I’ll start this piece by stating what should now be blindingly obvious to anybody with eye and ears who has been exposed to the Irish General Election: Peadar Toibin and Aontú have had a very good campaign. And I mean, a very good campaign.
Good campaigns involve a slice of good luck as well as good strategy. One video in particular summed it up for me: Bertie Ahern, that old fox, was convinced by our friends over at the Irish Independent to try out a particular vote-matching app that tells you what party you’re supposed to vote for. Bertie inputted his views, the app matched them up, and he was matched with Aontú. “I’m an Aontu voter”, declares the Bert, presumably somewhat in jest.
(Though mind you, some people wouldn’t put money on him casting a vote for poor old FF warrior Mary Fitzpatrick)
This is an example of good luck, and good strategy. The strategy element, clearly, is in the manifesto: This is a set of policy proposals targeted directly at the centre of the country, moderate enough to capture the preferences of somebody like Bertie Ahern while also radical enough in some areas, like migration and crime, to appeal to the disenchanted anti-establishment voter.
The luck element is that the Indo asked Bertie to take the test. You can’t buy a moment like that, and you’d never have gotten Bertie to do it voluntarily, I suspect, had he anticipated the outcome.
Then there’s the Toibin factor. This writer has been critical of Toibin in the past for failing to show enough passion on the stump: In the European Elections, for example, where Aontú had a disappointing showing, I thought he was too mild-mannered in the RTE debate. Last week, amid a cast of ten leaders, he played it perfectly, with polls showing him running away with the public’s opinion on who had performed badly.
There’s also the candidate factor: For the first time, every voter in the country will have the chance to vote Aontú. In some constituencies, like my own, that will be very much a fruitless vote as their candidate is under-funded and unlikely to be in the mix. But having a candidate matters because it gives every supporter in the country a chance to vote for you. Aontu’s anti-establishment rival, Independent Ireland, has failed to do the same thing.
A good manifesto, a good leader, and a well-planned campaign. It’s all there. So why is it that I still feel like 10 seats is setting the bar unnecessarily, indeed foolishly, high?
The answer lies in the nature of the Irish electoral system, which for small parties requires a party to concentrate its vote geographically in various constituencies. It is a simple fact of our system that a political party that scored 6% of the vote nationally, and spread that evenly across every single constituency, would struggle to take even one seat. Our biggest constituencies are five-seaters, in which to be elected you need 16.5% of the vote for a quota. In a three-seater, that rises to 25% of the vote. It’s a very high bar.
Aontú certainly have various candidates who will be “in the mix”. Constituencies like Cavan-Monaghan, Mayo, Wicklow-Wexford and Dublin West are four or five seat electorates where the party has good candidates. But other places where it has good candidates, like Cork North West, are three-seaters where getting to a quarter of the vote would be a monumental ask. Of all their candidates in the country running in three-seaters, only Toibin himself is really someone you could call as a likely winner.
Then there’s the other perennial issue for Aontú candidates: Transfers.
The most obvious source of preference votes for them comes from the ranks of the independents, whose voters tend to be anti-establishment types to whom Aontú may be more attractive than other parties. But Independent voters do, historically, tend to fragment when their first preferences are redistributed. We’re likely to see much stronger left-wing transfers between Labour, the Greens, and the Soc Dems than we are between Independents (or anyone else) and Aontú.
All of this is not to put a downer on the Aontú campaign. But 10 seats just seems, to this writer, an enormously over-ambitious target. If the party was to come back with four TDs, that would constitute an enormous win and an enormous advance on its position, and would firmly embed it in the political firmament.
Five or six years ago, that looked like an impossible task. Today, it does not look unreasonable. If the party can close strong, it is set for a really good result. But ironically, saying that you want ten seats might make a really good day look disappointing. It’s the first – and so far only – mis-step of what has otherwise been the absolute pick of the campaigns rolled out by the parties in this election.