One might be forgiven, reading Pat Leahy’s interview with Mary-Lou McDonald for the Irish Times yesterday, for thinking one was reading an interview with the leader of a radical right wing party that had just won a shock election victory somewhere in Europe and was urgently trying to settle the markets and reassure the world that the new administration wouldn’t do anything too edgy, too quickly.
The interview addressed four main issues: The economy, housing, immigration, and the Israel/Gaza war. On the economy, Mary Lou was in full “don’t scare the horses” mode:
I think business and investment correctly needs to have a sense of direction, of what happens next. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable ask for any sector to say to me that they don’t want to see rabbits pulled from hats. That they want a sense of direction….. I think it’s very, very important to develop our economy to maintain those things that we have gotten right and also to build firmer foundations, that people have a sense of the direction of travel. I think that’s reasonable.
An interesting, but unasked follow-up question there might have been “what are the things that Ireland has gotten right?”, but in the absence of that, we can only speculate about what those things may be. What is certain is that no Government wants to throw away the bumper tax revenues that flow into the national coffers from the inward investment of US multinationals, which is substantially linked to our policy of low corporate taxes. We can assume, at least, that this policy is safe on the basis of what Mary Lou says above.
The problem that she doesn’t wrestle with is the question of whether this policy is compatible with her big announcement on housing: She would like to see average home values in Dublin fall, she says, to €300,000 for an average home, as opposed to the half-million or so she cites as the value for a similar home today. This can only be achieved in one of two ways: Either demand for homes in Dublin must fall, or the supply of homes in Dublin must dramatically rise. There is no third option, beyond directly regulating the price, which would simply cause people to stop building or selling homes altogether.
Of course, one of the issues that our political class as a whole does not want to touch is that the huge number of US multinationals in Dublin directly drives demand for homes: Many of these companies import skilled workers from abroad (perfectly legally) and pay them salaries above the average wage in Dublin. This phenomenon is why rents in the Dublin Docklands, for example, are so high. This is not a phenomenon unique to Dublin: It is true in all of the world’s great “tech” cities, from London to San Francisco. If you keep the “things that are working” in our economy, then there’s a good chance you keep high house prices too.
It is on immigration, though, where the real Sinn Fein shift is underway. Here’s the putative next Taoiseach, sounding almost “far right”:
You have to apply the rule book, and the rule is safe haven, asylum, refugee status, absolutely for those who seek those protections. We have, as a matter of international and a moral obligation, to discharge those duties. But in the event that there are safe countries, safe third countries that are safe for secondary movements, then equally we have to apply the rule book….And if somebody doesn’t qualify, then they have to leave the jurisdiction and that’s not to be harsh with people…. I think they have conceded themselves that they need to step things up and that there needs to be a greater efficiency and I think there was some question marks with this idea of people self-deporting.
That paragraph could have been written at any time, over the past two or three years, by yours truly. To hear it, then, from the mouth of the leader of Sinn Fein is quite something – the party will assiduously pretend that it has not shifted its tone on immigration, but this would be, in political parlance, “spin”. In more common language, it would be an absolute fib. Shifted they have, and quite radically.
For example, the hint that Sinn Fein would put an end to the practice of “self-deportation” is quite a radical departure for that party compared to the rest of the political firmament in Dáil Eireann, and makes them – Aontú aside – immediately the most right wing party in the parliament on that issue. Going into an election with a pledge to immediately reject immigrants from “safe countries” and restore old-fashioned Gardai-put-you-on-the-plane deportations would immediately be a substantial electoral offer on immigration that the other parties would be either forced to match, or leave themselves open to significant vote leakage.
Again, this is a party shifting right, at least on some issues, to try and win power. There’s no better example of that than on immigration, but another example is on Israel/Gaza: Mary Lou had to be asked twice whether she would expel the Israeli Ambassador.
In times past, this would have been answer number one, not something that had to be dragged from a Sinn Fein leader. It should be noted that by the time Sinn Fein come to power, the current war in Gaza will be at an end, meaning that diplomatic expulsions will no longer be an issue. And given her tone in the interview with Pat Leahy, one gets the distinct impression that a future crisis in the region will mysteriously not rise to the level where expelling Ambassadors is required.
So that’s the new Mary Lou: Holding the course on the economy; bringing house prices down; cracking down on immigration; and sounding more diplomatic towards Israel.
If you didn’t know who she was, you might think you’d woken up from a coma, and were listening to John Bruton or Bertie Ahern, circa 1997. What a difference the aroma of power can make.