Chariots for hire: Irish political prospects in 2024
This time last year, Paddy Power was offering 1/5 against Sinn Féin winning the most seats in the next Irish general election. In other words, five chances out of six or an 84% probability. A year on, the bookie is even more certain. It now offers 1/10 or 90% odds of Sinn Féin being the largest party. The odds against Fine Gael winning most seats have retreated from 5/1 to 7/1 while Fianna Fáil’s odds have stayed at 10/1.
It is no surprise that Sinn Féin should be strong favourites, indeed close to a racing certainty to emerge as the leading party, at the risk only of unforeseeable events. They have led in every published opinion poll since June 2021. Different pollsters have different methods which make for slightly differing results. So, it is a crude measure of Sinn Féin’s standing that its average lead over the second placed party in the 31 polls published in national newspapers in 2023 was just over 10%, its highest lead in any poll being 17% and its lowest 7%.
However, while alarm bells might not be ringing in Sinn Féin headquarters, there would have been some unease at the slight softening of the party’s rating in 2023 compared to the previous year. Whereas it could fairly be said that the party was polling solidly in the “mid-thirties” in the latter half of 2022, its rating settled in the “low-thirties” for most of 2023. In March, the party’s rating dipped below 30% (to 29%) for the first time since June 2021 and it failed to hit 30% or more in three more polls during 2023, including the last two. Has its support plateaued — or can it kick on after this “breather”? Who knows? The first published poll of 2024 doesn’t make us any wiser on that point.
Another straw in the wind is that the combined ratings of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil exceeded that of Sinn Féin in all the polls taken in 2023 whereas in 2022, Sinn Féin’s rating exceeded that of the combined ratings of those two parties in three polls (incidentally, all Red C polls prepared for the Business Post).
At the end of 2023, Irish Polling Indicator[i], (a website that is at least more analytical than whimsical in lighting the way through the fog of the future) was assigning mean polling ratings to the three main parties as follows (estimated range of support to a 95% confidence rating in brackets):
Sinn Féin 31% (29–32.5%)
Fine Gael 20% (18–22%) and
Fianna Fáil 20% (18–21.5%)
This time last year, Paddy Power was betting that this Dáil would run its full term, offering odds of 5/6 or over 55% probability of an election not happening before 2025. If you had taken the bookie’s odds then of 7/2 against an election in 2023, you would obviously have lost your money. The bookie is offering odds of evens against an election this year and 4/6 against it waiting until 2025. So, on balance, it expects the Dáil to run close to its full term. The election must take place by mid-March 2025.
The robustness of opinion polls findings has not been tested in any electoral contest since the last Dáil by-election in July 2021. But they will be subject to nationwide testing in June when elections to local authorities and the European Parliament will take place on the same day. Indeed, we could be in for a rerun of the twilight months of the last Dáil when the local and European elections in May 2019 were followed by a Dáil general election in February 2020.
Right now though, as a broad judgement, it would be fair to say that the last year has been one in which the prospects of the main parties marked time rather than noticeably advanced or receded. If present ratings hold through the election itself, it does mean that Sinn Féin is the party most likely to lead the next government for one simple reason. With more seats than any other party, it needs less help to bridge the gap towards a majority of all seats. It could conceivably form a government with the participation of only one other party. All other parties seeking to lead the government formation process will probably need the support of at least two parties.
In the unlikely event that they secured an overall majority of seats between them, I suspect that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael would prefer to govern with a third leg to their governmental stool than without one. The former scenario would emphasise too much for their comfort just how indistinguishably like Tweedledum and Tweedledee they have become.
The local and European elections should not be assumed to be a reliable guide to what might happen in a general election a few months later. First, a lot can change in the interval between them and the general election up to 9 months later. Second, they are different kinds of elections to different institutions with different issues and stakes in play. The 2019 polls illustrate the point.
Remember that in the general election of February 2020, the main parties secured the following vote percentages: Sinn Féin 24%, Fianna Fail 22% and Fine Gael 21%. The vote in the European elections 9 months earlier was close enough to that outcome. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael secured 22% each with Sinn Féin close behind on 19.5%. However, in the local elections, Sinn Féin took a hammering, winning only 9.5% of the vote compared to 27% for Fianna Fáil and 25% for Fine Gael.
I have previously discussed the likelihood of the present government parties running as a joint “ticket” at the next election. I still think that is less rather than more likely for several reasons.
First, this government was established as a marriage of convenience rather than any more deeply rooted commonality of outlook between the participating parties — though there are no yawning chasms of ideological disagreement between them either. The three parties now in government together were enough to make up the numbers for a stable majority. No alternative majority had any traction. Nobody in Dáil Éireann wanted an immediate dissolution and a new election back in the COVID-dominated second quarter of 2020. So, that was more or less that.
The tri-partite coalition has done better than survive as a government for three and a half years. There have been no destabilising inter-party bust-ups, brinkmanship or blatant jockeying for party position by any party at the expense of the other. Solo-runs by any party (such as Fine Gael’s habitual pre-budget wistfulness for tax “cuts”) have been carefully coded to suggest differentiation from rather than outright opposition to the other government parties. They can clearly work together cohesively and congenially.
But presenting themselves to the electorate as an “oven ready” united government makes it close to impossible for individual parties to project a distinct identity during an election campaign, identity being established as much by what a party is not as what it is.
For example, would Mr. Varadkar alone participate as the “leader” in televised debates? If so, would it be a “head-to-head” with Mary Lou McDonald? It would suit Sinn Féin to be presented as a direct and equal counterpoint to the entire government. It would not suit the government parties — at all.
Being perhaps the most “radical” party in the current government, the Greens might prefer to stand slightly apart from its current partners to keep its options open to transition smoothly to a Sinn Féin led government. Fine Gael might want to have freedom to contrast its unwillingness to participate in government with Sinn Féin under any circumstances with Fianna Fáil’s more ambivalent position on that issue.
So, I expect the three government parties to run separate campaigns in which they would seek credit for their participation in and contribution to the current government and not take wallops out of each other during the campaign. Indeed, I expect them to signal quietly if not loudly shout encouragement to their voters to allocate their lower preferences towards “like-minded” candidates and, by implication, not to Sinn Féin.
And if the numbers add up, it wouldn’t surprise me too much to see the same government configuration that we have now come together smoothly — and quickly compared to the three months government formation took in 2020.
We got a good indication of Sinn Féin’s game plan from Mary Lou McDonald’s pre-Christmas round of media interviews. Pat Leahy interviewed her for The Irish Times.
In the close to infantile mode of Irish political “journalism”, Mr. Leahy began by asking her: “How many seats do you expect to win?” as if there was some remote possibility of Ms. McDonald committing to a specific number, be it high or low.
Instead, she batted it away. “We will win as many seats as the people give us.” She expanded a tiny bit though. If Sinn Féin is going to be the government of change to which it aspires: “We’re going to have to win a lot of seats. We are going to have to have critical mass.”
A more granular answer is this. Sinn Féin’s minimum target will be to deliver on the promise of the polls and win more seats than anyone else. Failure to achieve that threshold with room to spare would be deeply wounding to the party and almost certainly a fatal blow to the leadership of Ms. McDonald. Obviously, the party will want to win as many seats as possible altogether and, at a stretch, enough to give it a fighting chance of forming a durable coalition without Fianna Fáil participation or, failing that, with a sufficient plurality of seats over Fianna Fáil to establish itself as the dominant rather than merely the senior party.
The last outcome would intensify introspection within Fianna Fáil of whether it could stomach participation in government as a very junior partner — for the first time in its history.
Probed three times on the point, Ms. McDonald said her party was committed to retaining the current “economic model” except they will want to share the prosperity it generates “in a fair and equal manner”, implying what we already know that it will be more distributionist than the present government — or, indeed, any of its predecessors.
Ms. McDonald listed the absolute priorities needing to be addressed by the next government.
…at the heart of that is the issue of housing. You won’t be surprised to hear me say that [the other] issues [will be] around our health service and then longer-term planning and preparation issues in respect of energy independence, the climate obviously, preparation for reunification and a step change in terms of how the State transacts its business.
I will take a pass on the doffing of the cap to reunification which, I venture, will not be a salient issue in the election — not for the voters at any rate.
On housing, she wants to tackle the crisis of affordability. “The objective has to be to get prices as low as we feasibly can” (and to get rents down too). The €300,000 “mark” was mentioned as an appropriate affordability threshold for Dublin with “a regional variation on that”. Ms. McDonald didn’t mention supply but left the silent assumption hang that supply will be ramped up in scale and at pace to bring prices down appreciably at least and dramatically at best. The current average house price in Dublin is more than €400,000.
Whether they will deliver is another matter, but the gamble is that there is a lot more votes now in getting people housed than in protecting the values of houses that some people are already in and own — and that the balance of public belief, justified or otherwise, is that Sinn Féin can hardly ramp up supply more slowly than the present government are doing.
Either way, given the yawning gap between demand and supply, getting prices down will take years rather than months. Sad news for those waiting in the queue. Relieving news for those home owners with a mortgage fearful that Sinn Féin’s policy will leave them all in immediate negative equity.
As for the way “the State transacts its business”, according to Ms. McDonald that’s about “the lack of pace, the lack of ambition… There is an issue just around delivering… Things take too long.”
That thought will resonate with an impatient public. For so many public projects to which the government commits, the question is less “Are we there yet?” than “Will we ever get there?” Think of the children’s hospital which is at least “nearly finished” but has been that way for a long time. And for some, it’s a case of “Will we ever get started?” Think of the Limerick — Cork motorway connection, the new national maternity hospital, metro-link, clearing trolleys from Accident & Emergency, pension auto-enrolment…
Will Sinn Féin be able to change the priorities and put the achievement of desirable outcomes ahead of adherence to laborious due process — and will the public be entirely happy if they do? We must wait and see. Ms. McDonald didn’t volunteer the name of a country which she sees as a template where projects move briskly without noticeable uproar from the public and are done properly. And the sleepy reporter never thought to ask for one.
Anyway, Sinn Féin are going to campaign on a mix of the restlessness of insurgency and the responsibility of prospective incumbents, change agents but unthreatening ones. They carry the credibility and risk of being untried and untainted. To those who argue for sticking to nurse, they will say sadly: Nurse has been around so long she has become doddery?
If you think “Nurse” is in fine fettle, let’s revisit this time last year. In his first address as re-elected Taoiseach in December 2022, Mr. Varadkar presented “housing” first in his list of “pressing challenges that will define the rest of our term”. In a subsequent interview with political journalists, The Irish Times reported Mr. Varadkar as:
…pledging to go “all out” to address the housing crisis, comparing the response needed to the kind of action seen during the Covid-19 pandemic…
We need to turn the corner on housing, it is an emergency, it’s affecting people in so many different ways.
“It’s holding us back as a country, and it’s causing intergenerational division that I don’t like to see.
` “It’s really going to be a case of let’s do everything, unless there’s a really good reason as to why we can’t,”
Looking back over the past year, can anyone truly say that this Government has projected in its actions the sense of critical importance attaching to housing implied by those words? Mr. Varadkar might plead that the government is presiding over the building of more homes than previously, but the notion that it is not nearly enough is even more firmly established. Supply may be improving but demand is increasing faster.
In relation to housing at least, there is no word in this Government’s political vocabulary that quite captures the urgency of mañana.
Immigration was the hottest and noisiest domestic current affairs issue during the twilight months of 2023. It is hard to detect evidence that it has much electoral salience, except that the ratings of “independents and others” have been more consistently in double figures in 2023, compared to occasionally topping double figures in 2022.
On this, Ms. McDonald’s line has been carefully calibrated with a tone of tough but fair. The country must stand by the rules-based order to which it has signed up regarding admission and processing of asylum seekers, including deporting promptly those whose application is refused. But she heaps plenty of ordure on the government for its allegedly inadequate consultation with “communities” when clusters of asylum applicants are being shunted their way and its inadequate planning to balance the services needs of people already resident here with those of incomers.
Separately, just before Christmas, she suggested that Ukrainian refugees not working in “critical” jobs should not automatically be allowed to remain in Ireland after the EU-mandated Ukrainian refugee arrangements expire in March 2025. Some took that as a sop to the so-called hard right and it may have been so. On the other hand, it is simply a restatement of the existing rules with some shades of flexibility.
But Ms. McDonald will be very careful in steering a path between the Scylla of the “bleeding hearts” and the Charybdis of the “far right”, offering a bit of a nod to both while committing to neither. Such is politics.
Mary Lou is already rehearsing for the office of Taoiseach, projecting a dual identity as opposition leader and Taoiseach in waiting. But she won’t be thinking of measuring the curtains in the Merrion Street Office for a while yet.
