Recent opinion polls are showing something of a puzzling contradiction.
Fine Gael have been in power for the last 13 years during which time housing, health, immigration and law and order have been making the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Despite being in control of these portfolios for most of that time, Fine Gael’s new leader Simon Harris has confounded the pollsters with what is now being called the Harris bounce.
So who are the voters behind this bounce and, more importantly, why do they believe that Simon Harris is now going to deliver something that neither he nor Fine Gael has delivered over the last 13 years?
The key to understanding the Harris bounce is to understand that this voter cohort may well be broadly similar to Simon Harris himself. In demographic terms, it’s possible that we’re talking about people in their 30’s and 40’s living in the Leinster commuter belt. Most important of all, perhaps, is that they identify with Harris’ sense of himself as someone who is self-consciously modern and impatient with what they view as the guff associated with old Ireland. Let’s name this archetypical couple as Colm and Sarah.
Born in the late 1980s, Colm and Sarah grew up in a 1990s Ireland which was experiencing a real sense of achievement. Think of Italia ‘90 and the magic of the Charlton years when Irish children saw for themselves an Ireland doing the unthinkable and qualifying and playing in two World Cups.
This was also Ireland’s Eurovision golden era when a small country on the periphery of Atlantic Europe pulled off the unthinkable by winning the competition on four occasions between 1992 and 1996. Who knows – perhaps the success of this decade set up an impatience for success in this generation which continues to this day.
Enter Simon Harris, the 37 year old leader of Fine Gael, the man in the white shirt with sleeves rolled up suggesting someone who has just entered the building and is impatient to get on with the job. This is the self-consciously modern man who would appear to be more comfortable sipping a Latte than your bog-standard Americano and certainly not the humble cup of tea that his parents once saw as their go-to beverage.
Now in their late thirties, life has caught up with Colm and Sarah. There’s a home in the Dublin commuter belt and an attendant mortgage. There are children and child care and the precarious juggling act that goes with all of that.
However, the problem for Simon Harris is that the man who always wants to talk about the future now has a substantial amount of baggage from the past. Not alone has Fine Gael been in government for the last 13 years but Harris has been a minister and sitting around the Cabinet table for eight of those years. This is hardly someone who has just walked onto the Irish political stage.
The thing that our imaginary Colm and Sarah appear to be missing is that not only have Fine Gael been running Ireland for the last 13 years but they have been doing so in the most chaotic manner imaginable.
Take Justice, a government department that Fine Gael has had full control over now for more than a decade. At this point, even Fine Gaelers will privately concede that Helen McEntee is, and always has been, totally out of her depth as Minister for Justice. But this isn’t just some far-right trope.
We have seen an unprecedented motion of no confidence in the Garda Commissioner by rank and file gardai. In addition, we have seen a haemorrhage of gardai resigning from the force. No one needs reminding that not so long ago in Ireland, the idea of anyone walking away from a prized career as a garda was practically unheard of. It is no exaggeration to say that McEntee’s tenure in the Department of Justice has been characterised by ongoing and sustained ineptitude.
But the critical thing here is that Simon Harris, the man in the fresh white shirt, had the opportunity to do something about this when he became leader of Fine Gael in April of this year. For Harris, ‘doing something’ might well have taken the form of a re-shuffle of his Cabinet and moving McEntee to another portfolio or out of Cabinet altogether. However, he chose not to preferring instead to put his energy into trying to make the hapless McEntee look competent.
Neither has Harris’ own time in Cabinet been characterised by the sense of energy and competence that he likes to project. His time as Minister for Health will hardly be remembered as a golden era. After all, he was the minister who signed off on the contracts for the ill-fated National Children’s Hospital.
What started out as a €600m project is now heading for a completion cost north of €2.25 bn. To contextualise this for our imaginary couple Colm and Sarah, if they had entrusted the building of their own house for an imaginary €350,000 to one Simon Harris, the house would have ended up costing them a minimum of €1.2m meaning that, in all probability, they would now be both bankrupt and homeless.
The thing is that Simon Harris, despite the visuals associated with the white shirt and the furrowed eyebrows, is not hearing about the issues he is now being presented with for the first time. As a veteran Fine Gael TD, he has been hearing about things like scoliosis, a housing crisis, an asylum shambles and collapsing law and order for years. The other part of that is that Simon Harris and Fine Gael have been central to creating these same problems.
The Fine Gael spin doctors may be feeling chuffed with themselves that their man appears to be doing so well in the opinion polls. However, that optimism should be tempered by some old school electoral realities.
The fact that 17 of 34 Fine Gael TDs have opted not to seek re-election hardly sounds like a vote of confidence in either Simon Harris or the direction the party has taken in recent years.
Incumbency is a huge factor in retaining a seat in the Irish electoral system and the fact that Fine Gael will be relying on political novices in so many constituencies isn’t going to help them in electoral terms. Neither is Simon Harris the electoral Lionel Messi that his spin doctors would like us to believe.
Only time will tell if, Colm and Sarah, our east coast thirty somethingish couple will continue to believe in the PR myth behind Simon Harris.
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