The Irish election: 5 things you need to know
Raise the Roof march, 2019 (Shutterstock)
Here are five things you need to know about the Irish election:
1) This was not a Brexit election. Brexit played no part in the campaign. A key issue was a foolish decision by the Fine Gael (FG) government to increase the pension retirement age from 65 to 67, without ensuring that firms altered staff contracts to allow employees to keep working until 67. Swathes of voters faced leaving work at 65 but having no income until 67. Fianna Fail (FF) failed to come out clearly against this measure. Sinn Fein (SF) unambiguously opposed it and picked up those votes.
2) Other issues like the appalling state of Ireland’s public health service and the lack of affordable homes for men and women in ordinary jobs allowed Sinn Fein to get a big protest vote. There was an element of Corbynism in the Sinn Fein offer, not reflected in the old style Fine Gael and Fianna Fail politics. FF and FG are regarded as being in the pocket of property developers. Ireland’s GDP has increased massively this century but many ordinary Irish families are still struggling, rather like the left-behind workers in Northern England who deserted Labour in December. But three out of four Irish voters did not vote Sinn Fein.
3) Sinn Fein remains at heart the historic political expression of the Irish republican struggle. Members and even elected representatives have very little power in the party, which is run by its Executive Council. Its low-profile members retain a rigid centralist control over who gets put up as a candidate or is named a party spokesperson. Emblematic of the IRA-SF link is Dessie Ellis who won the biggest single victory in his Dublin constituency. Wilson was extradited from the US after he skipped bail following his arrest in Ireland when explosives were found under his bed in 1981. He was sentenced by an Irish court to ten years in prison. The younger SF activists are left-wing in the manner of Momentum and the ruling guard are careful to put up new faces who were in school when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. But SF remains a classic democratic centralist party and at some stage there will be an explosion, as a new generation clashes with the old guard who led the struggle in the 1970s and 1980s.
4) The smart move would be to let Sinn Fein enter government as ministers, giving them, for example, housing and health. Let the Irish people see if SF can deliver. They are unlikely to be able to do so.
5) Already SF are pivoting away from the social issues that lost the 1920s clericalist nationalist parties their vote. SF is now saying the priority is a “border referendum”. That plays to the century old SF core demand of getting Britain out of Ireland. Boris Johnson will not concede this and thus English Tory intransigence will shore up SF support. But there is no evidence that there is majority support for reunification in Northern Ireland. It is not just the DUP or Protestant unionists. Very few Northern Irish nationalist Catholic voters would want to swap the NHS and other UK-funded social welfare transfer payment for the much poorer public health care or social services in the Republic. Many Northern Irish citizens are in public sector jobs funded by transfers from the English taxpayer. Will they risk losing these jobs and income by embracing rule from Dublin?
Finally, the Irish vote confirms the new trend line in wider European politics. The classic 20th-century party formations of the centre right (including Fianna Fail and Fine Gael) are losing support, as are the classic 20th-century centre-left parties like Labour, the French and Italian socialists, or the German and Nordic social democrats. This has been wrongly interpreted by academics and commentators in London as Europe moving to a nationalist populist anti-EU right-wing model of politics. The Irish election was a win for left nationalist populism. As elsewhere in the EU, green populism did well. There is as much support for progressive populist and identity politics as for the right. All the parties in Ireland are ardently pro-European. Britain remains alone in making the rejection of Europe the cornerstone of its politics.
