An election is an opportunity – a rare opportunity – for every adult citizen in the country to pass their verdict on the state of the nation.
Opinion polls are not votes, but they give us some insight into the national mood. Asked by The Irish Times Behaviour and Attitudes pollsters last week whether the country needed change, or not, some 53% of voters favoured moderate change. A further 35% sought radical change. Only 9% – fewer than one in ten of us – sought no change at all.
And yet those same opinion polls tend to show that voters have limited options for change. The final Red C poll of the campaign, published last night, shows the three major parties all polling only slightly down on where they were in 2020. A cumulative 7% of voters in that polling series have abandoned Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Fein, all of whom are now polling in or around the 20% mark.
In essence, people want change, but are preparing to vote, per the opinion polls, for more of the same. This, we believe, would be a mistake.
It would be a mistake for several reasons.
First, you cannot send politicians mixed messages about what you believe. Your vote does not lie. Either you endorse the record of our politicians, by giving them a number one preference, or you reject it. Voting is, essentially, a binary activity. You either want change, or you do not.
We pause to note here that we simply do not believe that the Sinn Fein party represents change of any kind. Their actions over the past five years belie that claim. They backed the Government on every major decision, depriving the public, in the process, of the kinds of important debate that opposition is supposed to provide. On covid-19, Sinn Fein was slavish in its devotion to the Government’s priorities. On Brexit similarly. On immigration, if anything its record in the round has been more slavishly pro-Government than the Government itself. It was Sinn Fein that attended a pro-immigration rally in Dublin in March 2023 to endorse the Government’s policies, while Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil stayed at home.
On spending priorities, the party is largely aligned with its civil war twins. In any case, even if Sinn Fein does enter Government, it will be with one of the two parties currently in office. That would amount to a re-arrangement of deck chairs, not a righting of the ship.
Second, it should be obvious over the past ten years that your vote is much more effective with a small party or an independent than it is with a candidate of a major party. Say what you will about the Green Party – and we are not fans – but that party has enacted far more of its 2020 policy platform in Government than either of its larger partners. From 2016-2020, independent TDs were able to extract powerful policy concessions from the minority Fine Gael government, as fans and opponents of former Ministers Katherine Zappone and Shane Ross will recall. Empowering a smaller coalition partner to prop up two of the big three and extract policy concessions is objectively a better use of your vote, based on recent history, than backing a big party.
Third, the record of the past five years has too often been the triumph of groupthink over true intellectual diversity in our politics. Again, we mention the pandemic here, when it was only a handful of politicians in the Oireachtas who displayed the intellectual and moral courage to ask unpopular questions. Or the case of the Hate Speech bill, which was defeated by a handful of independent Senators while mainstream politicians lined up to ask no questions. Or the case of the referenda earlier this year, when Aontú was the only party in Dáil Eireann to say no from the start. Or on crime and migration, where our politicians as a collective seem only too happy to parrot the official line and caveat every comment with a distancing of themselves from much of the electorate.
This is a country where diversity is prized in everything bar political thought, it very often seems.
If you are amongst the 88% of people who seek change, then, the only logical thing to do is to vote for a smaller party or an independent that actually represents change. We do not tell you who to vote for, but your ballot paper will not be short of options: There is at least one candidate on every ballot paper who would have joined the chorus of the questioning over the past five years, rather than the legions of consensus. Those candidates should be the ones you support, in our estimation.
The final point, and perhaps the most important, is that we believe – as we said at the beginning of this campaign – that the record of this Government deserves to be rejected, if for no other reason than simple democratic hygiene. A vote for them is to endorse their record – a record which is littered with fiasco after fiasco, ranging from the National Children’s Hospital to the Dáil Bike Shed to the treatment of children with Scoliosis to the Taoiseach calling Donald Trump a “gowl”. It would endorse an immigration policy which is obviously out of control, a crime policy that tends to reward criminals with a slap on the wrist, a foreign policy that appears to be based on grandstanding, and an economic policy which has seen the cost of living spiral out of the reach of many ordinary middle class families.
If you are upset about housing, then bear in mind that housing is in the state it is because of the record of the political establishment. If you are upset about carers, then recall that their supports or lack of them have been set by this Government. If you are upset about sex education in schools, or men in women’s prisons, recall who it was who set those policies.
Most of all, though, even if you disagree with us, use your vote tomorrow. Irish politicians are not a fan of elections, and when this one is over they will cobble together some coalition that they intend to last five more years. By the time you get another say, the country you live in could look very different.
Consider that, and then cast your vote for those who will at least – in the words of the great American writer William F. Buckley – “stand athwart history, shouting stop”.