Labour’s Ivana Bacik is “alarmed” at the number of spoiled votes in the Presidential election. She didn’t like it one bit. It was “profoundly anti-democratic”, she said for anyone to organise people to spoil their vote – as opposed to dutifully lining up to support one or other of the carefully curated candidates the parties had chosen for the proles, I suppose.
It was an orchestrated effort, Bacik fretted, by the ‘far-right’ and others. Holly Cairns of the SocDems also indulged in a bit of hand-wringing, saying it was “really worrying”.
It could be observed that one measure of success for any initiative is how much it causes the liberal left to fret, but in truth their reaction is mostly unimportant, though their repressive instincts are revealing. There’s nothing “anti-democratic” about ordinary people sending a message through the ballot box. It’s what the left used to claim they did before decideding to abandon the concerns of the average citizen in favour of woke nonsense or globalist ideology.
The fact remains that a stunning, historic, unprecedented number of disenfranchised people came out, not to vote for an establishment candidate, but specifically to express their anger.
It has long been held that it is extraordinarily difficult to motivate massive numbers of people to bother to go to the polling booth and deliberately spoil their vote. It goes against the grain because we have always been told that exercising one’s vote is a positive action, showing support for a candidate, taking part in the process.
But this time 213,738 people, a truly extraordinary number, participated to show the process that they were tired of being held in contempt. As the Irish Times opined, “the fallout from this result will reverberate for a considerable time”.
Will any lessons be learned by the two supposedly centre-right parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, from this election, however? To be honest that seems unlikely, since they are not, in truth, much interested in being a foil to the liberal left, and spend their time openly displaying their contempt for their own supporters, not to mind those floating voters who might be up for grabs.
This viral exchange between David Quinn and Fine Gael’s Emer Higgins over the weekend underlines that level of sheer indifference and disregard – and highlights a fact that conservatives seem slow to grasp: these parties don’t want you.
They’re just not that into you, as the saying goes – as indicated by Higgins’s desire to go chasing imaginary support from voters who want nothing to do with her party. David Quinn is right when he says that Fine Gael are focused on the wrong voters, and disinterested in courting values voters they’ve lost, but Higgins’s reaction is reflective of the leadership view, not just in her own party, but also in Fianna Fáil.
That’s why I disagree with my colleague Laura Perrins when she says we need a right wing alliance which would, in reality, be primarily made up of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, though I absolutely understand her frustration. She says “a leftwing government would be an absolute disaster for Ireland, as it is for every other country they are ever elected in.”
They would, but the problem is that the supposedly centre-right governments which have been in charge for decades have been an absolute disaster for Ireland, and that will not change as long as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are the dominant force in any such coalition. Out-of-control immigration radically altering our country; an asylum system severely damaging – perhaps irreparably – our tourism industry and causing public unrest; violent crime spiralling in a country where murder used to be a thankfully rare occurrence; a failure to tackle overruns and ridiculous delays in public infrastructure projects; our young people leaving in droves and with them any hope of addressing our birth rate collapse while abortion rates soar; the list is endless, and the damage has been caused, not by the wild and extreme left, but by those who are meant to be their political opposite.
Real, disruptive, political change is needed, and the seismic changes across Europe in the past 5 years show that it can be done. We cannot keep returning to political parties that despise us and only seem interested in obeying EU directives or fulfilling “international obligations”.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael don’t want a right wing alliance anyway, they’d far prefer to cosy up with the Greens or Labour who have always been the tail wagging the dog precisely because that’s how the bigger parties want it. They may quietly blame our asylum mess or spiralling energy costs on Roderic O’Gorman and Eamon Ryan but it was the larger parties who not only happily implemented Green and left policies but then largely adopted them as their own.
They have presided over all the reckless governance that has led to the situation where, despite the unbelievably profligate spending and taxing families into the ground, the country seems to be falling apart as we face into the likely prospect of losing the source of revenue that has been making all that spending possible: our corporation tax haul from multinationals.
I think that sometimes conservatives can become paralyzed at the awful spectre of a left government taking the reins especially when the left are hollering from the rooftops about a win, even though that win was really a combination of awful opposition and sheer luck and, as Ben Scallan showed when he crunched the numbers, the lowest valid turnout in the history of the state. Catherine Connolly is President with 25% of the votes that could have been cast.
But Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael rely on the bogeyman left to keep their traditional base from abandoning them altogether. “Think we’re bad, wait until the Shinners have you paying 70% tax,” is their pitch, and it has kept them from oblivion. But elsewhere that reliable threat has fallen to voter discontent. It should happen here too.
In Britain, the old binary choice of Labour versus Conservatives is being upended by the success of Reform whose support is largely gathered from those voters who eventually got sick and tired of waiting for the Tories to fulfill their promises. It will, of course, have helped Reform that Labour are proving so goddam awful.
It’s unlikely that positing Thatcher as an example to follow will go down well with Irish voters in my view. And when things are badly broken, radical change is requited to fix it. Trump is also a radical disruptor, which is why he was, and is, opposed by so many in the Republican party who, just as with the Conservatives in Britain, kept voters endlessly dangling while they pursued policies that were anathema to their voters and harmful to society. Reform’s agenda seems genuinely radical in that it refuses to be bounded by supposed imperatives like Net Zero or the ECHR. That sort of thinking is badly needed to direct political change here.
It is my view that there are many good people – grassroots members – of the largest parties in the State who also feel equally despised by the leadership. Relying on incrementalism or seeking to pull back Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael from their embrace of the destructive liberal left is a waste of time, however, and will lead mostly to more disappointment.
What we can all agree on is that those seeking to build a real political alternative – which embraces traditional values and upholds nationalist traditions while protecting a modern, thriving economy – do need to coalesce and set aside differences in order to organise, engage, inform and motivate an increasingly disenfranchised electorate. The 213,738 spoiled votes represent but a portion of a people ripe to embrace real change. Carpe Diem. Or be left with the same.