Those who claimed that a spoiled vote was a wasted one, just over two weeks post-election, appear to have been thoroughly disproven, two of the largest parties in the State clearly experiencing a prolonged period of identity crisis as a result of the very public whooping they received during the campaign and at the ballot box.
In the depths of their confusion, both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil appear to have settled on the same demographic as their way out of the doldrums: young people.
The first seer to plumb the mists and discern the novel message that young people are the future was Fine Gael’s Emer Higgins, who told RTÉ Radio One the day after the election that “the big lesson for us, and for me, and for Fine Gael, is that we need to connect more with our young people, and we need to work out ways to do that”.
Not as quick off the mark, Fianna Fáil’s Billy Kelleher said over the weekend at an Eamon De Valera commemoration that his party needs to “reconnect and re-engage” with young people, because it’s facing “a demographic cliff-edge when it comes to membership, activists and voters”.
Per RTÉ’s reporting of Mr Kelleher’s comments, he said: “To say otherwise would be to deny reality…We need to listen to them, and not dismiss their views just because we don’t agree or don’t understand.”
Both Ms Higgins and Mr Kelleher are right in their identification of a lack of youthful enthusiasm for their parties being a problem. The world cannot but be symbolic, and a lack of young people cannot but speak of a party without a future, a perception Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are both clearly struggling with.
It surely won’t have helped that the “united Left” managed to dredge up more young people than the governing parties did throughout the presidential campaign, Connolly’s campaign paradoxically more expressive of youth than either Heather Humphreys’ or, dare we speak of it, Jim Gavin’s.
And it’s here that we get to the crux of FFG’s problem: you don’t attract young people, in an age of radical dysfunction, by simply connecting, engaging and re-engaging more with young people. You get young people by offering the radical solutions that they are uniquely capable of conceiving off, whether by virtue of their boundless vitality and sense that anything is possible, or because of their naive ignorance about how the world really works.
It’s probably a combination of both, in reality.
And yet, neither Fine Gael nor Fianna Fáil show any signs of budging in the direction of the radicality that would actually win them any voters amongst disaffected youths. There are a couple of reasons for this.
The first and foremost issue they face is that, unlike most other parties in the State, young people know for a fact that neither Fine Gael nor Fianna Fáil are radical in the way that the present moment seems to call for, and they have their extensive periods in Government to point to as proof of that.
The forever crises of housing and health not only remain, but have reached new heights on their watch, and they’ve even added immigration and the cost of living to the list, with both frequently appearing among the most prominent responses in issue polls the past couple of years.
That being the case, who could possibly be surprised that radical promises from leftwing parties to ‘unlock’ the State’s homebuilding potential and amend the constitution to put it in black and white that each and every person in Ireland has a right to a house are proving relatively more popular amongst the politically-engaged youth?
Nothing ventured, nothing gained, the thinking goes.
Or for their disaffected young compatriots to the right, can there really be that much shock amongst Fine Gaelers and Fianna Fáilers at the complete loss of interest in the parties that have presided over some of the biggest social reforms in the history of the State, alongside the aforementioned stewardship over immigration levels unseen in the history of the island, with the exception of the peak Celtic Tiger boom years?
If they haven’t been electorally outflanked by parties to the left and right, it’s more to do with the deficiencies of the options on offer than anything else. It’s certainly not the result of any lingering attachment to Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil that could be remedied with “re-engagement” or “re-connection”.
No, the governing parties are hamstrung by what they are and what they represent, two things that no amount of reaching out without reform is ever going to remedy. And they show no signs of reform. Fianna Fáil’s much-discussed leadership revolution is playing out with all the energy of a deathbed scene, while Fine Gael remains at war with itself over whether or not to concede anything to immigration concerns, never mind change course or improve in any of the other areas young people express dissatisfaction about.
Last of all, but perhaps most importantly, young people have always, or at least more often than not, gravitated towards the positions of rebellion and revolution. They might disagree about what that looks like, but it is certainly an analysis that holds in Ireland. The unifying factor across left- and right-leaning young people is that they do not desire business as usual, because business as usual isn’t working for them.
Unfortunately for FFG, they have become synonymous with business as usual, and it may well be the case that what’s required to shatter that image is electoral defeat the likes of which they have yet to see. But that is the direction things are trending in, and it’s young people in the vanguard, where they’re bothered to vote at all.
A quick fix for FFG, this is not.