Reading the runes on Irish political prospects in 2022

This time last year, Paddy Power was offering odds of evens against Sinn Féin winning the most Dáil seats at the next election. By mid-year, those odds had tightened to 4/7 and, by last month, even further to 2/5.

Fine Gael has run a consistent second in this betting. But the odds against it winning the most seats have lengthened from 6/4 last January to 9/4 now. The odds against Fianna Fáil being the largest party have retreated even more sharply, from 4/1 a year ago to 12/1 now. The other parties don’t figure. Labour and the Greens are next, way back on 66/1.

These trends reflect those of opinion polls. Since our last review of the Irish political stakes in July, there have been 15 published polls before the end of the year. Sinn Féin led in every one of them with Fine Gael generally running a distant second.

The published polls have been conducted by four different organisations for four different newspapers. Behaviour and Attitudes and Ireland Thinks ran five polls each on behalf of The Sunday Times and Irish Mail on Sunday respectively. Red C conducted three polls for The Sunday Business Post and IPSOS MRBI two for The Irish Times.

There is no suggestion of deliberate bias, of thumbs being placed on scales, but opinion polls are not homogeneous. Different methodologies flow through to differing conclusions. For example, all five Behaviour and Attitudes polls (sprinkled evenly over the period) registered Fianna Fáil support in the range of 20–25%. These include the only two polls to place Fianna Fáil ahead of Fine Gael. By contrast, Fianna Fáil support did not reach 20% in any of the five Ireland Thinks polls, registering in a range from 14–19% and in an even gloomier range of 13–15% in the three Red C polls. Both IPSOS MRBI polls registered Fianna Fáil support at 20%. Those are material variations, not solely attributable to the different times at which polls were taken.

Incidentally, Ireland Thinks delivered the last poll of 2021 in December and the first of 2022 last week. There was no material change between the two.

The different polling methodologies are one reason why only “broad brush” indications can be drawn from the polls. Sinn Féin’s support appears to be in the range of 30–35%, moving closer to the top of the range and its lead over other parties growing over the six months since June. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil support rests in the 20–25% zone. While noting Paddy Power’s billowing confidence that Fine Gael is running ahead of its traditional rival, the poll figures strike me as less clear cut.

Those support levels for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael do not compare badly against their actual performance in the general election of February 2022 when the parties won 22.2% and 20.9% of the vote respectively. But they compare very badly with the transformation in Sinn Féin’s fortunes. It appears to have added up to 10% to the 24.5% it won at the election.

Two more caveats about polls. First, voters are fickle and can change. For most of the first year of the pandemic, Fine Gael enjoyed leads over other parties as big as the one Sinn Féin enjoys now. Similarly, for most of the year before the 2020 election, Sinn Féin support languished in the mid-teens. Second and relatedly, until there is an election in prospect, polls are more an expression of shallow preference than deep determination, a consequence-free beauty contest rather than a firm indication of voting intentions.

And Paddy Power does not expect an election any time soon. It is offering 10/3 against an election this year, 7/2 against one next year and 11/4 against one in 2024, but only 11/8 against an election in 2025. This bookie expects this government to go the distance. Incidentally, this time last year, Paddy Power was offering only 15/8 (roughly one in three) against an election in 2021. Looking back over the year just gone, whatever one thinks of the government’s performance, its fundamental stability never looked in genuine doubt.

But let’s imagine that current support levels do carry through to the election whenever it happens. Of one thing we can be certain, next time around, Sinn Féin will run enough candidates across the constituencies not to leave any winnable seats behind them as they did in 2020, although the implications of “wasted” votes for the party in that election is often exaggerated. They could and should have won the most seats as well as most votes, but nowhere near enough more of the former to have given them a shot at forming a government.

I would expect them also to move further along the spectrum from being transfer toxic towards transfer friendliness which could shake an extra seat or two their way in tight counts. But, their current support has a heavy weighting of younger age groups who are less likely to vote.

However, it is not adventurous to project the party as likely to win around 50–55 of the 160 Dáil seats compared to 37 in 2020. If the Greens could hold most of their 12 seats and Labour and the Social Democrats their 7 and 6 respectively, one can plausibly imagine those parties forming a stable, durable coalition government. The latter requires close to rather than an actual overall majority of 80+, because there will be a strong rump of independents more disposed to preventing rather than triggering an early election.

So, it is less hard than earlier in the year to see Sinn Féin leading a government without the participation or at least tacit support of one of the “civil war” parties, though it is not especially easy either, a genuine possibility but maybe not a high probability.

Although I expect all three parties in the current government to run on their individual merits and not to commit to any preference about government partners ahead of the election, the implicit alternative to Sinn Féin is another government including both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, probably needing another party to round it out.

I have stated the obvious truth that polls can change, but I suspect the emerging Sinn Féin “hegemony” is underpinned by several connected structural factors.

The first is a shift in the axis or fulcrum of politics from a contest principally between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to one between those two traditional parties together (“FFG” or Fianna Gael as their opponents impolitely call them) and Sinn Féin. And there is more to that distinction than a divergence of policies. Every government in the history of the state has been led by either Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or the latter’s precursor, Cumann na nGaedheal. If Paddy Power is right in projecting 2025 as the next election year, the two will have been loosely or tightly together in government for almost a decade. All of that heightens the plausibility of the notion that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are united by more than divides them.

It has been said that the most visible sign of our becoming independent was that post boxes became green rather than red. It could also be said that most of our elections have hinged around no more than a possible changing of the guard and since 2016, only changes in the positioning of the same guard. If Sinn Féin comes to government after the next election, it will be more than just a changing of the guard, perhaps more akin to 1932 than 1948, possibly more seismic than either.

Second, Sinn Féin’s support base is not confined to those who dislike the traditional parties or, indeed, to those for whom continuing to travel matters more than reaching a destination. It has displaced Labour as the leading standard bearer of the Left leaning agenda and is unashamedly an aspirant party of government rather than a contented hurler from the ditch, unlike the diaspora of radical socialists on the far reaches of the Left to whom purity matters more than performance. It can credibly present itself as the party of choice for those who want to see change rather than continuity in how we are governed as much as who is governing.

Third, it is often said that elections are lost by governments rather than won by oppositions and that governments become the lightning rod for public dissatisfaction with life in general even if the government is not to blame for or can do little to alleviate the causes of that unhappiness. Largely but not solely because of the lingering cloud of COVID , my sense is that the quotient of tetchy tiredness exceeds that of light hearted contentment in today’s Ireland, that the government is tolerated more than appreciated, perhaps not grudgingly but certainly not enthusiastically. I suspect the government is more likely to pay for our endurance of COVID than be rewarded for negotiating our path through it.

But hope springs eternal — in politics at least. Three years hence is a long way away. By then, COVID could and should be on the sidelines of public life and the robustness of our economy even during COVID could also be helpful to the government. For now though, untainted by actual responsibility for the present, even if beset with dubious responsibility for a dark past, the scent of roses around Sinn Féin continues to intensify.

However, if the “civil war” parties’ poll ratings are still languishing in the doldrums as 2022 winds to a finish, Fianna Fáil will certainly not allow Michael Martin any leadership lap of honour after he steps down as Taoiseach in December and Fine Gael will wonder whether Leo Varadkar is really the right person to succeed him. Both have more of a whiff of staleness than a scent of freshness about them already.

Even though they will continue to enjoy the luxury of opposition through the year, Sinn Féin will need to do more than just bash the government and wait for success to fall into their laps — on two fronts.

First, the party’s overriding policy is the pursuit of a united Ireland. Not this year, but soon, they will be in government both North and South, perhaps leading both. Their challenge will be to devise a policy approach that will actually advance the cause rather than merely thump tubs. Clarion calls for a border poll do not the ingredients of a policy make. Indeed, the louder and shriller they get, the more likely they are to set that cause back. The pre-condition for a united Ireland is the development of a vision of it that most neutral observers would see as one that Unionists could, maybe even should reasonably accept, not one that they can refuse without embarrassment. Without implying a lingering unionist “veto”, Sinn Féin must be seen to woo unionists honestly, not to attempt to co-erce them.

Second, the party’s broad strokes approach to domestic policy here is to proclaim that everybody in the audience apart from an amorphous class of anonymous “fat cats” will get most of everything they might want from the public sphere because such is no more than their due. The title of their 2020 election manifesto: “Giving workers and families a break” hums the tune. The headings on individual sections put words to it:

• Money in your pockets;
• A roof over your head;
• A right to retire;
• Health care when you need it;
• A safe community.

There is nothing wrong with promising to comfort the afflicted by afflicting the comfortable, provided you are clear and forensic about who falls into which category and how precisely they will be affected.

The Irish Times Political Correspondent, Pat Leahy, captured it well in his column on New Year’s Day.

Is Sinn Féin going to have a house for everyone who wants one, in a place they like, at a price they can afford? No, they’re not. You can’t be a government-in-waiting unless you can show you will take difficult decisions and disappoint some people. If responsibility comes with power, with the promise of power comes the need for clarity.

Compared to the head scratching required from their opponents to retain their ascendancy, this is a first world problem, but Sinn Féin will need to reflect on whether it is more politically astute to try to dampen expectations before the election or risk disappointing them afterwards.

There is another dimension to this point. Sinn Féin’s electoral constituency is the actual and self-perceived “have nots” of society, its message being that they will all at least “have more” at the expense of the “haves”. There is very little in the Sinn Féin manifesto about how they might increase the size of the proverbial national cake, only about how the existing one might be divided more fairly.

There is plenty of food for thought in that, though maybe not enough food of other kinds to sate everybody’s appetite.