In heated Dail debate, it’s often the jabs rather than the punches that prove most telling. Last week during Leaders’ Questions, amidst pugnacious exchanges between Brian Cowen and his opposition adversaries, the Labour leader Eamon Gilmore landed what initially seemed like a glancing blow. If the taoiseach would lead the country as vigorously as he attacked the opposition, Gilmore observed, we’d all be better off.

A backhanded compliment it may have been, but Gilmore’s implicit acknowledgement of Cowen’s dormant leadership skills is significant. Such faint praise is a great deal more than he’s latterly been able to muster for his opposition colleague Enda Kenny, the Fine Gael leader.

Gilmore and Kenny share a birthday (April 24) but that’s where their common ground ends. The respective responses to the economic crisis by Fine Gael and Labour have revealed vast differences between the parties on key issues, and the disparity is reflected in coolness between the leaders.

As public confidence in the government’s competence plummets, voters are scanning the opposition benches for the makings of a credible alternative administration. Thus far they have done so in vain. In fact, with Fianna Fail, the Greens and Mary Harney obviously determined to hang together, there’s considerably more coherence among the government parties.

The simmering hostility between Fine Gael and Labour boiled over last weekend at the latter’s conference in Kilkenny. Several Labour figures castigated Fine Gael with as much venom as they denounced Fianna Fail. There was condemnation of Fine Gael’s call for substantial reductions in public-sector staff numbers.

Though Gilmore was more circumspect, he, too, was highly critical of Fine Gael’s economic policies. Fianna Fail did not have the answers to the state’s problems, he declared, “and neither does Fine Gael”.

Much of the chippiness underlying such rhetoric stems from widespread belief within Labour that Pat Rabbitte, Gilmore’s predecessor, was wrong to align the party with Fine Gael before the last election through the Mullingar Accord.

As the election result demonstrated, with Fine Gael gaining 20 seats and Labour losing one, the pact clearly benefited the larger party at the smaller’s expense.

Despite mounting anger with Fianna Fail, meanwhile, there are some in Labour who believe many voters would still balk at electing Kenny as taoiseach. Hence Labour’s determination to go it alone as

an unaligned third party, a legitimate aspiration ludicrously overstated in the posters held up at the Kilkenny conference advocating “Gilmore for taoiseach”.

In Labour’s enthusiasm to distance itself from Fine Gael, however, the party threatens to talk itself into a position whereby coalition with Fianna Fail becomes its only viable option. In his conference speech, Gilmore argued that Labour must present itself as a party for all the people rather than a doctrinaire advocate for any sectional interest. Yet in continuing to curry favour with the public-sector unions, he’s doing the exact opposite, and creating an unbridgeable chasm with Fine Gael in the process.

Under normal circumstances, experience tells us there are few policy differences that cannot be magicked away by aspiring coalition partners. However, all parties agree that we’re currently facing dire economic ills so we must assume there’s some degree of seriousness to the remedies each one prescribes. Given their diametrically opposed attitudes to the public sector, therefore, it’s difficult to see how Fine Gael and Labour could coalesce without one side making a credibility-destroying climbdown.

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