The fascinating thing about yesterday’s Sunday Business Post/Red C opinion poll was… that it wasn’t fascinating at all. Not in any way. Not even a little bit:
POLL – Dáil Éireann
Red C / Sunday Business Post
SF: 34% (+1)
FG: 21% (+2)
FF: 16% (nc)
SD: 5% (nc)
GP: 4% (-1)
LP: 4% (-1)
PBP/S: 3% (nc)
AÚ: 2% (nc)
I/O: 11% (-1)22nd-27th April 2022
+/- March 2022
Sample: 1,014— Ireland Votes | #Vote2024 (@Ireland_Votes) April 30, 2022
Obviously, Sinn Fein partisans will get very angry with us if we do not note, for the record, that 34% is their all-time high in this polling series, and Fine Gaelers angry if we do not note their two-percent increase. Maybe Labour people will be grateful if we do not mention their decline in support, and the electorate’s apparent anti-Ivana misogyny. But the more neutral and honest appraisal is that not one of the political parties surveyed saw their support move outside the margin for error of the poll itself. It’s “as you were”, with a little bit of statistical noise tacked on to give Sinn Fein and Fine Gael supporters something to cling to.
The Irish electorate is now very clearly divided up into three blocks of roughly equal size: About a third want a Sinn Fein Government. About a third want Fianna Fáil and/or (but almost certainly now, “and”) Fine Gael back in Government. And about a third are splitting their votes between the various minor parties and independents. And this has been the situation, almost unchanged, since the last election.
Remarkably, almost nothing that has happened in the last two-and-a-bit years has meaningfully altered the broad preferences of the electorate, except at the margins. Let’s talk about those margins briefly.
The Greens have suffered for being the soft-left party in Government, but that’s because the 15% or so of the electorate who vote soft-left have other options. When the Social Democrats enter Government, those voters will move again, as they moved from Labour in the past. To think about the electorate structurally, it’s always useful to think of those three parties as effectively one party. They are competing for the same voters, and those voters tend to move fluidly between them.
Similarly, the right leaning anti-establishment vote is pretty constant at 10-12% of the electorate, floating as it does between rural, right-leaning independents and Aontú. These voters, having nowhere else credible or mainstream to go, are also stuck. The unlikelihood of the independents, at least, entering Government en masse means that this 10% of the electorate is effectively freezing itself out of Government and power, unless either the independents form a party, or their voters switch in large numbers to Aontú. Neither prospect seems particularly likely at the moment.
That leaves us, then, with an electorate that is stuck. It is stuck because the two main blocs increasingly see their main political purpose as keeping the other bloc out of power.
Put simply, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil voters appear to fear the prospect of a Sinn Fein administration much more than they deplore the failings – real or perceived – of the present Government. And so we live in an odd country where the Government’s various decisions and problems which might otherwise cost them oodles of votes are almost free of consequence, because their voters would sooner live with Tony Holohan getting a sinecure, or turf being banned, or whatever the latest thing is, than they would live with Sinn Fein in Government.
Similarly, a section of the electorate seems to believe that it is Sinn Fein’s turn to be in Government, and that there is a concerted effort to deny them their right to govern, and that only Sinn Fein can tackle the problems of the country. Their votes, too, seem locked in now to the extent that even a dramatic turnaround in areas like housing or homelessness would be insufficient to switch them away from their choice.
All of which leaves us in a position where Irish politics has essentially become stuck in a long war of attrition. Sinn Fein are the largest party, but with nowhere near the level of support needed to form a strong Government. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have dramatically weakened support levels compared to their historic norm, but command just enough votes between them to be slightly larger than Sinn Fein when those votes are combined.
And all the while, how the country is actually run seems to make precious little difference, in either direction, because fear of Sinn Fein seems to outweigh frustration with the Government in those still voting for the old twosome.
The real problem here is that all of this likely means that the next General election will see a result quite similar to the last one. Eventually, with the general attrition of older, better off voters and the addition to the electorate of younger voters who have yet to buy a home and have no memory of a world before peace in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein will get enough votes to govern. But until then – whether it takes two or three more elections, Irish politics is stuck in a rut. It’s bad for the country.