seanad, or even committee membership.
Like when Fianna Fáil TD Marc MacSharry resigned from his parliamentary party last year and his place on the high-profile Public Accounts Committee was taken away from him. By the way, unlike Neasa, Marc has made it clear that he will vote for the government this week.
In the Golfgate fallout, Fine Gael Senator Paddy Burke lost the party whip for his attendance at the infamous dinner party and resigned as a member of the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission — which came out with a $10,000 raise — after being asked to so keep going Leo Varadkar†
Dinner was legal. Burke doesn’t have his place back. His Senate colleague, Jerry Buttimer, was forced to resign as deputy chairman.
That gig came with an extra €17,000. He never got that job back. Those are the breaks, as Boris Johnson would say.
Except the breaks aren’t the same for everyone. Fine Gael TD Joe McHugh lost the party whip when he voted against the government on the mica-defective bloc recovery plan.
He still chairs the Oireachtas European Affairs Committee, with a fee of €10,000. Not a call from Leo telling him to step down. McHugh’s uprising cost the government its parliamentary majority, but was relatively without consequences.
Because it doesn’t pursue inflation, the government gets a chase from the Shinners, who are pick-a-hope from the polls three years after the only poll that matters.
Sinn Féin will try to use the motion to send the government away for the summer holidays with a flea in the ear. The coalition will still win the no-confidence vote this week, but the field will matter.
The three sides will rightly talk about guiding the country through Covid-19, managing Brexit amid turmoil in the UK, a booming economy with bounced Treasury yields, record levels of employment and spending across the board.
But the problems, pressures and variations remain in health and housing as the cost of living crisis bites hard.
The coalition itself never seems to fully agree on where its priorities lie, with each party pointing to its own leading position.
Sinn Féin hangs the motion on refusing to put forward an emergency budget to tackle the cost of living and not cut the cost of energy, rent and childcare.
The internal bickering about what’s to come in Budget 2023 doesn’t help temper expectations or show consistency in its moves.
Moreover, Fianna Fáil seems completely unaware of what she stands for, as the party’s existential identity crisis continues. The party whose raison d’être used to be about being in power now wants to talk about what it should offer.
Fianna Fáil is in charge of the three main social portfolios: health, housing and education, along with control over government spending, agriculture and Northern Ireland, but the grassroots are still unhappy with the party asserting itself.
Frankly, the Taoiseach’s Shared Island Initiative is a very annoying exercise to see it do something about the issue of unity, so they have a point there.
However, there is a danger that you can no longer see the forest for the trees. While Michael Martin While he was away on his 10-hour train ride to Kiev to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his backseats were planning their own private summit to discuss policy.
No groundbreaking ideas seem to have been hatched.
Meanwhile, back outside the government buildings, Education Minister Norma Foley announced a mini-budget for parents to low self-esteem.
There was an additional €100 on the back-to-school clothing and footwear allowance and more funding for underprivileged schools. This is all aimed at people with the lowest incomes.
But a universal step was the elimination of school transport costs, saving a rural family with more than one child €500 in September. It is not aimed at low-income people.
As Labor’s Sean Sherlock noted, the result is “the big dairy farmer’s son three miles from school gets a free ticket, while the factory worker’s daughter three miles away can’t even get on the bus”.
It’s not exactly a Donogh O’Malley free high school area, but it’s a great concession for families living in rural Ireland, where fuel and petrol costs are high. There is a policy that is commendable.
It shows that in the next general election, Fianna Fáil will be judged by voters on her performance in government — not on hokum promises in the next manifesto.