The most important thing for any political movement that desires long-term success is to have the ability to look reality in the face, and accept it. For those of us in Ireland who are on the right of the political centre, reality was spelled out in fairly stark terms in Friday’s local elections: The public looked around at their available options, and decided that Government candidates were the safest bet. In Longford, candidates representing the three Government parties won an almost Stalinesque 81.3% of the votes cast. In Cork, the brother of the Finance Minister racked up nearly 5,000 votes in a local election – enough in truth to win many Dáil seats, let alone a seat on a county council. In Stillorgan, Fine Gael alone took more than half the votes. Few Governments in Europe will have such a crushing victory this weekend as the one the Irish Government has just had.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil losses will be minimal. The Greens, long expected to receive a kicking, held firm. And what of electoral successes for the right?
They were there, to be sure: At the time of writing no candidate explicitly of the right has been elected, but Gavin Pepper and Malachy Steenson seem certainties in Ballymun-Finglas and in Dublin’s North Inner city, respectively. The Irish Freedom Party seems on course to win a single solitary council seat, in Palmerstown. There has been significant success for Independent Ireland, who look on course for about 20 seats, and slightly less success for Aontu, who may get close to double figures. If you add in a slew of “under the radar” independents – people who got elected after campaigning quietly and in a low profile way on issues of concern to right-leaning voters – there may be as many as 50 or 60 such seats across the country. More on that below.
But for the officially organised “right”, it could hardly be called a stunning success.
One of the problems of course is that across the country a slew of people got fewer votes than they often get twitter “likes” for their tweets. These facts may not be un-connected: Many people seem to entirely mistake twitter popularity for a real-world following, while Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Councillors with names like Seamus Coyle and PJ O’Hanlon – to cite just two victors in the county of my birth – certainly do not. In Tuam, where Fine Gael topped the poll with Cllr Andrew Reddington, the victorious councillor revealed that his campaign team had fully eighty people involved in it. There were EU election campaigns on the right fought with campaign teams a fraction of that size.
At some point, the right has to wise up to two things:
First, that campaigns need to be professional and focused. You will not win an election with no election posters, and no leaflets, and no visible presence in the local newspapers or in the community. These things by themselves do not guarantee success, but running a campaign “on social media” guarantees failure. Mairin McGrath, the daughter of Mattie, topped the poll in her local election area – it is no coincidence that she also claims to have knocked on every single door in her Cahir local election area. In my own ward, the Labour candidate who came to my door is famous for knocking on every single door – and when I told her I wouldn’t be voting for her, reacted with a smile and good wishes and asked for my highest preference. Her posters were everywhere. She also campaigned entirely on local issues, and when she knocked on my door she already knew what those issues were: It was she, not I, who mentioned the state of the road and when it would be fixed. She topped the poll.
Second, that politics is about more than one or two national issues, and is conducted outside of just election campaigns. Trust with voters is built up over years, not over the three weeks of a campaign.
It is no coincidence that two of the right’s most high profile winners – Pepper and Steenson – are activists who have been working in their communities for years, not weeks. Whatever you think of them, they know many voters by name, and those voters in turn know them and have formed an impression of them long before the campaign started. This is also true of most FF and FG councillors and council candidates. It is not true, and was not true, of too many people running under the “nationalist” banner.
The truth is that there clearly was a vote – and a substantial vote at that – in this election for candidates who are well to the right of the Government on immigration, climate change, and a raft of other issues – but that vote went to what you might call “career independents”. People like the aforementioned McGrath, or John Snell who topped the poll in Wicklow, or Ken O’Flynn who got a stonking great vote in Cork, or Seamus Treanor who retained his seat in North Monaghan, or the two Galway councillors who bolted Fianna Fáil over immigration, or to the ex-Fianna Fáiler who left the party over immigration and who topped the poll in Fermoy, beating Derek Blighe by fully 13%. Many of these people will have – or will continue to have – successful and long careers as “colourful characters” in Irish politics. Some of them may make the Dáil and serve five or ten years making regular appearances in Miriam Lord’s Irish Times colour column for kicking up the odd fuss.
Such characters, though, are of little use to anybody while they remain career independents. They are no threat to take power from those who hold it. Only an organised and focused movement can do that.
There is, however, no clear and focused movement on the Irish right. There are some groups with some promise: Aontú and Independent Ireland, for example, competing with each other.
There are also some groups who should have the honesty to admit to themselves that they are campaigning without much promise at all. One council seat is a very poor return after five or more years for the Irish Freedom Party, but that still ranks it ahead of the National Party circus, or the Irish People, or Ireland First, or I can’t believe we’re not putting Ireland First. There are also a raft of egotists running vanity campaigns who had no business putting their name on the European ballot as independents. A tricolour and a copy of the 1916 proclamation is not a manifesto, and it is not a campaign. What it is, I’m afraid, is social media performance art masquerading as politics.
These results should provoke major soul searching: It has been decades since the political ground was as fertile as it presently is. Immigration, as we are constantly reminded, is an issue that concerns 70% of the voters. The right, having had that issue largely to themselves for several years, turned 70% of the voters being concerned about it into a handful of council seats. Those declaring this a success are deluding themselves, and you.
There is not room in Ireland for six or seven fringe political parties contesting elections on the right. There is not room either to indulge the fantasy idea that people like John Waters or Mary Fitzgibbon or Philip Dwyer or Una McGurk or literally a dozen others were ever serious candidates for the European Parliament. All of them might be good people, and admirable in their own way, but their presence on the ballot paper is a sign of a leaderless and unfocused and politically hopeless movement.
There is time to address these mistakes, and to learn from them going forward. But addressing these mistakes means admitting first of all that they were mistakes. And it means being brave enough to face them down, and to commit to not making them again.
On the left, from whom lessons can be learned, it is often forgotten that People before Profit is not a single party, but a formal alliance of several: Solidarity, RISE, and (at various times) the Socialist Party. Its members have separate factional identities, but campaign as a single unit.
These elections, in practical terms, will not change much. A general election is coming in short order. At the moment, unless people get a lot smarter quickly, the Irish right is not in any way a threat to make even the slightest impact in that contest. The only question is whether that situation will persist after this week.
It should not.