Agreeing to disagree – FG and the Eighth

Interesting I thought the manner in which FG is going about its business in relation to the referendum on the Eighth, with a Cabinet decision to hold a referendum and Varadkar finally emerging with a line on the issue, the old Bill Clinton one of ‘safe, legal and rare’. It’s a stand and important that the Taoiseach makes it. However belatedly.

But what is also interesting is that there’s little hedging or even fuss over individual Ministers being concerned about the 12 weeks proposal, including Simon Coveney. Far be it for me to suggest these aren’t entirely sincere positions being taken, but they’re also rather expedient, because here we have the government party willing to bring forward a referendum and have disagreements and in contrast there’s FF which is, to judge from the IT yesterday and at the weekend, going through a tortuous process as some tranches of it realise that they’re not quite the ‘pro-life’ party they used to be (wasn’t it Dermot Ahern who said the other day at an FF PP meeting that he ‘thought FF was a pro-life party’. Whether the question was rhetorical or not it’s not quite that simple Dermot, not in 2017).

Which, one suspects, is no harm at all to FG.

Though how all this impacts on the referendum outcome. Well that’s a different story entirely.