I wrote earlier on about the broader implications of yesterday’s Sunday Times opinion poll, but it really is worth focusing in on the plight of the poor beleaguered Social Democrats: This is, after all, the first time in a good long while that I can recall a major political party registering a duck egg in an opinion poll:
POLL – Dáil Éireann
B&A – Sunday Times
SF: 37% (+1)
FG: 23% (+3)
FF: 22% (-2)
LP: 5% (nc)
GP: 4% (+2)
PBP-S: 1% (-1)
AÚ: 1% (nc)
SD: 0% (-2)
I/O: 8% (-1)June 2022
+/- May 2022— Ireland Votes | #Vote2024 (@Ireland_Votes) June 12, 2022
Polls, of course, are fickle things. The nature of smaller parties like the Soc Dems and Aontú (who have few reasons to cheer themselves, on 1%) is that their support is concentrated geographically. Some of this 0% might be explained by a sample of voters nationwide that didn’t include enough from Roisin Shorthall’s constituency, for example. It’s reasonable to expect that in an election, they’d do a little bit better than zero. But how much better?
The party seems stuck in a weird place: It’s twin leaders, Shorthall and Catherine Murphy, are old-school Labour or Workers Partly left wingers, whose political bread and butter is calling for more transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor. Their membership base, on the other hand – the so-called “purple people” – are a different beast altogether. Go to a Soc Dem conference and you’ll find people much more animated about flying Pride Flags on public buildings and banning abortion protests near clinics than you will people wearing SIPTU membership stickers. It’s a party of young culture war chargers, led by two women from a slightly different political age.
The struggle for them has been to find a niche: Irish politics, especially on the left, is a crowded space. The Greens own their issue, and are delivering on it (which might be hurting them more than helping). If you want progressive preaching and sermonising, it’s very hard to out-Bacik Ivana Bacik. If you want radical anti-capitalism with a middle class tinge, Richard Boyd Barrett’s your man. And if you want radical anti-capitalism with a militant tinge, Paul Murphy’s bare head and raised fist is your call to arms. What does that leave for the poor Soc Dems?
During the pandemic, they tried: First they were the zero covid party, so much so that actual zero covid campaigners boasted that they were pulling the strings. Then they were the open up party. Then they were the facemasks party, and the mandatory vaccines party, then the end lockdown party again. “Zero Covid is inevitable”, they said at one stage. Alas, what was actually inevitable was many people losing any ability to take the Social Democrats seriously. It’s extraordinary, if you talk to politically active people, just how much the party is actively disliked by others: “Convinced they’re morally superior, but at the same time not quite sure what their morals are” was the verdict of one, speaking to me recently.
At times, that moral superiority works for them. The party’s strongest moments have tended to come, oddly enough, not on policy matters but on corruption and integrity stuff: Catherine Murphy’s long conflict with Denis O’Brien won her many admirers, but that stuff is years past now. It’s had strong moments too on things like Mother and Baby homes, where it manages to get to the front of the line of people lining up to say things like “never again”. But on actual policy issues, it’s a long time since the party has had an idea actually worth writing about. Their big reveal at this weekend’s conference was “free public transport”. Inspiring stuff? Not really.
One of the problems for smaller parties of the left in Ireland, at the moment, is that Sinn Fein’s strength has them in a catch-22 produced by our electoral system. The runaway momentum of the Mary Lou train means that more and more voters of the left are drifting that way. The natural thing for a party like the Soc Dems to do would be to open a new front in the fight, and start attacking SF directly to peel away some voters. Yet, if they do that, they risk being cut off from the vital supply of Sinn Fein transfers in an election which saved them so many seats last time, but may not do so next time.
It’s probably true, too, that they need a new leader. The party is entirely geared, culturally, and instinctively, to pursue the young “woke” vote. But it is lead by two women who, while warmly viewed by those voters, don’t inspire the affection or passion that young voters tend to fall in love with. Call it the Hillary Clinton problem: The activists grudgingly liked her, but they never felt about her the way they did about Barack Obama. The party does have young talent, too, in people like Gary Gannon and Holly Cairns. But at the current rate, that won’t be true after the next election.
The other, perhaps more sensible option, is just to merge with Labour. You can’t out-preach Ivana Bacik anyway. Maybe the best hope for the Soc Dems isn’t to try to fight her, but to stand behind her and nod. It might give Bacik a badly needed dose of momentum, too. Because on the current trajectory, both parties are heading for atrocious elections, next time out. Which is a pity, because without the Soc Dems and Labour there to needle a Sinn Fein Government from the left, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will definitely, 100%, decide that’s the space they need to move into. It simply being unpopular won’t be enough to stop them. After all, everybody in Ireland knows that the only way to appeal to young voters is to preach at them from the soft left, right?