Gavan Reilly: Negotiators can’t negotiate if they don’t know what they want

Here we are, back from Christmas, and still two weeks away from the Dáil returning – and even then, possibly without a government to form.

The talks are taking a while, partly because negotiators have two competing instincts. In 2020 the Green Party was still wearing the scars from its first time in power, back in 2007. Then, many of the promises made by Bertie Ahern to get the Greens into power were delivered by mouth and never committed to print. Once bitten, twice shy: in 2020 they made sure the written blueprint for government would spell commitments out to the letter.

The survivors believe that document was too prescriptive: overtly comprehensive and not leaving enough wriggle room to deal with circumstances as they arose. The old-ish/new-ish government might take office the same week as Donald Trump: they can’t presume the economic environment for the next five years will match the one of the last two. Better to leave some constructive ambiguity, they think, for wriggle room.

On the other hand, the Programme for Government is not just a negotiation between the parties joining the government – it’s also an instruction to the civil service. Mandarins around Merrion Street and beyond often have their own ideas about what is good and what is bad, but have to bow to the democratic mandate of an elected government. The one chance that ministers have to assert that supremacy is to get their plans stipulated in black and white.

There’s also divided views on whether it’s important to have insiders in the talks, who have actually walked the walk and served in specific departments before. Some have identified the Department of Communications as one where talks have stalled: Eamon Ryan was the senior minister in the last government, and Ossian Smyth his junior, so it’s the one department where neither FF nor FG have any survivors to speak of. Is this a help or a hindrance? Some think it’s necessary to bring in outside expertise, to ensure realism. Others feel unencumbered by the weight of the past. (“What can be, unburdened by what has been,” as Kamala Harris famously intoned.)

Throw in the as-yet-undetermined views of the two independent factions – one entailing the Healy-Rae brothers, the other involving eight regional independents including Gillian Toole of Meath East – and the process becomes a little harder to nail down. The group of eight are likely to be brought inside the tent on Wednesday or Thursday of this week, but at this remove, nobody quite knows how extensive their shopping lists will be. In some cases it might be insertion of a single line on a single page. In others the process of delivering a wishlist might mean revisiting the foundations of what is already there.

Those sorts of navel-gazing things need to be squared off - possibly as happenstance outcomes of talks in individual areas - before the final deal is inked.

There is still some optimism of the document being finished early next week. I doubt it.