DOING NOTHING HERE IS BIGGER RISK THAN DOING SOMETHING

Posted By: May 21, 2014

“The evidence that[Taoiseach] Enda Kenny couldn’t care less is incontrovertible.

Brian Feeney.Irish News ( Belfast). Wednesday, May 21, 2014.
APPARENTLY Ed Miliband’s new American guru David Axelrod has advised him that the risk of the risk of not having any radical policies is worse than adopting some radical policies.If Miliband wants change he needs to tell people what change will mean for them.In the south the latest polls indicating Sinn Fein is running at around 23 per cent and that Gerry Adams is the leader with the highest satisfaction rating have spread panic in the political establishment and in the Labour Party in particular.

Change is in the air with Sinn Fein now set to be a major player in the 2016 Dail.

With any luck that eventuality will have some effect here because otherwise there will be political stalemate for the foreseeable future.

Here’s why.

UKIP [United Kingdom Independence Party] will do enormously well tomorrow in Britain while the treacherous, duplicitous Lib Dems will be deservedly annihilated.

The success of UKIP will put the fear of God into the Conservatives who will predict several UKIP MPs elected to Westminster next May, thereby denying them the majority they crave.

On present showing there is no chance that Axelrod will be able to convince the electorate that Miliband is not a plonker.

All the polls are going in one direction and that is away from Miliband – so there won’t be a Labour majority.

What that means for this benighted place, and Cameron is already acting on this assumption, is that the DUP will be recruited to a mixum-gatherum coalition of right-wing nutters, including Ukip, to support Cameron’s in-out Euro referendum.

The consequence is that, whatever about change in Britain or the south, there will be stalemate here.

Hoping to recruit the DUP with, in all likelihood, nine MPs next year, Cameron will not exert any pressure on Robinson to move on flags, parades, the past, or indeed anything that might discomfit the party.

Sinn Fein already realises this stalemate exists. Martin McGuinness forlornly appealed to the Irish government a couple of weeks ago when he said: “The increasingly pro-Unionist and partisan position of the British government demands a more assertive and decisive response from the Irish government.”

Hah. No-one paid any attention, least of all the Irish government.

Even if the collapse of support for the Labour Party in the south leads to the removal of Eamon Gilmore as minister of foreign affairs and leader of the party there will be no change in the Irish government’s dereliction of duty towards the north.

The evidence that [ Taoiseach] Enda Kenny couldn’t care less is incontrovertible.

Furthermore, Sinn Fein’s success in Friday’s European and council elections in the south will make it even more unlikely that the government in Dublin will play its proper role in jointly managing this place for the simple reason that it would look as if the government were backing Sinn Fein’s policy in the run-up to the Dail elections in 2016.

You can just see Kenny, or even more improbably, some desperate Labour replacement at Foreign Affairs saying, ‘Yes, our mortal electoral enemies Sinn Fein are completely correct in their attacks on David Cameron and his clueless northern cipher for the time being. We completely agree.’

So brace yourself for Cameron giving the DUP anything they want and refusing to support any effort to have them change to move this place on.

Cameron has always demonstrated an ignorant, cynical opportunist approach to this place. He doesn’t understand the north; thinks normal political rules operate here.

Remember his disastrous intervention with UCUNF in 2010 in the hope of picking up a couple of seats?

Unlike Axelrod’s advice to Miliband, Cameron doesn’t realise that doing nothing here is a bigger risk than doing something.

Cosying up to the DUP and backing their intransigence on one reading will simply result in galvanizing the Sinn Fein vote.

On the other hand it’s more likely he’s unwittingly setting the scene for more radical change when Sinn Fein wins 25 seats in the Dail in 2016, enough to put real pressure on an Irish government.

Then people will really see what Cameron’s political opportunism has done to British-Irish relations and it won’t just be a matter of reducing the chances of Prince Charles attending the centenary celebrations of the 1916 Rising.