By Jimmy Rhatigan
OUR proposed new government could perhaps best be described as an arranged marriage.
A wedding of a son or daughter to a lassie or laddie down the road, cobbled together to ensure that a blow-in doesn’t have the opportunity of his or her hand in marriage?
The suspicion is that a high percentage of arranged nuptials may eventually nosedive.
We have no statistics to back that up but the notion is that we just may be right.
It would be fair to say that those in a mixed marriage are living together for the wrong reasons.
The same could certainly be said of the wacky mix of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and The Greens, an unusual trinity that may not fit comfortably into any marriage bed, with the possibility of a good night’s sleep as rare as a collection of hens’ teeth.
Varadkar and Martin will be at one end of the bed with Ryan at the other with his green toes tickling the tonsils of his fellow party leaders.
Good old days
There is certainly a precedent for such a scenario.
It was in the so-called good old days of big families when there were no such things as televisions and soaps had nothing to do with actors or actresses.
Any soaps then were small bars of an antiseptic cleansing substance, often the carbolic kind, with which you washed the balls of your toes or behind your ears.
Because large families were commonplace, parents often had no choices but to pack three or more youngsters into the same bed which more often than not had a former army coat that masqueraded as a blanket, an eiderdown with sleeves.
If a little brother had a pee during the night it was inevitable that the other occupants of the bed would get their share of it.
Needs must was the truthful answer to queries about why overcrowding was inevitable.
The motley crews of FF, FG and the Greens may give a similar answer but there will be many who will describe such a reply as disingenuous.
Become peed off
And whether or not anyone’s bladder is emptied, accidentally or accidentally on purpose, the bedfellows may simply become peed off.
Bluntly, but the latter trio won’t admit this, their reason for packing three into the same nest was to ensure that there would not be room for anyone else.
In other words the motto was ‘Shinners need not apply’.
One wonders if the arranged marriage will survive?
One would have to be super optimistic to give a Blessed Martin-type positive nod to that poser.
The programme for government appears at first to be quite rosy and a perusal through tinted glasses may bring innocent or biased positive answers.
The devil is in the detail.
Utopia is promised but it appears that no one has a clue where the money is going to come from to pay the piper.
It seems that nobody had the wherewithal or indeed took the bother to put the ducks in a row.
Deadly enemies
The Greens will be hoping that the arrangement will grow on us as their paymasters.
The so-called Civil War deadly enemies will pray hard that someone, anyone will have piddled on any powder that may be produced during internal stand-offs that could meander down an old bog road to the days when they were at each other’s throats.
Sinn Féin and indeed some of the smaller parties that may find themselves on the other side of a Mexican-type wall built by Donald Trump will lean on every word uttered from government benches, ready to pounce and hit hard.
The Government’s marriage bed may become unbearable. Squabbles that could lead to eventual divorce may not be commonplace early on.
But we all know that familiarity breeds contempt.
Promises made could very easily become pledges smashed.
The manure will then hit the fan and the Shinners in particular will fan the flames of any blazing home of our piebald Government.
And who can blame them?
Chatting up
After all SF was denied the opportunity of chatting up any potential bride or groom.
The cracks were appearing shortly after an agreement was made to co-habit.
One can only imagine what things will be like in the house built for three in a few months’ time.
Provided of course the newly-weds are still together for that long.
Depending on how the grassroots vote on what might be dubbed Wedding Gate, the marriage arrangement could become history during any honeymoon.
Fine Gael may trust in God.
But would they say the same about Fianna Fáil and The Greens.
A TV series of the future could be called Wedding Gate, a soap that could not be used to whitewash any stains of internal battles.
