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The posters have certainly gone up in record time. Here in the north riding of County Tipperary, where three precious seats are at stake on the 29th, Michael Lowry gazes down at us magnificently from every second lamppost, immaculately attired and wearing the benevolently self-satisfied smile of a regency-era Earl announcing the impending marriage of his only daughter to the duke of somewhere or other.
Lowry, of course, is so deeply embedded in the political culture here that he doesn’t need anything as common as a slogan. A smiling face, a crisp tie, and the words “Lowry 1” will do the job very nicely. He’ll be returned for yet another term without breaking a sweat.
One wonders whether Messrs. Harris and Martin might have learned something from Lowry’s “less is more” approach. Fine Gael have gone for the very insipid “A New Energy” for their slogan, underneath a leader poster with a picture of Baba Harris looking very chuffed with himself indeed. For Fianna Fáil, the Muinteoir looks upon us with nice kind crinkly photoshopped eyes and invites us to “move forward together”.
It’s early days, but there’s a complacent tone to the Government’s campaign, at least on the lamp-posts. They’ve covered both bases: Simon offers you new energy and new ideas; Micheál the familiar face and the reassurance that while he’s around, his experience will place at least some cap on administrative incompetence. Neither man bothers offering you a policy since nobody pretends to have any of note: You’re instead offered energy and experience; new and old; blue and green; Laurel, and Hardy.
Writing in the Sunday Times yesterday, Alison O’Connor – Ireland’s number one exponent of conventional wisdom – reported satisfaction from the Government parties on their canvassing. There is, she told us, no appetite in the public for a change of Government. “People want the Government back” was the verdict of one, anonymous TD.
In part of course, this is all an indictment of the opposition. Sinn Fein are light on the slogans on their own posters, but the main slogan for the campaign seems to be “Change starts here”.
So, these are your choices: New energy; forward together; or entirely unspecified “change”.
The coverage, too, is insipid: I watched back some video footage of RTE’s live coverage on Friday of the Taoiseach’s statement announcing the election. RTE’s studio guests were the aforementioned Alison O’Connor – who apparently has a caravan parked somewhere on the RTE campus for the rare hours when she’s not on air telling us what we already know – and Hugh O’Connell for the Sunday Times. We were treated to some very insightful commentary including “there’s been a lot of speculation about when the election might be” and “a week is a long time in politics” and “a lot can happen in a campaign” and “this is a big moment for any Taoiseach” and “has he got the date right?”.
The Irish Times, for its part, published an Editorial announcing that the two topics it would be watching most closely in the campaign were climate change and economic security, while issuing a stern warning from the fifth floor of its multi-million euro headquarters that “what should not be acceptable at this time of uncertainty is a descent into the sort of auction politics that have served the country so badly in the past.”
But of course, auction politics is what we are going to get. We got some of it yesterday with Fine Gael flying the kite for a specially reduced VAT rate of 11% for food and hospitality. Fianna Fáil are out this morning proposing an old-age pension increase to €350 per week, with the small print hiding that this will come in increments of €12 per year. Labour, meanwhile, will propose auction politics left, right, and centre, without any fear of reproach from the Irish Times, having already pledged €1.6billion in new healthcare spending, and proposing “radical efforts to cut poverty” – which is a neat sounding phrase, but also an assault on the English language. What is a “radical effort”?
For my part, as I mentioned on last week’s podcast with Sarah, I’m leaning strongly towards voting for the Aontú candidate in my constituency. That party bugs me from time to time – the amount of energy they expend on talking about a United Ireland that’s still decades away, for example, or its occasional tendency to over-egg the pudding in terms of taking credit for opposing things like the hate speech bill or the two referenda this year. But for all that it bugs me, it’s also the only party standing in this constituency, at the time of writing, with anything approaching an alternative vision for the country. And too often it’s the only party willing to stand with the public on matters where there’s an overwhelming common-sense majority view amongst the public, such as on issues like migration, crime, and whether men should be in women’s prisons if they call themselves women. My vote certainly won’t elect an Aontú TD in Michael Lowry’s back yard, but it might push them towards the 2% of the vote nationally required to secure state funding – so I’ll happily cast it for them.
And yet I find myself deeply disillusioned with the democratic process in Ireland. Perhaps that is because the Americans, last week, had a real choice. You can argue about which choice was the right one to make – but they were presented with really radically different visions of the next four years for their country.
In Ireland, the choice is between energy, experience, and change. Those aren’t ideas, but marketing slogans. I’ll leave you with this from my old friend Barry Walsh – a committed Fine Gaeler – in the Sunday Independent yesterday. He says it better than I could.
“There are many fundamental questions Simon Harris has not even attempted to answer in recent months. What exactly does Fine Gael want to achieve in a fourth term in government? In fact, what does Fine Gael even stand for?
Does the party now aspire to government purely for the sake of government? Why should anyone vote for Fine Gael instead of Fianna Fáil? Where are the eye-catching pledges that can push the party’s support above 30pc?
Sitting down to write this, I couldn’t think of a single Fine Gael policy that isn’t shared by at least one of the other parties. It feels like 2020 all over again.”
Ah Barry. You forgot “a new energy”. That’s what’s on offer. More of the same, but with added battery life. Or, as another cynical Fine Gaeler put it to me yesterday – it sounds like we’re selling vibrators, not ideas.
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