That ‘new’ party?

Also in the SBP at the weekend I was struck by Michael McDowell’s focus on the Fine Gael leadership contest. Though he seemed more interested in the effects of same for FG as a party and the broader polity. For example, I think he’s correct in the following:

One gets the feeling that the entire FG party sense that the game is drifting away from them. A change of leader is no longer seen as the launchpad for recovery; it is now seen as a defensive seat-svaving manoeuvre, Coveney is seen simply as someone who may stop the rot.

And he is right that:

Fine Gael is suffering badly because it appears to be in office but out of power – while FF is seen as in power but out of office. That is a debilitating confidence sapping and moral destroying consequence of the ‘new politics’.

Though how could it be different. The ‘new politics’ is very much a function of FF and FG weakness. No more. No less.

Still. Here’s an old tune of his re-emerging…noting the decline in the support for the civil war parties, and the fact that SF has ‘made some significant headway by showing some clarity of purpose on the current Garda controversy’… he writes:

Unless there is a dramatic cage in the form of a new political player on the field, or a FF-FG coalition, or a FF-SF coalition, a a general election would produce yet another dose of paralysis.

I think though that a new election will offer up a new combination of circumstances in and of itself. And at least two of the above scenarios are feasible. A new party though? That I’m sceptical of. One thing that he rarely addresses is why the PDs failed? Why did they, why did a party that last two decades implode so comprehensively? And why is it that that space has not been – to date – retaken by a successor party? Why did RENUA not work? These aren’t easy questions to answer. There may, in fact, be many answers and precious few of them of any great utility.

But they do seem to make all his hopes about a ‘new’ party of the right, which is of course the subtext of the piece, moot until some analysis, not of what next, but what happened in the last ten years is conducted.