The government has said they want to “level the playing field” by outlawing the management of all parties’ social media accounts from abroad, but this is a sideshow compared to how mainstream parties already rigged the game a long time ago.
The Cabinet has indicated its intention to crack down on what it apparently perceives as Sinn Féin’s shady dealings abroad, not only through the wildly lucrative Friends of Sinn Féin USA, but also the party’s benefactors and social media operators in Europe.
Expanding the Electoral Reform Bill 2021 to create roadblocks for the Sinn Féin juggernaut, government parties have simultaneously appeared responsible and ready to meet any “threats to our democracy” with swift legal repercussions.
One would think they actually believe their own rhetoric around election integrity, transparency and fundraising.
The reality however is that all the major parties know the game is ultimately tilted in their favour, and they’re not about to remedy that much bigger problem if they can avoid it.
Put simply, the major parties have cemented their electoral superiority by giving themselves vastly more taxpayer funding than a small or new party can hope to attain under the 1997 Electoral Act.
This arrangement of giving considerable sums of taxpayers’ money to political parties on the basis of having a greater share of the vote is the single biggest obstacle to allowing genuine political competition to gain a foothold in the national conversation.
Whilst they are prohibited from spending taxpayers money directly on campaigning, the slush fund not only means they can create a formidable, well-staffed machine which influences their effectiveness on the ground, but all other monies raised can be spent on winning seats.
Ireland is stuck firmly in the vicious circle of establishment parties being given wall-to-wall coverage because they unsurprisingly win the most seats with their vast war-chests, making this particular merry-go-round a difficult one to stop.
This is all the antithesis of a “level playing field” the government speaks of, where we the taxpayer idiotically prop up a corrupt system of political benefit for our ruling class.
In 2018 alone, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil together received over €3 million from this pot because of the high percentage of first preference votes they enjoyed; Sinn Féin received almost €1 million, whilst five other parties divided €1.9 million accordingly.
This is the real democratic deficit in Irish politics, where alternative voices and ideas are excluded from the halls of power because our overlords have rewarded their electoral success with more funding, thus laying the firm foundation for future success.
The solution to this is clear: to halt all taxpayer funding of political parties.
But don’t expect those on the real gravy train to tackle anything other than mere trifles like social media accounts and “foreign interference”.