Ireland General Election 2016

Here’s the result of the Irish General Election of 2016, 100 years after the foundation of the state — a state which is ostensibly based on this document.

Ireland has traditionally been a ‘two and a half party’ democracy with Fine Gael and Fianna Fail being the two main political parties and Labour being the minor coalition partner in many governments. The outgoing government in this case was a Fine Gael-Labour coalition with a very sizeable majority. As usual the minor coalition partner was decimated having held office for five years and been seen to do the dirty work of the larger party. This is an ongoing pattern in Irish politics for over a generation now. That is, either of the two main centre-right parties, Fine Gael or Fianna Fail are ‘propped up’ in government by smaller parties of the right or left, Labour, the Greens, the Progressive Democrats.

But something has changed utterly this time round.

For the first time ever it will not be possible for either of the main two centre-right parties to form a government propped up by a smaller party. Because both of those large centre-right parties have seen their support decimated over the past few election cycles.

And so for the first time ever, we are left with a situation where neither of the two main parties can form a government and must contemplate forming a coalition together. No one voted for this.

The voters who punished Labour for doing Fine Gaels dirty work do not want to see Fine Gael back in power.

The voters who turned to the left in their droves do not want to see a centre right coalition.

The two main parties themselves, FF and FG vowed not to go into government together.

And yet this is seen by many as the obvious and logical outcome of the election. Half the Irish electorate expressed a preference for either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael.

Another Way

There is another way though. As has been pointed out by many commentators the situation that the Irish electorate find themselves in is not particularly unusual across Europe and other mature democracies where proportional representation is the favoured form of democracy. Instead of a talking shop where a pre-negotiated ‘Programme for Government’ is rubber stamped by a docile majority and the opposition is reduced to baying from the gallery and having every one of its ideas good and bad ignored, why not use the national parliament as an actual parliament where legislation is introduced, debated, amended, improved and approved? This type of a parliament would represent the views of the Irish people as expressed in the election. This type of parliament exists and it works. Elsewhere.

You said what again?

So the Irish people have spoken, what have they said? Looking at the results — they are saying they no longer want politics here to work on partisan ‘civil war’ principles that most people neither understand nor care about. They are saying that the values espoused by the left have real meaning for them. They’re saying they are sick of ‘auction politics’ and are more interested in public services than tax cuts.

And they are saying some scary things too — that they have a short memory and will return to Fianna Fail, widely viewed as the orchestrators of Ireland's crash just over eight years ago. That they have a short memory when it comes to bloodshed and hatred, that this nation was founded on blood sacrifice and we should therefore move on from the troubles that cost so dearly in human life yet occurred so recently.

But primarily they are saying that the wide array of views and ideologies represented by the parties and independents they have elected are representative of the nation we have become, 100 years on from the foundation of the state.

And so how do we form a government? Well perhaps we go back to that document on which the state was founded — the Proclamation of the Irish Republic — and instead of viewing it as an historic talisman of blood sacrifice and butchery — we view it as the blueprint of parliamentary democracy it was intended to be. It is time to take the governance of our state seriously — Ireland, it’s time to grow the fuck up.