Séamas O'Reilly: Half of Irish voters trust the people behind our problems to solve them
Leader of Fianna Fail, Micheal Martin (left) and leader of Fine Gael, Simon Harris during the General Election leaders' debate at RTE studios in Montrose, Dublin.
Trying to explain last week’s election to people here in England has been tricky. For one thing, I’ve had to bring it up myself each time.
Unlike with the US election last month, there were not — from Hartlepool to Hull — political junkies eyeing up the charts and maps of Cork North West and Longford-Westmeath.
The scant mentions on news channels were bite-sized in duration, allotted roughly the same level of importance as stories about pandas being born in Chinese zoos or those events where thousands of people gather in regional town centres to break the Guinness World Record for most people dressed as Elvis at once.
Given this lack of interest, I want to scold our neighbours for their indifference and tell them that, actually, our election was fascinating, and suppress the part of myself that considers it a “more of the same, please” affair.
So, I’ve given some thought as to how I might make any of it sound remarkable at all.
For one thing, the incumbents basically won.
The ruling Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition took 43% of the vote and 49% of the seats — despite a particularly wonky electoral period on the part of Taoiseach Simon Harris, the man who called the election and then spent his campaign snarling at every voter he met as if they were an intruder in his home.
In return, the party suffered only a minor dip — coming third in the polls with 38 seats.
On 48 seats, Fianna Fáil emerged as the largest party, setting the stage for another go-around for the ruling coalition which has been in some form of shared Government for most of the last tumultuous decade. They are, thus, largely responsible for most of the overlapping crises the vast majority of voters cited as their key issues going into this election.
I’ll admit I find this hard to explain to befuddled Englanders, who struggle to work out the cause and effect at play.
“It’s simple”, I say, “it’s like how if you praise an arsonist enough, he’ll eventually become a fireman. It’ll all work out in the end”. If this seems strange, please be assured that it is.
By voting, broadly, for its incumbent Government, Ireland has bucked the trend of almost every other western democracy on Earth.
Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky notes that, since the pandemic, 40 of 55 elections in western democracies have ousted their incumbents — a tally that does not include governments like those of India or Japan, which clung to power following heavy losses, or of France, whose ruling coalition toppled as I was writing this very sentence.
In this context, the Irish government’s combined vote share looks remarkably stable, a vote of confidence that’s vanishingly rare in the rest of the world.
Some point out that the FF/FG vote, though basically unchanged from the last election, is still a far cry from their traditional electoral hegemony.
Nevertheless, they have more than enough momentum to form a Government with a few Independents and smaller parties, the rise of whom has also proven newsworthy.
The focus now is on which of those smaller parties — Labour and the Social Democrats chief among them — could or would enter Government with the current duopoly, given repeated evidence that doing so is something of a poisoned chalice.
One must only gaze toward the annihilation of their coalition parties, the Greens, to witness this phenomenon’s most recent and painful example.
One thing everyone seems ready to agree on is that this election was a poor one for Sinn Féin — the one Irish political party my English friends will reliably know — who failed to capitalise on the goodwill and momentum they’ve recently built up, and who were beset by scandals in the lead up to last week’s vote.
For this, they languish in second place with an unprecedentedly large haul of 39 seats in the Dáil.
A performance which has been unanimously declared a resounding political failure.
For me, personally, just two other tidbits have proved useful in conveying the import of this election to outsiders.
One was the campaign of Gerry Hutch, a man whose stature is hard to explain to English people.
In most western countries, the idea of a “famous gangland figure” is something of an oxymoron, considering that it’s an occupation one presumes it would be better to keep under wraps.
Not so for The Monk, who parlayed his name recognition into very nearly getting a seat in the Dáil.
The other main takeaway was the utter non-entity that was the far-right vote in Ireland.
Everywhere their candidates stood, they were met with ignominy across the board — perhaps most memorably in Philip Dwyer’s remarkable tally in Wicklow.
Opening the box for Newtownmountkennedy — the town in which he helped foment anti-immigrant protests in May — revealed just one ballot in his favour.
An achievement which, in the memorable words of Jake Hurley, brought new meaning to the phrase “one man one vote”.
If I were to muster a takeaway from those facts, I would just say this: Only 6% of voters cited immigration as a major issue for them immediately before the election, this despite acres of coverage, free advertising, and an entire televised debate on the topic.
It would be nice to think some of that normalisation might cease in the face of incontrovertible evidence that voters’ minds are on other things.
It’s not much, in the face of an election that offers little chance for meaningful change in this republic but, on that issue at least, more of the same is not good enough.
