Everyone could see that the Irish general election was coming several months beforehand. The so called Tiktok Taoiseach, Simon Harris, Ireland’s youngest ever Taoiseach, was doing well in the polls and a giveaway budget sprayed money in all directions, particularly extra goodies for pensioners (no talk of cutting winter fuel payments in Ireland) and significant increases in welfare spending also. The EU had won the court case against Apple, resulting in 13 billion euros of unpaid tax returned to the Irish exchequer being returned in unpaid tax. Ironically the coalition government had supported Apple! All the talk was of a country awash with cash and that there was plenty more where that came from. Unlike the austerity budget following the UK’s election, this was a giveaway and pre-election budget.
The election campaign
The election campaign itself was very short, only three weeks and the campaign started with Harris and Fine Gael riding high in the polls – their coalition partner, Fianna Fail, trailing behind them. The polls showed that the third government party, the Greens, would be decimated and this was one of the only predictions which the polls got right. All of the talk from economists and others on international TV stations and YouTube was that Ireland was on the pig’s back and that happy days were back again! This despite the fact that there is a massive housing crisis and the health service is on its knees. Patients are waiting on trolleys for over 12 hours in A&E, in a health service where many staff are emigrating to get better pay and conditions in countries such as Australia and the Gulf. The levels of homelessness are huge and many of Dublin’s streets are now full of tents housing the homeless.
The housing and homelessness crisis has led to a rise in support for the Far Right, who have been very militant over the last year. They really came into the open during the Dublin riots in November last year, following the stabbing of a number of young children by a man described by the far right media as an immigrant who had arrived from the Middle East. In fact, he was an Irish citizen, born in North Africa who had lived in Ireland for many years. In the local elections in the summer, the far right did well on the back of immigration and the housing crisis. It argued that in working class areas, immigrants were being given accommodation which the local Irish population could not access. This is a trope common across Europe but carries weight in a country with a huge dearth in public housing. Dublin is currently the second most expensive city in Europe and the rents are sky high with virtually no social housing available. The coalition government, many of whose members are landlords, has presided over this. Recent opinion polls have shown large numbers of young people saying that they would have to emigrate as even if they had a good job, they saw no future in Ireland because of the housing crisis and the huge cost of housing.
Sinn Fein
Sinn Fein, the largest party on the Left, after a really successful general election in 2020, where they received 25% of the vote, had slumped badly to 12% in the local elections and were predicted to do badly. The party had been beset by a number of sex scandals, involving some prominent elected representatives but had also lost support to the Far Right in some working-class areas on the issue of immigration. In those neighbourhood they were publicly described in far right demos as “traitors” and some elected Sinn Fein representatives had been personally targeted by the far right. The Labour Party, scarred by its involvement in previous right wing coalition governments, was not expected to do well. The Social Democrats, who had taken some of Labour’s former vote along with Sinn Fein, were also expected to lose votes. This left People Before Profit and the new right-wing republican party Aontu, which has very reactionary positions on a number of social policies, particularly trans rights, where Ireland has a generally positive position, superior to that of the UK.
People Before Profit and some other Left parties took the position that they would not enter into a coalition with either of the right-wing government parties. However, Sinn Fein left the door open to negotiations. With Ireland’s notoriously complex single transferable vote system transfers play an essential part and the slogan of Sinn Fein and all of the Left parties was “Transfer Left” thus ensuring that all Left votes would be maximised.
As the election campaign continued, the wheels began to come off the carefully crafted Fine Gael campaign as Harris began to mix with the public. This came to a head in an encounter with a care worker, Charlotte Fallon, in a supermarket where Fallon asked the Taoiseach to do more to support care workers working with disabled people. Harris’s response was so arrogant and dismissive that the interview, filmed by Irish state TV, went viral and Fine Gael’s support dropped 6 points within a few days! On the other hand, Mary Lou Mc Donald, the Sinn Fein leader, had a barnstorming campaign and in the leaders debate, where only she, Harris and the leader of the other government party, Micheal Martin, were able to participate she came out with the wonderful line (pointing to Martin and Harris in turn) “You gave us the crash and you gave us austerity!” This hit home and Harris’s bumbling response did not help his campaign.
The exit polls predicted Sinn Fein as the largest party on over 21%, with Fianna Fail just behind on 21 and Fine Gael trailing on 19%. In the event, like many other recent elections, the polls were wrong. Fianna Fail has emerged as the largest party with over 40 seats and Fine Gael as the second party with 20.8%, leaving Sinn Fein as the third party with 19%. As predicted the Irish Green Party was decimated losing all of their seats, with the exception of party leader, Roderic O’Gorman. This has been a trend across Europe for Green parties recently, but the Irish Green Party has experienced this before whenever it has entered into a right-wing coalition government, as happened in 2011. Paul Murphy of People Before Profit managed to hold his seat in Dublin and the Social Democrats have done well polling far higher than before.
Polls show that younger voters went predominantly for the left parties, but the older and wealthier vote has won out again, although the two parties who have ruled Ireland for a century now only have 40% of the vote between them. As there are many Independents in the Irish system, the general view is that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael will have enough seats to form a government with the support of a few right leaning Independents. The alternative of a Left coalition headed by Sinn Fein and consisting of virtually every party outside of the big two and Aontu, seems unattainable. The new government is unlikely to be formed by Xmas.
Uncertainties
This result is a failure for Sinn Fein, who had hoped to recover their position of 2020. The background to this is that the housing crisis and homelessness is likely to worsen and that many younger people will be driven to emigrate, which has been the safety valve for the Irish state since independence. However, the good news is that the racist and anti-immigrant far right came nowhere but this should not lead to complacency as the continuing housing crisis will fester and lead to more reactionary radicalisation. There is a real need now for the entire left to get together and discuss the future. It is also noticeable that the issue of Irish reunification played very little role in this election, it was a bread and butter election. The only exceptions were when Harris was interviewed and said that it was not a priority but was likely to happen in his lifetime. McDonald said that it would be a priority for her government and that the first thing that she would do in office would be to call Keir Starmer to discuss the border poll. Martin, who is the most likely to be the next Taoiseach, really angered Northern republicans when he said that republicans in the North had brought much of the trouble there on themselves, thereby cementing a partitionist view of Ireland.
The big shadow hanging over Ireland is that Trump’s tariff policy will mean the withdrawal of US IT companies from Ireland with a colossal economic impact resulting in unemployment and social unrest. The next election will likely be a very different one with the halcyon days of financial surpluses well in the rear mirror.
Art Book Review Books Capitalism China Climate Emergency Conservative Government Conservative Party COVID-19 Creeping Fascism Economics EcoSocialism Elections Europe Event Video Far-Right Fascism Film Film Review France Gaza History Imperialism Israel Italy Keir Starmer Labour Party London Long Read Marxism Marxist Theory Migrants Palestine pandemic Police Protest Russia Solidarity Statement Trade Unionism Trans*Mission Transphobia Ukraine United States of America War