Simon Harris is impeccably smooth in person. Your correspondent knew this about him – and indeed has written as much before on several occasions. But it’s one thing to know a thing, and another to be reminded of it as I was yesterday, at the Fine Gael manifesto launch.
Smooth and slippery are, of course, synonyms of a kind, though I think the latter word would be unfair. Nevertheless, pinning down the Taoiseach is not unlike trying to grab hold of a greased-up eel. Every question is a good one. Every idea put to him has merit. He sees your point and he will consider it. He cares very deeply about everything. He is “restless” for change – a form of words he used on multiple occasions.
And yet, when he doesn’t want to answer a question, he simply doesn’t do it. I asked him yesterday to put a number on the amount of refugees Ireland might be expected to accommodate over the next five years. Answer, came their none.
Instead, I got a long and remarkably convincing spiel about how the Government was finally going to speed up asylum applications, get tough with miscreants, and restore a little “common sense” to the system. If you’d just come down from Mars yesterday, you might have mistaken him in the moment for some dreadful European populist, like that Meloni woman or that dreadful man in Hungary. Reader, I found myself nodding in agreement. Then blessedly, I caught a hold of myself.
Heck, he’s even pro-natalist now, preparing to hand every newborn baby €1,000 at minimum in their personal savings accounts. (Whether that money will be worth anything like €1,000 in eighteen years at current inflation rates was a question nobody got around to asking).
Harris was flanked, as he often is, by his two most notable deputies. Paschal Donohoe, whose unflappability could be bottled and sold, and Helen McEntee, who mainly just repeated whatever Simon said. Nevertheless, one advantage the Blueshirts have in this campaign is that they have a leader who is comfortable handing over questions to his deputies. This stands in contrast to poor Meehawl, who often looks like a man wincing at a slow-motion car crash anytime another Fianna Fáiler grabs a microphone in his presence. And it stands in contrast with Mary Lou, who sometimes looks as if she’s at real risk of being upstaged by Pearse or Eoin. With FG, Harris is the star of the show, and he is comfortable with his supporting acts.
For all his slipperiness, though, there was a clear move to the right yesterday in the manifesto that he launched. The dreaded hate speech bill has been cast into the fires of purgatory, where it will wait, Helen McEntee declared, until some other party comes up with an acceptable idea to revive it. On immigration this was the most right-wing manifesto by a major party in our lifetimes (not hard, you might rightly say, but still). For now, at least, it seems as if we have passed “peak woke”, at least in Fine Gael land.
Now, I understand the impulse of readers on this, which will vary between distrust and absolute horror that someone like me is writing anything less than a full-throated condemnation of the Fine Gaelers and their manifesto. But here’s the thing: You take the wins where they come. And for better or worse, this is a party that is vastly more likely to be in Government than any of the various arrangements of true nationalists that are fighting for scraps at the electoral table.
If you want criticism of Fine Gael, then there is much to criticise. The party – thanks mainly to Paschal – did a passable job yesterday of presenting its utter profligacy (€54bn in extra spending) as a form of prudence, but make no mistake about what this manifesto is: It’s a laundry list of targeted bribes at various groups. A shameless attempt to purchase the electorate with its own money. In that respect, FF, FG, and Sinn Fein are all at the same lark.
Nor should this manifesto be presented as some kind of right-wing wish list. If you’re looking for a rollback on nanny-statism, look elsewhere. If you want NGO’s tackled and shackled, find another party. If you want just an hour of your life without someone preaching about the “climate emergency”, then this was not the event for you.
But at the same time, it’s very clear that the Overton window in Irish politics has shifted. Two years ago, the very idea of a senior politician even considering processing migrants offshore or setting up a dedicated court to speed up applications, would have been anathema. Yet here was An Taoiseach, “open” to the first idea, and committing his party to the second. He’s even been reading Gript, he announced. Hey, Simon.
Harris, like most politicians, will protest firmly that he is on your side. He is not – at least not in any ideological sense. He is on the side of getting re-elected, and being popular, as almost all politicians are. In the service of that objective, he is able to deploy a remarkable talent for communication and projecting empathy, on a level that is head and shoulders above his competitors.
Yet even those skills cannot render him or his party immune to political gravity. And as such, this was a manifesto that included pledges that many of my readers would have longed to hear from mainstream Irish politicians for years: Faster deportations. No more hotels to be used to accommodate migrants. A dedicated court to deal with immigration.
Just a few months ago, he was calling the UK’s aborted Rwanda plan “despicable”. Then yesterday he was “open” to an offshore processing scheme that’s almost identical in intent, if not in practice, so long as the Europeans make him do it. That’s a remarkable shift in tone and approach, and it’s all been provoked by unrest and activism from the electorate.
His party, per the polls, is likely to be rewarded at the ballot box by a sufficient number of voters to form a Government. It will then be our job, and yours, to hold him to account.
It is not always possible to remove a party from office or to convince your fellow citizens to change the Government. But provoking the Government to change in your direction? Sometimes, that’s almost as good.
We’ll see how real it is, in time.