It should be stipulated at the beginning of any article about Micheál Martin and coalition options that the Tánaiste is, on these matters, what a literary critic would call an “unreliable narrator”. This is the man, after all, who explicitly ruled out a coalition with Fine Gael before the last election, and told the voters that only a vote for Fianna Fáil would remove Fine Gael from Government. That was, generously, misleading. Less generously, it was something else.
And so, ahead of Ireland’s approaching (but still a ways off) general election, it’s worth taking the Fianna Fáil leader’s coalition punditry with a pinch of salt.
That said, this was a good and instructive answer which tells us a few things.
Tánaiste Micheál Martin getting a bit chippy with media over questions about whether he’ll consider a coalition with Sinn Féin after the next election pic.twitter.com/AvVQ2h9kVa
— Seán Defoe (@SeanDefoe) September 11, 2023
The first thing to note is Martin’s apparently genuine and understandable irritation at the media smart money being piled on a Fianna Fáil-Sinn Fein (or more likely, Sinn Fein-Fianna Fáil) coalition. Irish journalists, as we know, have a remarkable tendency to herd around conventional wisdom, and the conventional wisdom very much is that only those two parties will be able to command a majority between them in the next, slightly expanded, Dáil. Since everybody wishes to appear smart and knowledgeable, punditry about that coalition will be the dominant theme of talk ahead of the election, treating it as something of a foregone conclusion.
Which it very much is not.
Because the second thing to note is that Mr. Martin very clearly has a strong preference not to go into Government with Sinn Fein. The reason we can say this with certainty is simple: He is not in coalition with them today, when he could easily be. Sinn Fein has 36 seats, to Fine Gael’s 33 as things stand. After the last election, an FF/SF/Green coalition would actually have been more stable than the FF/FG/Green coalition we got.
Mr. Martin chose breaking a promise to get FG out of Government, over putting Sinn Fein into Government. Now, that comes with a caveat – perhaps Sinn Fein had zero interest in such a coalition. But we can only judge people by their public statements at the time, and on those statements, Sinn Fein was very open to entering Government. Mr. Martin chose to dance with the aul’ enemy, rather than the new girl.
The third thing is that Mr. Martin’s instincts are entirely correct when it comes to preserving Fianna Fáil. The nature of punditry is that “Sinn Fein entering Government” is a much more exciting yarn than “Fianna Fáil staying in Government with Sinn Fein”, and therefore the consequences of such a decision are relentlessly focused on Sinn Fein, not Fianna Fáil. Objectively, partnering with Sinn Fein would be a disaster for FF, for fairly simple reasons.
In such a Government, FF would represent the old and the past, and Sinn Fein the new and the future. Positive changes would be fairly attributed by the voters to SF, since they would be the new boys and driving such change. Things that stayed the same or got worse would be associated with FF, since that party would represent the legacy problems of the previous Government. All the time, Fine Gael on the opposition benches would have time to eat up former FF voters uncomfortable with any big changes. Fianna Fáil would be relentlessly squeezed, from both sides.
Mr. Martin is smart enough to understand this, even if too many journalists either overlook it, or do not care.
The fourth and final thing to say is that Mr. Martin is entirely correct about the polls and the election campaign: Nobody really knows how it will turn out since almost every party’s final seat numbers are a complete lottery by dint of our electoral system and the almost complete randomness of last seats. It’s not hard to imagine a great election for independents throwing the numbers off, or Sinn Fein suffering from weak second candidates and losing winnable seats.
The polls are close enough that it is very easy to imagine the present Government – minus the greens – emerging in a very strong position, one in which it is able to sub in Holly Cairns or Ivana Bacik for Eamon Ryan. If it could do so, there is little doubt that it would.
Mr. Martin did not repeat his mistake of 2020 by absolutely ruling out working with Sinn Fein, and he was right not to do so. But it is, and should, be absolutely clear that working with them is not his preference, and that Sinn Fein face a much steeper climb to power than is presently being assumed.