I will begin this article with some exclusive inside information from a losing campaign: Niall Boylan, the defeated Independent Ireland candidate for the Dublin European constituency, had circa 1,000 posters during the election.
One other candidate, representing a political party, had ten thousand. That candidate got many thousands of fewer votes than Boylan did. So what is the lesson we can learn? That posters aren’t everything? Not quite.
Because of course, posters are really a proxy for a lot of other things. When you have 10,000 posters, as opposed to one thousand, chances are that means your campaign has more money. It also, most likely, has more volunteers: The 10,000 poster candidate had their posters put up by volunteers, who were also putting up posters for the local elections. It’s quite easy to poster a city on the scale of Dublin when you have hundreds of volunteers working on local election campaigns as well.
Here’s some other insider information: The Boylan campaign had only a very few committed volunteers – a couple of dozen at the upper limit, I am told. By contrast, the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil candidates, as well as the Sinn Fein and Labour candidates, had their entire party’s organisation at their disposal. For all four parties, that amounts to several thousand activists knocking on doors, facing down voters, and answering questions about their candidate. Despite all that, the Boylan campaign came fifth and gave the establishment a fright. It is not an insignificant achievement.
With proper organisation, however, there is no doubt in my mind that Boylan – or indeed any one of five or six other candidates – could have won.
In the Dublin election, the left took two seats and the centrist parties (I’m using their own description) took two more. The last candidate elected – Mr. O’Riordáin – finished with 63,526 votes.
The right, by contrast, took no seats. The cumulative “right” vote – for the sake of argument I am including Aontú here though they might not include themselves in that description – polled, on the very first count, 64,105 votes. More than the total number of votes, as it turned out, needed to secure a seat.
But that actually undersells the nature of the failure, because it is not as if those 64,105 votes were the maximum votes available. Turnout in this election was low. It is a reasonable assumption that there were many more “winnable” voters who simply did not turn out, who might have turned out had they been canvassed, or reached, or talked to.
To do that, you need one effective organisation. The right, in this election, had perhaps ten ineffective organisations.
Instead of a co-ordinated and well organised campaign with canvassers working for one or two local candidate in each ward, and one or two EU candidates hand in hand, there was instead a patchwork quilt of groups working in an uncoordinated way with fifteen or sixteen different versions of the same message. To give the example of Malachy Steenson, who won his election in the locals but was not a factor in the Europeans, the question must be asked as to whether his local election victory might not have been much more resounding had he not also been focused on trying to reach voters outside his ward, and was instead focused entirely on his own area, and helping to promote an EU candidate there as well.
Instead of local cumanns and organisations that know every street in their wards and know what voters are persuadable, the right has a series of pop-up campaigns that come along every five years and try to grow votes on ground that has already been well-seeded by their opponents. All of this does not only result in a fractured vote – but thousands of votes being left on the table.
It is the same across the country: In Midlands North West, John Waters had an admirable volunteer campaign, but no money. By contrast, Peter Casey had money, but hardly any volunteers. Michelle Smith had an online presence but couldn’t afford a litir um thoghchain; Hermann Kelly and Peadar Toibin had local candidates, but perhaps slightly the wrong message (In Kelly’s case, leaving the EU, in Toibin’s, potentially leaving his seat). Ciaran Mullooly had celebrity, and the backing of a prominent TD, but little trust from right-leaning activists. In Ireland South, Mary Fitzgibbon and Una McGurk each had the almost fanatical trust of a dedicated cadre of activists, but no name recognition. There are also, of course, some people who simply should not be candidates because they lack electoral appeal. A well organised movement would weed such people out, via selection conventions.
It is no coincidence that one candidate who surprised, though still did not threaten a seat – Derek Blighe – had a little bit of everything: Enough money for posters and leaflets; name recognition and media profile; a strong online presence; local election candidates; a clear message; and committed volunteers.
Just not enough of any of them.
For all those candidates, if you add all their strengths together, you get a very formidable campaign. Separately, all of their weaknesses combine to create a mess.
A mess that still secured, in the EU elections, some 21% of the vote combined, nationally.
Fixing all of this is not as simple as waving a magic wand. Everyone who wishes to see a successful right movement in Ireland will have to make their peace that an electorally successful movement will be one that they can only agree with on perhaps 80% of the issues.
Those who want to see “mass deportations” will have to settle, perhaps, for strong restrictions on immigration and citizenship, and a fix to our voting system. Pro lifers may have to settle for something a bit less than “go back to how it was before 2018”, at least in the short term. People concerned about the WHO treaty may have to settle for a commitment to no more lockdowns or health mandates. Libertarians and small Government conservatives, like myself, may have to settle for a policy of more public spending than we might like. Hardline nationalists may have to settle for a more mainstream policy on Irish unity, and people like me might have to accept a policy on the middle east more in line with the Irish mainstream and a position on neutrality which annoys me.
Yet in return, there are many things that such a movement could unite around that would be politically popular. A commitment to free speech; a commitment to reforming sentencing so that criminals – especially those convicted of sexual offences – go to prison; a commitment to standing firm against green taxes and much of the current climate policy; a commitment to adopting, at minimum, the Danish policy on migration; a commitment to dismantling the NGO infrastructure of the left; a commitment to reform of education and the curriculum; a pledge to defend the interests of farmers and food production; a commitment to prioritising Irish people on housing lists; a commitment to, as a short term measure, guarantee funding for sick children such as those with scoliosis to receive treatment abroad.
That list is not exhaustive.
Of course, there will always be those for whom that kind of thing is not enough. There will always be those who put their names on a ballot paper out of ego, or spite, or a delusional belief that they can win simply by so doing. Such people will always exist, and will always be loud. There will also too always be imbeciles online and elsewhere who try to make a name for themselves by tearing others down – whether that be by making videos encouraging people not to transfer their votes to other candidates, or by indulging in overt racism for some “likes” from Americans.
For the broad mainstream of the right, however – people who are not “far right” or anything like it – such an achievement should not be impossible.
Difficult, yes. But not impossible.