Far be it from me to second-guess Colette Browne, the communications director for the Social Democrats, but in her position I am not sure that I would have agreed, during a cost of living crisis, to have my party leader photographed for the Sunday Independent wearing made-to-order clothes with a labelled value of over €1000.
Nevertheless, it’s useful that at least one Social Democrat wardrobe has been re-filled, because judging by the tone of the interview, its policy wardrobe remains entirely threadbare:
When she was promoted to party leader earlier this year, Cairns said her first priority was: “Housing, housing, housing.”
That hasn’t changed. It is the emergency for her generation and, at the time, she pointed out that she, like many of her peers, was essentially living at home. In her case, though, it doesn’t seem to be working out too badly.
She says the Government needs to be more hands on, with a more robust site-vacancy tax and a more aggressive attitude to tackling Airbnbs. One imagines there might be a fair bit of pushback on both of those policies in west Cork.
“We have to treat it like an emergency rather than having targets. Saying we have this target is meaningless. There are hundreds of thousands of vacant homes all over the country. The Government says they’re tackling vacancy, but why isn’t it working,” she asks.
“We would introduce a 10pc tax on vacancy. Make it an incentive to not sit on a vacant property.
“Also there are an extortionate number of Airbnbs that could be homes. We have laws around this, but the councils are saying it’s really difficult to identify them. They could if they wanted to by going online and trying to book a place and getting the address that way.”
Forgive my scepticism, but if your only housing policy of note that you can identify after nearly six months in the job is to re-direct council staff to spending their days browsing holiday websites to sniff out Airbnb rentals, then it might be said that you’re somewhat in deficit on the “big ideas” front.
“We have to treat housing like an emergency”, she says. But what – to quote a fictional former US President – are the next ten words? And the ten after that? Because turning Council workers into online housing investigators to uncover short-term rentals isn’t so much a solution, so much as it reads like a politician saying the very first thing that pops into her head under pressure.
But this is the dilemma facing both the Social Democrats, and Labour: It’s very difficult to come up with a housing plan when all of the traditionally centre-left policies have already been implemented, wholesale, by the sitting Government. Rent controls? We have them already. Increased protections for tenants? We’ve got them. Massive state investment in new home builds? Check.
And it’s not just in housing. Across the board, Labour and the Social Democrats are struggling to differentiate themselves on policy for the very simple reason that in practical terms we already have a Labour and Social Democrat Government. The market for social progressivism is entirely cornered by any Government that boasts Simon Harris, Helen McEntee, and Josepha Madigan as Ministers. The market for environmentalism is owned by the Greens. And so, what you’re left with is just vibes.
If you read the Cairns interview in the Sunday Independent, it’s very clear that the pitch is just that: Vibes. We learn that she wants to be an Irish version of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, the firebrand left-wing US Congresswoman from New York. We learn that she wants to bring something called “The spirit of repeal” into Irish politics. We hear a lot about how empowering it is to be a young woman, and especially a young woman in politics. There’s little to nothing on policy, but a whole heap of “vote for me, I’d be good fun on a girl’s night out”.
The good news for the Soc Dems, as I wrote last week in a piece about Labour, is that Holly Cairns is much better placed to occupy that kind of “vibey” niche in Irish left politics than Ivana Bacik is. The problem is that the whole thing is predicated on a bet that a big chunk of voters desire the exact same policies as we have at the moment, except implemented by somebody more “in tune with their values”.
That, after all, is the battleground on which Irish politics is being fought: Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are determined to show that they are progressive parties with progressive values. Everyone else (bar the Independents and Aontu) wants you to believe that the progressive policies are not working because they are not accompanied by properly progressive values. If only we’d a Government in power that really believed in this stuff, they say, then imagine the change we’d see.
But the trouble is that to most voters, the difference between progressive values and progressive policies is hard to grasp, and in the end, both Labour and the Soc Dems just end up sounding like spokespeople for the Government on almost every issue of the day, from housing to immigration to health to hate speech. It leaves Cairns, and Bacik, fishing in the very small pool of voters who believe that the only change Ireland needs is for the policies to remain the same, but with some added preaching.
For most of us, it’s all very uninspiring.