Fine Gael’s unenviable, uncertain victory

Oh look, the ruling Fianna Fail party is set for defeat in the Irish election. Unsurprising, for sure, but the scale of their drubbing will still be something to behold. An exit poll conducted by RTE has them in third place on only 15.1 percent of the vote – which, as Sunder Katwala points out over at Next Left, is some way down from both their traditional 40+ per cent support and the 41.6 per cent that they achieved in 2007. The same exit poll has the centre right Fine Gael party in the lead (on 36.1 per cent), their best performance for 28 years, although not enough for an overall majority. The probable outcome, as Alex details, is a coalition between them and the second-placed Labour party.

Guido characterises the impending results as a victory for the country’s centre-right, suggesting that the Irish public is alert to the need for fiscal discipline. That may well be true – even if it is mitigated by Labour’s majority-spoiling performance – but it is a superfluous sort of truth. Whichever party had won this general election, be they of the left or of the right, they would have had to run the deficit down to 3 per cent of GDP at the behest of the country’s European creditors. And, as our coalition has found, they probably wouldn’t have received much thanks for it either.  

I’ll leave CoffeeHousers with a snippet from Kevin Myers’ wonderfully scathing piece for the latest issue of The Spectator. Here’s how he sees the outcome of yesterday’s vote:

“Whoever wins the Irish general election — [Fine Gael leader Enda] Kenny, probably — will have to doff his cap daily to the neatly suited ECB/IMF inspectors (‘Germans’, as they are generically called) who now cruise Irish government corridors. His glorious prime ministerial duties will largely consist of him licking EU stamps, and asking if the staff can have Saturday afternoon off, bitte. He will also default on the repayments of Irish debt, because it is impossible for Ireland to meet the multi-billion-euro demands of the European banks and bond-holders. No one can rescue Ireland now, save the empire to which it has so abjectly surrendered its soul.”