In the aftermath of the local and European elections, there are two ways of looking at the broad outline of Irish politics.
If one was to take the long-term view, then the fact is that the two parties that have dominated the state since its foundation are in one of their weakest collective states of all time. Between them, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael divided just shy of 46% of the votes in the local elections, and just north of 41% in the European elections. By contrast, in the local and European elections of 1999, those figures were 67% and 64%, respectively. Over the last quarter of a century, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have lost a third of their voters. It is hard to see any way they will achieve that kind of vote share again over the next decade or several.
If, however, one was to take the short-term view, then the position of FF and FG looks perhaps more dominant than it ever has: Now that the two parties are, in effect, in a kind of long-term marriage, the 46% of the vote they can command makes them very difficult to dislodge – especially without an obvious alternative. Their position is increasingly akin to that of Australia’s “Coalition” – a single party which is formally two separate parties, the Liberals and the Nationals. At this election, as Michael McDowell noted in the Irish Times yesterday, one of the most notable things that struck tallymen at the counts was the emergence of a clear transfer pattern between the two parties – legions and legions of voters who now vote FF 1 and FG 2, or vice versa. Though there will be no formal merger, their own voters are clearly deciding that once you’re married, there’s no point not following through with the consummation.
In the past, you could get one of them out of government by choosing the other. And there were at least some differences between the two parties on policy. But for now, they increasingly look like a unified monolith combining almost half the votes. Absent another economic crash a la 2008 on their watch, it is hard to see them being defeated any time soon.
One of the things that has not changed, between the elections of 1999 and 2024, is the fragmented nature of the opposition. In 1999, Labour and the Green Party split 12% of the vote between them. In 2024, Labour, the Greens, and the Social Democrats split….. almost exactly 12% of the vote between them. In 1999, the Progressive Democrats won 3.9% of the vote and 25 councillors, and in 2024, Independent Ireland (which is in a slightly different, but broadly similar, space) took a similar share.
The big changes since 1999 and 2024 are the growing strength of Sinn Fein and Independents. Between SF and Independents, in 1999, about 14% of the votes were shared. In 2024, Sinn Fein and Independents shared nearly 40% of the vote. The problem is that Sinn Fein (on this weekend’s performance) are no threat to form a Government, and Independents could not agree a Government even were they strong enough to challenge for one.
The growth of Independents and Sinn Fein at the expense of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is therefore the single biggest change in Irish politics over the past 25 years. These two changes can broadly be classed as losses of votes by FF and FG to the nationalist left, and the nationalist right, though some left independents clearly exist.
The difficulty is that while the emergent nationalist left has had a party to coalesce around, the nationalist right is made up by and large of ex-FF and FG voters voting for people who were once of those parties: Mattie McGrath; The Healy Raes; Verona Murphy; Michael Lowry; and so on. It is this particular fragmentation, perhaps more than any other, that has allowed Irish politics to march leftwards.
The left – as we see from the Labour Green and Soc Dem vote – is not especially stronger than it was 25 years ago, in electoral terms. The big difference is that the rightmost flank of the political spectrum, which once had a home in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, is now politically vagrant.
In many such cases, it is represented by people, like the Healy Raes, and Mr. Lowry, who have very little interest in national politics and are content to remain the big dogs in their own back yard and leverage whatever influence they have for local pork barrel spending. In other cases, it is dominated by independents who fear that party membership would compromise their own chances of election if the party ever had to make a tough decision. I will name no names here.
The emergence of Independent Ireland, however, might be some sort of a panacea for this problem, since the weekend proved their brand, on its very first outing, to be electorally viable. If that party can continue to round up politicians and voters, it has real promise, but many problems too.
The first of these is that you cannot pretend to be a serious political party absent an agreed policy platform and a party whip – otherwise you will never be a viable Government partner.
The second is that with the greatest possible respect to their current TDs, they lack compelling or charismatic leadership. Michael Collins is a proven vote-getter in rural Cork, but one might doubt his electoral appeal in the Dublin Suburbs in a general election. The same goes for the other current members.
Probably, the single greatest chance to “change the game” between now and the election would be for somebody like the aforementioned Senator McDowell to step into the Independent Ireland leadership, giving that party both a policy focus, and very credible national leadership that blended urban middle class appeal with the broad swathe of rural voters that already align with the party. There might be, in such circumstances, as many as 15-20 Dáil seats available to it at the next election.
Of course, Michael McDowell is no across-the-board conservative, or a nationalist, and he might give some people absolute fits, in particular with his instinctive pro-Europeanism and social liberalism in some areas. He may also have no desire whatever to get involved at this stage of what has already been a notable and is by now comfortable life. Yet such an event would immediately shift the political ground rightward in Ireland by several degrees, and be a much better situation than that which faces those of us frustrated by the lie of the political land as it stands.