Post-rout clarity: The FFers and FGers re-thinking their life choices

Serial adulterers who describe themselves as sex addicts often speak of a crippling sense of shame and guilt that follows when they give into their compulsions. All lust and desire expended, they find themselves left clear eyed and filled with regret, the temporary high gone, and replaced with a deep sense of self-loathing about the betrayal of their partner. Reading such an account over the weekend made me realise the striking similarities of that emotion with what many of our politicians appear to be experiencing in recent days: A sudden and dramatic sense of shame, embarrassment, and guilt at having stepped out on the voters, and an apparent need to join a support circle and talk it all out. Call it “post-rout clarity”.

One of the oddities of Irish politics is that it’s often the greatest and most consistent vote-getters who are most consistently mocked (admittedly with occasional good humour) in the media and by other politicians: Think of the Healy Raes (father and sons); Michael Lowry; Michael Collins; and in this instance, Willie O’Dea. These are all politicians who, whether you approve of them or not, are perennial poll-toppers when elections are held. You don’t achieve that kind of record without being deeply in touch with the views of your constituents, and well-regarded amongst them for representing those views. When Willie O’Dea speaks, then, his party would be well-advised to listen:

Fianna Fáil needs to get back to basics & abandon the Hate Speech Bill etc. Focus on Housing, Health and Law & Order and stop playing to the woke gallery. Start listening to the people, stop talking down to them and stop listening to the out of touch Greens & NGOs #Referendum2024

— Willie O'Dea (@willieodeaLIVE) March 11, 2024

O’Dea’s sentiments were echoed yesterday by other politicians with a long track-record of success. Speaking to my colleague Ben Scallan, Fine Gael’s Charlie Flanagan (nobody’s idea of a conservative, it should be said) echoed the sentiment, telling him that the party was in “cloud cuckoo land” if it believed analysis given to Alison O’Connor of the Sunday Times by a senior Fine Gaeler which claimed that the hated “far right” was to blame for Saturday’s defeat. He expressed agreement with another Fine Gaeler, Peter Burke TD, about NGO funding.

Fianna Fáil’s youngest TD, James O’Connor, weighed in behind one of its most senior, declaring that he “couldn’t agree more” with Willie O’Dea.

When I described this, on social media, as significant, one correspondent – doused in cynicism – claimed that the TDs in question were “only trying to save their seats”. Yes.

That, my friend, is the whole point.

The most important thing to understand about Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s drift towards the progressive left in recent decades is that it is not primarily, and never has been, a matter of principle. If you want evidence of that, look no further than the 2018 referendum on abortion. The leaders of that campaign – Simon Harris, Leo Varadkar, Micheál Martin – all had one thing in common, that being that they had flipped their position one hundred and eighty degrees. As recently as the 2011 general election, for example, Minister Harris had signed the electoral pledge of the pro-life campaign, promising solemnly to defend the then-pro-life character of the Irish constitution.

There are precisely two possible explanations for their collective u-turn: The first is that these three – and many other people like them in their parties – all went on the same intellectual “journey” at the same time, considered all of the philosophical implications of one of humanity’s most vexed moral questions – and all arrived within a few months at the identical conclusion. The second is that they sensed the winds change in the electorate, and said “there go our people, let us lead them”. I respectfully submit that you’d have to be very gullible to think that these people were ever sincerely of either fixed view on abortion – either in 2011 or in 2018 – and that their damascene conversions were first and last matters of political opportunism.

This has always been the great weakness, and probably the only weakness, in the otherwise impenetrable institutional armour of progressive Ireland. The Universities are controlled. The media is instinctively sympathetic. The NGO sector is entirely of one mind. The problem has always been that FF and FG have been coming along for the ride because that’s where they believed the votes to be, not because – outside of a few exceptions – social progressivism is the deeply felt conviction of their leaders.

The problem for FF and FG, by contrast, has always been a simple one: Progressives are not stupid. They know, as much as I do, that FF and FG are not with them in heart and soul, but purely in terms of what they can get out of it. This has always been the reason that Mr. Martin and Mr. Varadkar, no matter how hard they sold themselves as new modern men to the Lena-Dunham-appreciating masses of South Dublin, have never been able to close the deal. Poor Micheál and Leo can talk about white privilege and embrace pronoun inclusivity all they want – Sadbh from Monkstown is still voting Social Democrat and recommending that everyone in her book club does the same.

It is this clarity that Willie O’Dea, and others, are now experiencing. The referendums at the weekend were just the latest in a series of indications that their traditional base – the people who actually vote for them – are not buying what Sadbh, god love her, is selling. They’re not crying out for constitutional tinkering, or drop-down pronoun menus with 78 options on state websites, or Government action on giving a guaranteed income to the Arts community. They’re concerned about crime, taxes, health, housing, and immigration.

The bottom line is that some of these TDs have spent just about enough time in bed with the NGO sector, and the progressives. The frenetic action is over now, and all they’re left with is the mess, and the shame, and the sense that they’ve betrayed the people they were actually married to.

We should welcome the post-rout clarity while it lasts. The trouble, as the above mentioned addicts will tell you, is that it very rarely does.