Government formation talks were not a regular occurrence in Irish politics for the first 80 years of the State because Fianna Fáil essentially saw itself as a single-government party.
Fine Gael and Labour, in contrast, undertook the exercise when building coalitions in the 1970s and 1980s, but the process was almost pro forma: two negotiation teams were formed to compare and contrast manifestos, a joint policy programme was quickly agreed and the leaders decided how cabinet posts would be divided. For the most part, it took no more than a few days.
Falling well short of a majority in 1989, Fianna Fáil had no alternative but to enter into this novel process, beginning talks with the Progressive Democrats, founded by Charles Haughey’s erstwhile arch-rival in Fianna Fáil, Des O’Malley. Haughey approached the talks as he had everything else in his political career: as a solo operation.
Nine years earlier, he agreed a multimillion pound deal for Dublin’s deprived north inner city to win the support of newly elected Independent TD Tony Gregory and achieve a paper-thin majority for a Fianna Fáil government. As he left Sheriff Street after the deal was struck, Haughey turned to Gregory and said: “As the Mafia say, it’s a pleasure to do business with you.”
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It was the same in 1989. Fianna Fáil set up a negotiating team, but it was Haughey who conducted the real negotiations with O’Malley and Galway West TD Bobby Molloy. He kept his Fianna Fáil colleagues in the dark. Haughey later told them a deal had been struck, ceding two senior ministries to the PDs, a concession that caused horror with the ranks of his party.
Three years later, when Fianna Fáil, then led by Albert Reynolds, began courting the Labour Party, which had, under leader Dick Spring, won a record 33 seats in the November 1992 election.
When talks broke down with Fine Gael over the attempted creation of a “rainbow coalition”, Labour sent its negotiating document to Fianna Fáil without any expectation of a deal. Within 24 hours, the party’s senior adviser, Martin Mansergh, had written back to Labour with a responding document that essentially accepted the vast majority of the smaller party’s proposals. A commitment in Fianna Fáil’s manifesto commitment to privatise State-owned banks was revised completely.
“It was the only way in which Albert was going to survive,” recalls Fergus Finlay, who was the party’s senior adviser. If those negotiations had started with two blank sheets of paper, as previous negotiations had, in 1982 for example, it would not have been as quick.”
Finlay remembers no disagreement. He and Mansergh jointly and quickly wrote a foreword to the programme for government that “introduced the word ‘partnership’ for the first time”, he says.
“The programme sort of wrote itself. And after that, the two principals, Albert Reynolds and Dick Spring, negotiated the numbers and largely negotiated the personnel.”
In earlier negotiations with Fine Gael, the notion of a “rotating taoiseach” had its first ventilation in Irish politics, but Finlay says the numbers “didn’t stack up against Fianna Fáil” to support the idea.
Spring took the foreign affairs brief, which was at the time considered an unusual ministry but since then, two other leaders, Labour’s Eamon Gilmore and Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin, have chosen the portfolio in coalitions.
What happened in 1992 provided a template and a protocol for post-election negotiations around coalition-building following subsequent elections.
“It became a settled way of doing it,” says former taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Bertie Ahern, a central figure in many of those negotiations. “There were two teams. They took the two manifestos as the starting line and went through them item by item, to see where there is agreement and disagreements. Somebody was then given the task where there was disagreement to find a compromise, or maybe drop the items altogether.”
Ahern says an agreed document is built from there, “even though there will still be some Xs and Os to be sorted out”.
“At an advanced stage, the side discussions started with leaders on the division of ministries,” he says.
In 2011, the process changed. A senior figure involved in securing a deal between Fine Gael and Labour recalled negotiations taking place against a background of “extraordinary circumstances”. With the troika of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission firmly ensconced following the State’s bailout, the economic advisers of both parties played a crucial role.
“They crunched some of the hard figures – that was a completely unrepeatable experience, the pall of gloom hanging over Government Buildings as it happened. It was as bad as the Emergency in the second World War,” says the insider.
Asking what would happen if the bailout were to be rejected, negotiators were told there would only be sufficient funds to pay nurses, firemen and gardaí for five months.
“That was the climate of those negotiations,” says the negotiator.
A coalition government was quickly forged.
“It was all about how do we restore our reputation, which was in tatters at the time,” says the source.
There was another twist in 2016. Fianna Fáil supported a minority Fine Gael government from the outside through a “confidence and supply” arrangement.
“It was more limited,” says Barry Cowen, one of the Fianna Fáil negotiators.
The parties attempted to find some agreement around the contentious issue of water charges.
“We agreed to support that government on financial matters and votes of confidence. That was new, and not substantial, but it was difficult,” he says.
The Green Party entered a three-party coalition in 2020 following protracted exploratory talks in which they posed 17 questions to all the parties during the early part of the year.
Anna Conlan was the senior party staffer involved in the process. “We had a brand new parliamentary party,” she says. Some 10 of the party’s 12 TDs were new. “All were made spokespeople. We then had a core negotiating team.”
The local issues were usually doable. The most expensive was the ‘Blaney Bridge’ in Donegal but it was the right thing to do because it brought two disparate parts of Donegal together
— Bertie Ahern
The talks began in early May, three months past the election, after Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael agreed to reduce carbon emissions by 7 per cent. Two months of detailed negotiations followed, with each party going through policy areas in exhaustive detail. Conlan and her counterparts, Deirdre Gillane in Fianna Fáil and John Carroll in Fine Gael, then distilled what was agreed to writing.
If there was disagreement, the issue was elevated to the three main negotiators, Catherine Martin for the Greens, Dara Calleary for Fianna Fáil and Simon Coveney for Fine Gael. The final arbiters were the leaders. Only one or two items escalated to that level, including the Occupied Territories Bill, which would ban economic support for illegal Israeli settlements in areas deemed occupied under international law.
Conlan says it took most of two months to hammer out a heavily policy-centred agreement.
Following last week’s election, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael could be back to relying on Independents. Ahern recalls sending Fianna Fáil’s Donie Cassidy as a “liaison” when he sought a deal with three Independents to support a minority Fianna Fáil-PD government in 1997.
“He would drive up to Donegal to talk to Harry Blaney or down to Wicklow to talk to Mildred Fox. The fundamental question was: are you interested and, if so, are you keen to do the full term?” he says.
Ahern says he drafted a separate document for each, dividing them into local and national issues.
“The local issues were usually doable. The most expensive was the ‘Blaney Bridge’ in Donegal but it was the right thing to do because it brought two disparate parts of Donegal together,” he says.
“The most important thing from the outset is to agree on a process where they will be part of the government.”
Ahern says that if Independents do not have ministries, then upcoming plans must be communicated “very clearly”. He used a designated person: his chief whip, the late Seamus Brennan, met them weekly.
If Fianna Fáil, with its 48 seats, and Fine Gael, with its 38, follow a similar route now as they try to build a government with the required 88-seat majority or beyond, some of the same template may apply.
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