So the first step was to negotiate a coalition agreement and the next to tell the people who voted for you why you will be breaking your principal promise. Irish politics is following the well worn democratic path.

Today’s Sunday Independent tells the story:

THE Fine Gael/Labour coalition Government is to implement in detail the outgoing Government’s four-year austerity plan as approved by the EU-IMF, the Sunday Independent can reveal.

In what will amount to the most barefaced breach of election promises ever perpetrated by an incoming Government, the coalition partners’ programme for government will cause uproar when it is published today.

While an attempt will be made to dress up the programme as a new plan by a new Government, when it is analysed it will be seen for what it is — the continuation of the economic policies of Fianna Fail and the Greens, virtually in minute detail, as laid down by the EU-IMF.

If anything, Fine Gael will be seen to have capitulated more as it is handing over responsibility for reform of the public sector to Labour, whose core support is drawn from the public sector.

The programme envisages no more than 22,000 voluntary redundancies in the public sector, a long way short of Fine Gael’s election promise to reduce the numbers employed by 30,000.