It’s been three days since Ireland went to the ballot box to decide the local and European elections and, much to consternation of pretty much everyone, we’re still waiting for the final results. The exit polls though show a remarkable collapse in support for Sinn Fein.
Mary Lou McDonald’s attempts to become respectable with the overwhelmingly liberal and middle-class Dublin mediocracy quite simply blew up in her face
This has been a rancorous and remarkably bad-tempered campaign. The rise in popularity in the polls of supposedly anti-immigrant parties such as Irish Freedom and Ireland First (neither of which even existed when we had the last local, European and general elections) had seemed to indicate that this new right-wing movement was enjoying a surge in popularity.
As we see from the exit polls, this might not necessarily be entirely the case, with neither party doing particularly well so far. The Irish are fundamentally conservative with a small ‘c’ and they tend to avoid changing their vote to what they may worry is an extremist party. But there has been an undoubted shift to more anti-immigrant points of view.
There is a huge anger and sense of despair, even a feeling of abandonment, in Ireland at the moment. People have been leaving the country in levels similar to the 1980s, when the Irish economy was in the tank, there was an ever-present threat of nuclear war and the only sensible option for many people was to ‘bug out’ to Australia.
Under such circumstances, Sinn Fein had, for a time, been lording it in the polls, reaching at one point a 40 per cent approval rating. Sinn Finn forming a government, which a generation ago would have been unthinkable, seemed a viable proposition.
Sinn Fein’s rise came after the catastrophic economic crash of 2008, when the needlessly punitive limits placed on the government sentenced every Irish taxpayer to an estimated 40 years of inherited debt.
The anger, as you can imagine, was palpable. In a country which had become so prosperous, cash machines suddenly stopped operating and the Taoiseach at the time, Enda Kenny, solemnly warned that the government was considering the previously unheard idea of deploying soldiers outside banks.
The scars of those dark days of ‘the Crash’ remain with many, if not all, Irish people.
Sinn Fein, to their credit, were more adept than other left-wing parties – who just blamed everything on capitalism – at harnessing the justified anger of so many Irish people. This was particularly the case for those in their 20s and 30s who now know that they will never be able to buy their own home.
Sinn Fein’s campaign mantra for the last few years been as simple and concise as all such slogans should be: ‘Time for Change’. That resonated with many young voters, particularly those born after the Good Friday Agreement, who simply saw Sinn Fein as the party who would give them free houses.
Yet from their highest polling of 40 per cent, Sunday night’s final tally showed them trailing in at a dismal 12 per cent, and they have been virtually wiped out in the local election results.
The reason?
Well, Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Fein essentially adopted an open borders policy which would allow mass immigration into Ireland.
Mary Lou McDonald’s attempts to become respectable with the overwhelmingly liberal and middle-class Dublin mediocracy quite simply blew up in her face, as rising non-EU immigration has come to dominate the political agenda.
But she’s not the only victim of this electoral splatter.
Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE, faced remarkable public outrage when it refused to platform the European election candidates Ciaran Mullooly or Niall Boylan on their live TV debates. Both candidates are well known broadcasters in Ireland, with both also standing for a new right-wing party, Independent Ireland.(Interestingly, Mullooly recently left RTE in acrimonious circumstances, fuelling the conspiracy theories about an apparent RTE bias.)
Now, at the time of writing, it looks like both Mullooly and Boylan will be booking their flights to Europe while Mary Lou McDonald and the rest of her party look on the smouldering wreckage of their disastrous campaign.
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