The elections to local authorities and the European parliament to be held on Friday are at once relatively unimportant, and at the same time a vital opportunity for voters to express their views on the state of our democracy.
In Ireland, local councillors have very few meaningful powers – aside from voting on development plans and planning matters, and moderately adjusting the local property tax, much of what a council does is determined in truth by the state-appointed county manager and his officials. Councillors are less legislators than they are lobbyists for the voters: Their true value is often in their ability to raise and highlight local and regional issues of importance.
The European Parliament is a more important body, with the European Union responsible for something like 70% of all legislation that is ultimately signed into law in Ireland. Here again, though, the powers of the parliament are relatively weak compared to a national legislature, with many of the ultimate decisions about the European Union taken by the Council of Ministers, which represents national governments.
As anyone who has watched the debates that have been held during the election campaign will have noticed, the true choice facing the voters in this election is not between candidates of the Government, and candidates of the official opposition; but between candidates of the collective political establishment made up of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Sinn Fein, the Greens, Labour, and the Social Democrats on one side, and candidates who stand opposed to the collective agenda of that political establishment on the other.
On the major issues of the day, establishment candidates largely sing from the same hymn sheet: On what is likely to be the single biggest economic issue of the next five years, both at home and abroad – the EU’s climate targets – all of those parties are in agreement that savage cuts to farming, industry, and home emissions are both necessary and desirable.
On migration the differences between them run from fully open borders on the left to mostly open borders with faster processing times for migrants from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
On issues of free speech the establishment parties have voted in lockstep. On issues of gender identity and the protection of women’s spaces and women’s sports, likewise.
On the size of the state and the role of RTE as a taxpayer funded media organisation, all these parties are broadly agreed.
On the single biggest event of the past five years – the Covid 19 pandemic – all stuck rigidly to the same script.
Between them, on the most important issues facing voters since the last election, these parties have only offered the illusion of choice, and often not even that.
Consensus-based politics has inflicted enormous damage to Ireland over recent decades, from the ruinous economic consensus of the 2000’s, which ended in disaster, to the ruinous public health consensus of the early 2020s, which landed Ireland with the longest lockdown in Europe and a covid enquiry that has yet to materialise. When politicians move as a herd, as ours do, basic questions do not get asked and bad decisions do not get challenged – which is the reason Ireland now has a migration crisis on top of its housing crisis.
Gript Media is not a partisan publication: We do not, and will not, advocate for votes for any party or any particular candidate. Nor do we advocate for votes against any particular candidate or party.
However, in our view, the stifling consensus in Irish politics must be broken open for the sake of the health of our democracy. On Friday, Irish voters will have at their disposal the tools to so break it: A record number of independent candidates and candidates from smaller parties. Voters, in our view, should choose between those candidates, and transfer between them also. If your first choice candidate is not elected, use your vote to ensure that it ends up with the candidate fighting for a seat who is most likely to break the consensus.
Voters should also temper their expectations: These elections are not elections to the Dáil and they will not bring down a Government nor radically change the direction of policy. Yet, electing candidates of a different stripe now will strengthen their voices and their democratic legitimacy ahead of the General Election to come next year. Whether those voices are radical or moderate; empowering them can only broaden the terms of that General Election debate when it comes, and pull the political establishment back in the direction of the electorate.
Above all, we urge you to use your vote, and to use it honestly and effectively: Vote for the candidate you like the most, regardless of how you perceive his or her chances of election, and continue your preferences in order of your choice until you no longer have a preference between the remaining candidates.
At the last election, there was a slogan: “Vote left, Transfer left”.
At the risk of coming up with the world’s least snappy slogan, we’d urge voters to adopt a different motto this time: Vote against the political establishment, Transfer against the political establishment.
For the good of that establishment, and for the good of our democracy, and for the health of Irish politics in general.