It’s Green bin day! That was the general refrain of many Irish political wags as the country continues to tally the count from Friday’s election. The first indicators from the exit polls were that the Green party who had been minority, but deeply unpopular, members of the governing coalition had just been hammered by the voters.
Speaking at the main count centre in Dublin’s RDS, an ashen faced party leader Roderic O’Gorman admitted that ‘this has not been a good day for us’. On this point, he is certainly correct. They are now on course to lose eight of the twelve seats they had previously held and he ruefully admitted that, ‘some very good colleagues, who have worked hard for the last four and half years are now very scared of losing their seats’. As well they might.
Ireland’s misery will stay largely the same
MPs such as Hazel Chu, Catherine Martin and O’Gorman himself were regular features of the Irish media, but as the exit polls suggested, the Green agenda was an issue for only 4 per cent of the voters. The party which had made carbon emissions, carbon reduction and increased Green taxes their main talking points were feeling the sharp elbows of an electorate which simply did not share their predominantly middle class, metropolitan concerns. Despite holding several ministerial portfolios, the party had become increasingly out of touch with a population who were far more energised by the housing crisis, the ever growing immigration concerns and the cost of living than they were with the levels of methane produced by Ireland’s unusually flatulent cows.
With the two big beasts Fianna Fail and Fine Gael set to slide back into power there is a sense of deja vu. After all, one or both parties have been in power since the foundation of the State and only a broad coalition of the Left, with Sinn Fein as the main party, was ever going to stand a chance of changing the natural order of Irish politics.
The only problem with that suggestion was that many of the parties of the Left despise each other more than they dislike either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael. Labour leader, Ivana Bacik had previously and rather preciously addressed her ‘difficulties’ with even referring to the Shinners as ‘a party of the Left’, preferring to dismiss them for their ‘populist’ policies.
Smaller potential power brokers, the Greens and the Social Democrats, have spent much of the campaign squabbling with each other over who would be best suited to becoming a minority member of the coalition. The Social Democrats had also expressed their disdain for Labour, who had been incorrectly written off prior to Friday’s vote. Meanwhile, the Greens also faced the added hurdle of having been part of what had become an increasingly despised government over the course of the last parliament.
While any hope of a credible left-wing alliance taking charge were always forlorn, Sinn Fein’s offer to join either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael in coalition had been quickly dismissed by both party leaders, Micheal Martin and current Taioseach, Simon Harris. Their reluctance to get into bed with the Shinners was justified, with only 7 per cent of the electorate considering that to be a viable option, while 49 per cent favoured a continuation of the current order. As things stand, Sinn Fein did better than had been expected, although not as well as their polling a few years ago may have indicated.
In the lifetime of this parliament, the party had increasingly lost support from their traditional, conservative and rural base who were aghast at their progression towards becoming a more socially liberal, immigrant-friendly party. They had managed to shore up some support in the last few weeks of the campaign, and emerged with exit polls giving them a 21.1 per cent share, beating both Fine Gael and Fianna Fail – who enjoyed 21 per cent and 19 per cent respectively.
Under Ireland’s cumbersome, lengthy but still popular process of proportional representation (as opposed to the UK’s first-past-the-post system), by the time the second preferences had been counted Sinn Fein was left on 17 per cent – still the largest individual party, but nowhere near enough to corral a coalition. As the popular rural Independent MP Michael Fitzmaurice points out, under the PR system, ‘it’s hard to turf out a government’ and this year it would appear, is no different.
With this natural order maintained, the main interest now is who will lose their seat. The current Justice Minister, Helen McEntee, is feeling the pressure as she struggles to maintain her seat in the Meath East constituency. That can be attributed in large part to her constant pursuit of establishing hate crime and hate speech laws which remain popular only with certain politicians, the increasingly controversial NGOs and establishment members of the legacy media and are either deeply unpopular or simply irrelevant to many voters who are more concerned with crime.
Which brings us to the rather bizarre situation where one of Ireland’s most notorious gangland figures, Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch, looks well placed to win the last seat in his crime-ridden and impoverished constituency of Dublin Central. It was here that devastating riots and looting took place in November of last year.
In a sign that Irish politics had truly taken a turn for the surreal, one of the gangster’s main pledges was that he wanted to see more Gardai on the streets. By any metric, that’s an unusual proposition from a man who was head of one side of the most vicious and lethal gang feud in the history of the state. The turf war between his mob and their hated enemies the Kinahans left 18 dead and saw hundreds of beatings, stabbing and pipe bomb attacks which made international headlines.
While it may not have been the ‘Indepedents’ Day’ that many Independent campaigners had predicted, there are enough of them still in the mix to take some notable scalps. Perhaps the most telling moment of the campaign came from one woman who, interviewed after casting her ballot, simply said that she had voted ‘to maintain stability’.
The Irish are a people who are conservative with a small ‘c’. While they were unhappy with the current regime, they looked at the potential opposition and decided it was better to stick to with they devil they knew. In fact, that attitude was best summed up by one volunteer at a count centre in Cork who wore a t-shirt saying ‘Maybe I Just Like The Misery’.
We won’t know the final composition of the new government until Monday or even Tuesday, and a new cabinet won’t be formed until early in the new year. But it is clear there were no clear winners in this election, Simon Harris will still be Taoiseach for Christmas and, as the man in Cork suggested, Ireland’s misery will stay largely the same.
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