The Sunday Independent, with polling firm Ireland Thinks, consistently do the most comprehensive and interesting polls of public opinion in Ireland. If you missed it, their latest set of figures were published yesterday morning, and you can read the findings in detail here.
For my part, I want to highlight what I think are the three most important findings in the poll.
It’s very easy to just skip to the “who would you vote for?” question in an opinion poll and miss the more interesting figures buried underneath. This is rarely more true than it is of yesterday’s poll, which – at surface level – shows Fianna Fáil support up 3% to stand at 25% overall. Add Fine Gael’s 21% to that and you have a very healthy 46% of the voters who would support the re-election of the Government today. If the General Election were to be re-run, on these figures, the results would be close to identical. The Government would be re-elected.
But.
When asked “is Ireland going in the right direction, or wrong direction?” only 33% of voters said “right direction”, with 42% saying Ireland is going in the wrong direction. When voters were asked “do you approve or disapprove of how the Government is handling its job?” only 39% of voters said they approved, while 51% – a clear majority – disapproved.
The figures get worse: 67% of voters strongly disapprove of the Government’s deal with Michael Lowry, and more than 60% of voters believe the Government lied to or misled them before the election about the housing figures.
So here’s the picture: A majority disapproves of the Government, a supermajority disapproves of the Government’s Lowry deal, only a third of voters think the country is headed in the right direction, but the voters would still re-elect this Government anyway. Why?
The clue is in the approval figures for the opposition: Mary Lou McDonald wins the approval of only 39% of voters. Most voters want the opposition to “move on” from the Dáil speaking time row. And on the most important four issues facing the voters – housing, tariffs, immigration, and the cost of living, it’s very hard to see any clear daylight between Government and opposition.
As I write often on these pages, Government in Ireland is only part of the problem. A substantially bigger problem is the lack of any alternative to the Government worth considering. On that, the voters seem to agree. So, we’re stuck.
Donald Trump’s approval rating amongst Irish voters in this poll was 15%. That, if he were a party leader in Ireland, would make him by a mile Ireland’s least popular major politician. To put the figures in context, more than twice as many Irish voters approve of Ivana Bacik as approve of Donald Trump. Even I, dear reader, would not go that far.
But as unpopular as Trump is here, he would still be more popular than Conor McGregor. When asked in this poll if they would consider voting for Conor McGregor for public office, 90% of Irish voters said “no”, and only 7% said “yes”.
Again, these figures should be seen in the light of the underlying questions in the poll, which – unlike the party support figures – tend to reinforce rather than undermine the headline facts.
For example, when asked “do you think Donald Trump disrespected Ireland by inviting Conor McGregor to the White House on Saint Patrick’s Day?” the voters answer in the affirmative – yes he did – by 78% to 19%. That’s four in five voters who feel that Trump disrespected their country.
When asked what they think about Trump’s tariffs, overwhelming majorities say that they expect Trump’s policies to make them personally poorer, and one in five are now worried that they may lose their own job.
Voters are also hungry for a measure of vengeance: A clear majority support retaliatory tariffs by the EU on American goods (which, just like Trump’s tariffs, will likely make us all poorer, but will certainly further damage the US economy as well).
By contrast, if voters disapprove of Trump and McGregor, they think Micheál Martin handled the whole thing pretty well. 66% are either positive or neutral on how he conducted himself in the White House on March 12th, as opposed to 30% who are negative. We should remember too that part of that 30% will include people who are annoyed at Mr. Martin for not shouting at Donald Trump about Gaza, or just calling him names and walking out.
In any case, the political position of Irish voters is pretty clear, right now: They may be dissatisfied with their own Government and politicians, but they would take them every day of the week over Trump and McGregor.
It is worth pointing out that in this same poll, 23% of Irish voters still say that “immigration” is the top issue facing the country. Even in that environment, many voters who are concerned about migration still want nothing to do with the most radical voices shouting about it online.
It is true that polls this far out from an election should be treated with a grain of salt, but Mairead McGuinness has very significant advantages should she seek the Presidency – as most Fine Gaelers I know now expect that she will.
In this poll, she would start a campaign with an enormous 34% of the vote. More significantly, the second placed candidate is Michael McDowell, with 20%, who is (I understand) unlikely to run. One would assume based on voting patterns in Ireland that McGuinness would benefit more from that 20% of the vote than any of the other candidates, who include left-wing “unity candidate” Frances Black sitting on just 17% of the vote.
McGuinness has other advantages too, not covered by the poll: She has very high name recognition, but has never sullied her reputation by becoming a TD or taking an Irish Government job. She is widely seen as having been a “safe pair of hands” in Europe. She passes the vital “is unlikely to embarrass the country” test. She has strong ties to the farming community, which usually votes at a high rate. There is no hint of any scandal or personal failing (think what happened to David Norris, here) that might derail her.
What’s more, if you put all of the findings in the poll together, you get a fairly clear picture of where the Irish voter is at: Dissatisfied with the Government, but worried and fearful about radical change. With fears of a Trump-induced recession and global instability, the Irish voter appears to be very much in a “don’t rock the boat” mood. McGuinness is the ultimate “don’t rock the boat” candidate.
If you lived through 2008 and the elections of 2011, you will recognise the pattern. Until the Irish populist right can provide a credible and mainstream alternative, it will continue to sit, moribund, in the water, and will have to content itself with twitter likes instead of actual votes.