The best description of Ireland’s political landscape after Friday’s general election might be: strangely familiar. The familiar bit is easy. The two main incumbent parties, Micheál Martin’s Fianna Fáil and Simon Harris’s Fine Gael, received almost exactly the same combined share of the vote (43%) as they did in 2020. As a result, the identical twins of Irish politics that have governed the state since it came into being just over a century ago will continue to do so.
One of them, Fianna Fáil, which has won the most seats this time, emerged as the dominant political machine in the 1930s and was almost permanently in charge until its vote imploded in 2011 after the bloody death of the Celtic Tiger. It is now edging back, if not towards its old ascendancy, then certainly into a comfortable seat at the centre of power. Its like-minded partner, Fine Gael, has been continually in government in one form or another since 2011, and if the incoming administration lasts a full term it will remain there until 2029.
So, same old, same old. But this familiarity itself feels strange. At the most obvious level, in this global year of elections, Irish voters have bucked the trend established by their counterparts in Britain, the US, France, Japan and South Africa and have declined to give the incumbents a good kicking. Amid the turbulence of so much of the democratic world, Ireland seems, on the surface at least, perversely calm.
Below the surface, though, there are paradoxes and perplexities. This was no simple vote of confidence in the status quo. Whatever the electorate in Ireland’s increasingly complex and fragmented political system is saying, it is something much more ambiguous than a big thumbs-up emoji.
The first oddity to be understood is that the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael duopoly is in fact a declining force. As recently as 2007, the twins had almost 70% of the vote between them. Considering that Ireland has in effect full employment, a massively expanded workforce, overflowing public coffers and a booming export-led economy, it may seem puzzling that the two parties are now very far from being able to command the loyalty of even half the voters.
They can, after all, claim with a great deal of justification that they have turned what was once one of western Europe’s poorest countries into a wealthy society. They have transformed a place of departure, shaped by generations of mass emigration and depopulation, into a place of arrival in which one in five residents were born outside Ireland. They have steered the country through the crises of Brexit and Covid with a competence that was all the more reassuring for the contrast it provided to the anarchic politics across the Irish Sea and the Atlantic. So how come they have received such a lukewarm endorsement?
Usually, the obvious explanation would be the popularity of the main opposition party – in this case Sinn Féin. Two or three years ago, this reasoning would have made sense. Sinn Féin, led by the brilliant campaigner Mary Lou McDonald, was polling at well over 30% and there was a common assumption that it was within striking distance of being able to form the next government with a coalition of leftwing parties.
But the opposite has happened. McDonald did indeed run a very good campaign and her party produced detailed and costed proposals to address two of the outgoing government’s biggest failures: a grossly inadequate supply of housing and very uneven access to healthcare. Yet the results of Friday’s vote have punctured the narrative of Sinn Féin’s inevitable rise to power on both sides of the Irish border. It was actually the biggest loser of the election, its share of the vote shrinking from a quarter to a fifth. The loss is disguised somewhat by the fact that there are more seats in an expanded Dáil this time, but it is nonetheless undeniable.
Why has Sinn Féin gone backwards? Partly because at least some of its support has leached away to rightwing candidates exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment among working-class voters who feel left behind by Ireland’s shiny globalised economy. The far right did not make enough gains on Friday to win Dáil seats, but its plethora of would-be tribunes of “the people” did eat into parts of Sinn Féin’s traditional ethno-nationalist base.
And partly because Sinn Féin has been beset in recent months by a series of internal scandals, some of them involving cover-ups of egregious failures of its child protection procedures. The party has looked at best incompetent and at worst cynical. For all its strengths, it has not looked ready for power in Dublin. Middle-class voters anxious for progressive change were drawn more towards the centre-left parties, Labour and the Social Democrats, both of whom performed very well, albeit from a low base.
It is those parties who now face the most significant choices. Do they offer, in return for a share of power, to make up the numbers that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will require for a stable parliamentary majority? Or do they see an opportunity to exploit Sinn Féin’s difficulties and seek to establish themselves as the most dynamic force among the fragmented opposition?
The attractions of office are strong, especially since the incoming government has plenty of money to spend. But Donald Trump’s threat to start a trade war with the EU is especially ominous for Ireland, which depends heavily on its position as the European base for US companies. Almost every party that contested the election offered voters a bonanza of public spending on infrastructure, housing and public services. Expectations are correspondingly high. Yet there are good reasons to think that the fiscal luxury the last government enjoyed (and arguably squandered) may evaporate.
There is also for the centre-left parties a political massacre to contemplate. The Green party that joined Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the outgoing government, and provided most of its innovation and dynamism, lost 11 of its 12 seats. To a degree it did so because its bigger partners signalled to voters that all the pain involved in trying to meet Ireland’s obligations to tackle the climate crisis was the fault of the Greens. This was as disloyal as it was dishonest, and it showed the shallowness of the centre-right parties’ commitment to genuine change and the ruthlessness with which they will devour their smaller allies.
It may well be (depending on where the final seat numbers fall) that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will be able to govern with the support of a handful of independents. But such a government would have to confront the profound contradictions from which it has emerged. It would represent a dull continuity – even though the parties themselves promised, in the words of Fine Gael’s election slogan, “a new energy”. Those who have been in government themselves recognised that the mood in the country is far from uniformly upbeat. Their basic proposition was that they can now do all the things – such as creating adequate physical infrastructure and public services – that they have failed to do previously, not just in the last four years but over the last century. It is a strangely familiar proposition.
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times and the author of We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland
