The safe pair of hands has won the day, we are being told, ever since last Friday’s exit poll made the eventual result apparent – and everyone is claiming that they, and apparently only they, now have a mandate from the people.
Liberal commentators who were particularly worried about impact of immigration on voters were quick to conclude that it wasn’t an issue in the election. But that’s simply not true. What mostly happened is never the full story, and what might happen often begins with small breakthroughs.
First, however, a note on elections and the electorate – and on the unknown and unknowable factors that come into play.
There are, as Sarah Ryan as I discussed on the Gript election livestream from the RDS on the day of the count, enormous barriers to entry for any new parties and for Independents hoping to have an alternative voice resonate with voters and win seats.
The party machines, long-established and well-oiled with millions in taxpayer funding, are adept at delivering their message, using the kind of spend in each constituency that is multiple times that scrapped together by most newcomers to the field. And the spend begins long before the election is officially called – as the incumbents have even that advantage on their side.
Driving around Dublin before the election and seeing the lavish billboards, the glossy ads on bus-stops, the huge spread of posters with plenty of money to pay workers to put them up and take them down, the multiple constituency offices – the endless visibility and public attention that only a big budget can buy – was a reminder of what’s needed to make and retain a political impact. Much of this is, as you may be aware, funded by the taxpayer, since a staggering €13 million each year is paid over to the parties from our taxes for electoral and administrative purposes. It’s easy to keep winning when your coffers are this full.
The other advantage the establishment parties enjoy is, of course, is access to the airwaves to build their brand. A huge difficulty for new candidates, especially Independents and those from small parties, is that most of the electorate in any given constituency don’t even know they exist. Having new platforms like Gript and putting in twice the leg work as the established parties helps, but the bigger parties have the huge advantage of a already being a recognisable brand, often helped by repeated airings in the media. Launching a political alternative is like trying to launch a competitor to Coke and Pepsi but with a negligible marketing budget – and sometimes with a product that’s not fully developed.
How access to the airwaves is decided is an issue, by the way, that requires further discussion. RTÉ are taxpayer-funded, but the majority of their coverage not just at election time but between elections, is with the established parties. This needs to be challenged, because if offers a permanent and unfair advantage to the incumbents – and one that’s provided from the public purse. The electorate also deserve to hear from those who would be disrupters to the system.
The relevance of immigration to the election has to take all of that into account. And the results are far more interesting than most media commentators have acknowledged.
Its undeniable that immigration has become a huge issue for voters. Polls tell us that very significant majorities repeatedly agree with statements such as “Ireland has taken too many refugees” and supported much stricter immigration polices. Yet most of the political parties pussyfooted around the issue before the election, talking tough about deportations for example but refusing to even discuss setting realistic limits or following the footsteps of so many other European countries who are now trying to undo some of the most negative impacts of what became a de facto open borders policy.
The Greens, who doubled down on their pro-migrancy policies in their election manifesto were almost wiped-out. Just one candidate, their leader, Roderic O’Gorman, a high-profile Minister and probably the person most associated with the asylum mess, barely clung on. Clearly Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil had managed to shunt much of the public’s anger on immigration onto the smaller Coalition party.
But the biggest impact of immigration in the election was reflected in the massive fall in support for Sinn Féin – who were achieving unprecedented highs in polling before public anger around migration began to build. Polling shows that Sinn Féin’s voters were amongst those most likely to have anti-immigration views and their support collapsed from a lofty high of 36% in polling in July 2022 to winning just 19% of the vote last week.
As Dr Rory Costello, who examined responses to polls around the June elections this year, pointed out, “among former Sinn Féin voters, 33% consider immigration to be the most important issue (and over half see it as one of the top three issues), more than double the number that prioritised housing. These patterns are reversed for current Sinn Féin voters, of whom 23% see housing and homelessness as the top issue, and only 12% cite immigration.
“This confirms that immigration is a particular priority for voters who deserted Sinn Féin,” he said.
And he found that Sinn Féin – who responded to falling poll numbers by adopting what they thought voters would perceive as a tougher stance on immigration – did not lose votes from its pro-immigration supporters because of the shift.
His analysis of the data shows that “Sinn Féin did not lose support equally from its left and right wings; it was predominantly those with negative views on immigration who turned against the party.”
It seems then, that the most significant impact of immigration happened before a vote was cast in the election – in that it radically altered the outcome that had been building since 2020: that Sinn Féin would do extremely well and outperform all the other parties. That expectation was undone when the party’s support for liberal immigration policies came up against the reality of an increasingly disgruntled electorate.
In an effort to stave off the decline , Sinn Féin came out in full attack on government’s policy before the election – insisting they would consult with communities and “establish a new Immigration Management Agency to deliver a fairer system that works”.
“The current system doesn’t work for anybody,” they said. There is little to no engagement with local communities. The location of centres is set by a small number of individuals who have become multi-millionaires on the back of human misery.” They vowed the would “not put new IPAS centres in working class communities already under severe pressure and would only be put in more affluent areas which have the capacity and where the services exist to support them.”
It’s very likely that these protestations staved off seat losses, but the truth is that Sinn Féin, despite all the nonsense about mandates, destroyed their chances of being in government mostly by completely misreading the room on immigration. Their final vote share at 19% was a fall of more than a full fifth on their 2020 vote – and down almost 50% from the giddy heights of polling before the decline began.
It’s interesting too to look at Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael: the swing towards talking tough on deportations and insisting that the system was tightening up seemed to reassure some voters that the Coalition parties would get a handle on the issue. The tents were cleared pretty quickly when they became an eyesore in more affluent areas of the city – Fine Gael and Soc Dem voters wouldn’t be expected to put up with that.
In addition, its important to understand that Councillors, TDs, and even Ministers from the Coalition parties likely garnered support from voters by opposing the policies of the government which was, of course, made up of their own representatives. “Plans to open a refugee accommodation centre in rural Limerick have stalled following an intervention from Minister for Higher Education Patrick O’Donovan,” the Independent reported in September. Fianna Fáil’s Cathal Crowe questioned the ability of his constituency to take more asylum seekers. Willie O’Dea called for a referendum on the EU Migration Pact. Cllr Edward Timmins of Fine Gael welcomed the failure of the Kippure asylum centre to get planning – and took a seat in Wicklow last week.
These examples typify the ability of the parties in government to win back votes from those who are fed up about immigration – and it is far easier for a party whose brand is well-established to offer a chance of fixing the problem than a candidate whose name is not known across the constituency, and who can’t match the spend or the reach of the bigger parties. The exit poll provided evidence of that thinking – recording high levels of concern with immigration from those who had just voted the same parties back into power.
(Even at that, it’s daft to pretend that this election was success for either Coalition party, who had the additional advantage of coffers bursting with corporation tax (which won’t last). Getting one fifth of voters to support you in a 60% turnout isn’t a big win for either of the three main parties.)
But a reality check is also important: as Matt Treacy’s analysis has shown on this platform, there is little hope of getting candidates who represent the public’s concerns about immigration elected if every constituency – and every ballot paper – is cluttered with too many candidates. The 300,000-strong vote bloc – those who “differed from the establishment line on issues like immigration on free speech” – often simply splintered into meaningless results. The votes that left Sinn Féin ended up electing very few alternatives. As Sarah Ryan said this week, “multiple, multiple, candidates cannibalising off each other.”
There were, obviously, some breakthroughs. Paul Lawless, who took a strong stance on immigration, won a seat for Aontú in Mayo – and the party, whose vote doubled overall, were unlucky not to gain more. Ken O’Flynn who described the government’s handling of immigration as a “catastrophe” took a new seat for Independent Ireland handily in Cork North Central, and the party came very close to additional seats elsewhere TDs like Carol Nolan and Mattie McGrath who had spoken out strongly on this issue sailed back in, with some topping the poll.
Other candidates, like Gavin Pepper in Dublin North West, polled respectably, especially in consideration of the fact that a fair few TDs who polled just 6% of first preferences took a seat in this election. But the right did not transfer to each other in the way that brought the left across the line. Unless the disparate groupings come together and hammer out a strategy, they won’t acheive the results they are looking for.
There’s a bigger picture that speaks to further change going forward. All across Europe, from Denmark to Sweden to Poland and Italy, political change is being driven by immigration concerns. In Germany, a knife attack by a Syrian refugee in Solingen seemed to be a tipping point of sorts. A landscape being rapidly changed by migration has led to the kind of political upheaval elsewhere that we can eventually expect in Ireland too.
That brings me back to something I mentioned earlier about the unknowable element of the electorate. Billions have been spent in trying to assess and gauge and understand voters, but anyone who tells you they the full measure of voting behaviour is either a fool or a trickster. Public moods sometimes swing and deliver unexpected results. Black swans happen. If the groundwork is done, catching that mood is vital, and entirely possible.
Ireland is behind the curve when it comes to the impact of immigration, but we are catching up fast. Those who want to represent the views of the vast majority of people need to get their differences sorted and their ducks in a row. The next five years will gone in a blink.