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There’s a great deal to be said for keeping it simple. The British journalist and excellent communicator, Andrew Marr, once advised journalists to put no more than four figures in an opinion piece. More than that and you lost the reader. And if this election campaign was dull, it was partly because it was weighed down with too many complex numbers.
Maybe that’s what happens when there’s more money available than we have ever had before. But it felt for three weeks that a new budget in the form of manifestos was launched every day – and then mini-budgets in specialist areas were squeezed in as well. After a while, many of us got lost in the blizzard of numbers and money promises. That’s not to suggest that people didn’t engage: for instance, the number who viewed the political debates was high. But we’ve learned to be sceptical. It’s not that long since the economy collapsed under political mismanagement, so we know that the lavish promises will have to be withdrawn if Trump slashes US corporate taxes and starts a tariff war. We’re not eejits.
There’s also the danger that too much detail clogging up the message means that the message gets ignored, while moments like Simon Harris’s encounter with careworker Charlotte Fallon are remembered. Of course they are. Her understandable anger at how carers are treated, and his turning away from her, was an emotional moment caught on camera that went viral, that engaged people in a way that columns of figures never could. During an election campaign, the voter is supreme. You don’t turn your back on a voter.
Harris’s lack of experience as a party leader showed in this bumpy campaign, as did the loss of some of the older, wiser heads in the party, such as Heather Humphreys or Richard Bruton. They might have pointed out to Minister Peter Burke that Michael O’Leary knows a lot about running an airline, but asking him to launch your election campaign was a bit like asking your seven year old to drive the school bus. And they might have advised that a crazy TikTok Taoiseach rush around all 43 constituencies had to be balanced against the danger of a tired leader making mistakes.
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But amid the fog of numbers early on in the campaign came a voice of experience that set out in one clear sentence what his campaign was about. It was Micheál Martin who said the battle was between parties that were pro-enterprise and pro-Europe and those that were not. He said it again in both television debates, neatly placing himself and Fine Gael and other possible coalition partners on one side of the divide, and Sinn Féin on the other.
Martin pointed to the fact that Sinn Féin has voted against most referendums relating to Europe, and claimed that its tax policies would create problems for many Irish indigenous industries, never mind their effect on foreign direct investment decisions. You mightn’t agree with him, and Sinn Féin wouldn’t, but at least his claim had the virtue of clarity.
In fairness, as the campaign went on, Sinn Féin focused more and more on the simple message of “change”. Mary Lou McDonald is a doughty campaigner and watching pictures of her on the stump in my hometown of Carlow this week, she showed the easy way she has with people, particularly with young people.
One political activist, not Sinn Féin, told me last year about doing visits to new voters in the senior classes of local schools. Having explained why it was important to vote and how the voting system worked, she finally asked if they had made their minds up as to how they would vote. To a woman and man, they almost all said Sinn Féin. She gave up going to schools.
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We’ll be finding out on Saturday morning if that young vote came out yesterday and if it went Sinn Féin’s way. We’ll be finding out too what happened to the immigration issue, which arose so often during the campaign, and whether it contributed to that solid bank of support for Independents – 20 per cent in recent polls, equal to the support for each of the three main parties. The Independents are a disparate group, ranging from left to right. But will there emerge from them enough TDs, together with Peadar Tóibín’s Aontú, to form a solid conservative bloc in the Dáil, a bloc that has the sort of views on immigration that can increasingly be found in other countries in Europe?
In most European countries, the ultranationalist party is also the most right-wing party – take Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party, and indeed the Conservative Party in Britain; or Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in France; or Geert Wilders’ Dutch People’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Sinn Féin has long boasted that it is the most radical nationalist party in Ireland, but that it is left wing and has therefore left no space for the growth of an ultranationalist right-wing party here. Maybe that’s about to change.
In his commentary on last Sunday’s Sunday Independent Ireland Thinks poll, Kevin Cunningham, managing director of Ireland Thinks, pointed to the 2 per cent rise in Aontú’s vote to 5 per cent and the 3 per cent rise in Independents to a hefty 19 per cent. He said that the rise of Independents and the potential rise of Aontú seems to be a function of a simple gap in the political market for those who both don’t like the current Government and hold more conservative views. “For the first time in our history, there isn’t a Fianna Fáil or a Fine Gael on the opposition benches offering a home to disaffected voters on the right.”
Could it be that those disaffected voters are finding a new home?
Olivia O’Leary is a journalist, writer and current affairs presenter