Who holds the best cards in Irish politics going into 2023?

In the run up to Christmas, Paddy Power was offering odds of 1/5 against Sinn Féin winning more seats than any other party at the next Irish general election. That implies a probability of 84% that Sinn Féin will have the largest representation in the next Dáil. This compares to a probability of 71% implied by the bookmaker’s odds of 2/5 a year earlier and the 50% probability implied by the bookmaker’s odds of evens in December 2020.

The bookmaker’s expectations of Sinn Féin finishing first are hardening.

That is not surprising, reflecting the consistent trend of opinion polls. In November and December, and in the first published poll of 2023, Sinn Féin’s ratings eased a little from 35% plus to 35% minus. But the party has now led in all opinion polls since July 2021. It enjoyed a lead of more than 10% in polls published between February and November, though the lead has dipped below that figure in two polls since.

Paddy Power was offering odds of 5/1 against Fine Gael winning most seats, a probability of 16%. Just as the odds for Sinn Féin have hardened over the past two years, those for Fine Gael have softened. Two years ago, the bookmaker was offering 6/4 or 40% probability that Fine Gael would get its nose in front. Fianna Fáil has been ahead of Fine Gael in only a minority of the polls conducted over the past year. Paddy Power was offering odds of 10/1 or 9% against Fianna Fáil being the largest party, though these odds are tighter than the 12/1 recorded a year ago.

However, by the bookmaker’s own estimation, all those odds are academic for the time being. Paddy Power doesn’t expect an election any time soon. It expects this government to run to the limit of its five-year term, offering odds of 5/6 or a probability of 55% that the election will not take place until 2025. Its odds of 7/2 against an election in 2023 imply a probability of 22% — and the odds of 15/8 against an election in 2024 imply a probability of 35%.

The bookmaker is probably encouraged in those odds by the stability of the government since its formation two and a half years ago. It has never really looked like falling apart and the passing of the baton from Micheál Martin to Leo Varadkar could not have been smoother.

However, as Argentina found in the world cup final when seemingly coasting to victory with a 2–0 lead and only 10 minutes to go, things can change very quickly. The pace of politics is normally slower, but two years allows plenty of time for things to change radically in that arena too. The coalition might yet run into an unanticipated iceberg that will sink it rather than reach the safe harbour of a completed term.

Before we do some tentative crystal ball gazing, a gentle reminder that the size of the Dáil will increase after the next election from 160 members today to 171–181 with the increases mainly in Dublin, Cork and Leinster reflecting the increased size and altered geographical balance of the country’s population.

If Sinn Féin’s support continues to pivot around 35%, that will not be enough for it to secure an overall majority of seats and govern alone. It is possible that the party might be able to assemble a broadly left-wing coalition government encompassing Labour, the Social Democrats and the Greens. The more sheep that must be herded into the same field though, the harder government formation gets.

But remember, the current government comprises only one party fewer and includes two parties in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil who would have considered serving in government together unimaginable less than a decade ago. So, anything is possible, if not necessarily probable.

It would be simpler logistically, if not necessarily ideologically, for Sinn Féin to attempt to form a two-party government with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, assuming such a government would have a secure overall majority. Both of those parties ruled out coalition with Sinn Féin ahead of the 2020 election. Fianna Fáil’s outright opposition then has softened to guarded openness now. Speaking to Seán O’Rourke before Christmas, Micheál Martin reflected:

I would say in the next election the idea of ruling out parties may not be as strong. In other words, we will leave it to the people to decide.

Fine Gael appear to be positioning themselves to stick to their 2020 position of ruling out power sharing with Sinn Féin. Certainly, Leo Varadkar is unequivocal, stating in the same television programme.

I would be totally against it, could not lead my party in a coalition with Sinn Féin.

Perhaps to head off the notion that it is thereby closing off the only possible route to government for his party, Mr. Varadkar has made vague noises about the present government renewing its mandate next time.

On 18 December, in an interview with RTE News, his first since his return as Taoiseach, Mr. Varadkar spoke of the present government as one that “can be elected and can be re-elected”, thus gliding past the fact that it was not the obvious popular will of the people in the first place.

But it seems more likely that Mr. Varadkar would be happiest to see a Sinn Féin-Fianna Fáil coalition after the election, so that Fine Gael could become the clear hegemon of the right from opposition just as Sinn Féin has currently established itself as the hegemon of the left.

There is a coherent prima facie case for the three current government parties running a joint platform at the next election — to present a credible, dare one say “oven-ready”, alternative government option to the vaguer option of a Sinn Féin led coalition. The lead Fine Gael generally enjoys over Fianna Fáil in opinion polls at the moment might make that option more attractive for Mr. Varadkar because, if those polls hold and translate proportionally into seats, he would reverse the outcome of the last election in which Fianna Fáil secured marginally more seats (and votes) than Fine Gael.

Whether Fianna Fáil and/or the Greens would wish to tie their hands in this way before the election is another matter. The latter might be especially reluctant to cast itself in opposition to other parties on the broad left by aligning itself more deliberately than pragmatically to the “establishment” parties.

Fianna Fáil’s position might be influenced by Micheál Martin’s interest or otherwise in remaining leader through the next election. There is talk of his move to the Department of Foreign Affairs being a neat stepping stone to exiting the domestic political stage as Ireland’s next European Commissioner. But the new Commission will take office as late as December 2024, possibly within weeks of the currently anticipated election date in Spring 2025, leaving little time for a new leader to settle in.

Before Christmas, Mr. Martin affirmed his own ambition to become Taoiseach again after the next election. Whether that is a genuine intent or an attempt to dispel any current incipient murmurings against him is an open question. But, it is hard also to see him voluntarily vacating his leadership of the party if that would also terminate his ministerial career in the “midstream” of the two years left to this government. Mr. Martin’s control over his own political destiny is enhanced by the absence of a single, serious challenger to his position as Fianna Fáil leader, only a plethora of pretenders.

Similarly though, now that the Fine Gael party has facilitated Mr. Varadkar’s stately return to the Taoiseach’s office, they are probably stuck with him to lead them into the next election. I wonder how many of its TDs are entirely comfortable with that prospect?

All three parties in the outgoing government will be constrained by having worked together chummily for over four years. They will hardly be able to take lumps out of each other in the election campaign whenever it comes. Sinn Féin will be only too happy if the incumbent parties point their rifles mainly at them rather than at each other. Sinn Féin wants to be seen as THE alternative, not just AN alternative.

The principal challenge facing the government over the next two years is to inject a sense of energy and zeal into the way it goes about its business alongside the cohesion and competence I suspect it imagines it already displays. Frankly, the government needs a hot poker to be applied to its rear end.

It’s another broad generalisation to say that modern Irish governments have been more managerial than missionary in their steering of the national ship: generally preferring to make progress without making waves. Effort will do, achievement is a bonus. Adherence to process trumps attainment of results.

I have often felt that if the Russian Army turned up on Curracloe Beach in Wexford intent on taking over the country, our government would be more concerned that its tender for the purchase of weapons was EU-compliant than that weapons were delivered quickly to Óglaigh na hÉireann.

But that perception is not entirely fair. This government has handled capably and urgently if not flawlessly two “macro”-challenges that came at it entirely unforeseen and for which there was no obvious guiding precedent about how they should be managed. Those were the influx of tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees and, more significantly, COVID. Of course, both were challenges that came at the country like an approaching express train which the government had no choice but to wrestle to a halt if it was not to be flattened by them.

Irish governments generally, and this government is no exception, find it harder to “nail” crises where it has time and discretion and must make deliberate choices about where to direct the force of the national government “apparatus” and how hard to apply the throttle. Housing is the most obvious contemporary example.

In his first Dáil address as re-elected Taoiseach, Mr. Varadkar presented “housing” first in his list of “pressing challenges that will define the rest of our term”. He called it a “social crisis”, before affirming his objective to reverse: “the trend of rising homelessness and falling home ownership”. A few weeks later, in an interview with the political journalists, Mr. Varadkar upped the ante on himself, according to The Irish Times report…

…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,”

Some observations on that.

First, I suspect that people would be less obsessed with getting on the so-called “property ladder” of home ownership if there were residences (I am deliberately shunning the word “properties”) available in sufficient number and variety and with reasonable guarantees of security of tenure other than ownership. But, for the moment, ownership is the only sure way of defusing insecure occupancy anxiety.

The government’s pre-occupation with “ownership” dilutes its focus on the key issue which is to turbo-charge the supply of more homes, places for people to live, not properties for them to own. Having a home takes proper precedence over owning a house.

Second, if one wanted evidence that the government’s mind runs behind its mouth, there is the planning Bill which the government approved during the same week of Mr. Varadkar returned to the Taoiseach’s office. The complexity and duration of the planning process is long recognised as a major obstacle to ramping up supply, but the Bill will only tamper with the process rather than overhaul it. Moreover, the issues (the speed and the lengthy and many appeals avenues) didn’t just emerge overnight but were apparent long before this government came to office. And government approval is only the first step in the lengthy meandering process through which the Bill will eventually become law.

This is the equivalent of an EU tender process to equip the army — eventually rather than urgently — with more pea-shooters with which to defy the invading Russian hordes on Curracloe beach.

But remember, when the government doffs its cap to the importance of “home ownership”, it is at least as mindful of the cohorts of voters who already own homes as those fewer voters whose prospects of achieving home ownership are dim. The former are often uneasy and sometimes positively hostile to new homes being created in their vicinity that might disturb their tranquility and affluence. The government is also in thrall to the construction industry generally; builders and developers who make their living “producing” “properties” for sale or rent at profit and the various agents and intermediaries, banks, estate agents and so on, who make their living “facilitating” the trading process, all of whom together with owners have a “stake” in the current property system to the detriment of the dispossessed who definitely don’t.

It is hard to avoid the feeling that the government has much more sympathy for the small-scale landlords who are “quitting the sector” by selling their properties at a profit than the tenants who are made homeless as a result. Perhaps if more members of Dáil Eireann were homeless instead of being landlords themselves, things might be different.

Is there any member of the Cabinet who is directly affected in a serious way by the housing crisis they confront? That is a reasonable question if not normally considered a polite one to ask. And how many of the Cabinet own more than one home?

Third, a government claiming credit for being more “concerned” about housing half-way through its term than it might have been at the beginning of it faces the obvious difficulty of having to explain why it was complacently dozing at the wheel until now. And another gentle reminder: Fine Gael has been in government since 2011. That is a round dozen years. This is Mr. Varadkar’s second spin on the Taoiseach merry-go-round.

But let’s go back to wargaming in general terms (not just housing) what a prospective government should be planning to do after the next election when it might expect to have a full five years ahead of it. Sinn Féin’s strategic “vision” comprises two elements. First, it plans to take more from the rich to give more to the poor. Second, it will throw more money and people at the delivery of public services. There will be something for most members of the audience, all except the fat cats. Oh, and it will shout to anybody willing to listen about the urgent need for referendums on Irish unity while fervently hoping that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to whom it falls to trigger a referendum process will keep his pen in his pocket.

A government resembling the present coalition will proceed with incremental tiller adjustments and prayers that the corporation tax revenue will continue to flow.

Neither offers a strategic vision, only a limited retail offer.

I will leave you with four themes the next government should address but almost certainly won’t.

First, I am comfortably confident that housing will still be an issue because the rising population will ensure that the numbers of new dwellings actually becoming available will always lag the government’s “targets” which will, in turn, be continually chasing behind actual need. “Housing” is a single umbrella word for a multitude of interlinked dysfunctional variables about “homes”. One essential contribution to defusing its problems is to ramp up the stock of publicly owned homes in scale. The “market” does not exist to ensure that there are enough decent and affordable homes for people. Government exists precisely to ensure that — and other public goods.

Second, the government should seek to redress the growing imbalance in opportunity and prosperity between “Dublin and the rest of Leinster” and every other region of the country — not least because that might ease the pressure on home purchase and rental costs in Dublin.

Third, they might seek to untangle the knots between the public and private as well as the secular and religious dimensions and divisions framing ownership, management and control of facilities, staff and service delivery in health and education.

And finally, they should redress the imbalance between the allocation of the burdens and benefits of participation in our society between the young and the old which are skewed heavily in favour of the latter. As of now, young people are paying a much higher price and bearing a much greater burden of looking after the old than the old are having to contribute to ensure that the young get a decent start in life. Having passed 65 last year, I am looking forward to receiving the state pension, bus pass and free television license next year, none of which I really need. Belated thanks to the government also for the electricity credits for which my need was equally great.

On these issues, I don’t expect to be holding my breath. There is little danger of any of these nettles being grasped and throttled by any party.

I have left climate change to one side. That is an issue the implications of which are sufficiently apocalyptic for it to be a missionary concern right now. And the contemporary verbiage, “planning” and target setting of officialdom is missionary, even to the extent of being supposedly legally binding. So, we can all hug ourselves about the great job we are doing.

But actual performance lags a long way behind. However, no need to worry. In political terms, 2030 is a long way off — two elections hence — and 2050 isn’t even a dot on the horizon.

And health? Over Christmas I consulted with an experienced change-maker who has dealt with many Herculean challenges, the most impressive being to create the world in only seven days, and whose ability to raise people from the dead, not least himself, comes a close second. I wondered if he might not grapple with Ireland’s health “service” too? “Never!”, he responded emphatically and despondently. “Life is too short. There are some miracles that are beyond divine intervention to perform.”

The situation of our island republic may often be desperate. But, it is seldom serious.