That Troublesome Thing, Democracy

It is the nature of being a member of an elite to quickly forget what it’s like to be part of the hoi-polloi. Marie Antoinette, for instance, couldn’t conceive of a situation where people were starving. All she ever knew were sumptuous riches. She had no conception of people not having cake to eat.

Sinn Féin’s inexorable rise in the polls has the Irish political elite just as baffled as the last Queen of France. But how could the elite understand it, when they only ever talk to themselves? If they were to talk to real people living real lives in the real world, the secret of Sinn Féin’s success would be all too clear. It comes about – if you will pardon the infelicitous phrase – through process of elimination.

The current government swept to power on a manifesto of change. But all they changed were the chairs. The music remained exactly the same.

The current government did not stand up to Brussels. They did exactly what Fianna Fáil had laid out for them. The current government did not end cronyism. If anything, they brought it to newer and towering heights. And God only knows what the ongoing disaster of Irish Water will do before that debate calms down.

In the light of all this, you can see how people might be a little bit tetchy. Nobody likes being sold a pup. As for the Government’s greatest victory, the Promissory Note deal and the exit of the Troika – well, what does that mean, really?

The people were told that thirty years of hardship lay in store, thanks to perfidious Fianna Fáil and their crooked builder pals. And now everything’s grand after three years? Either the Government was lying while in opposition, or else it’s lying now. Both statements cannot be true.

So, having tried the strawberry flavour and then tried the banana flavour, the public are going to try another flavour again. And the only flavour left in the shop is Sinn Féin.

The Independents can’t form a Government. If anything, “Independent” doesn’t quite describe that eclectic group, as they nearly all have mother parties from which they are currently estranged.

Lucinda Creighton had the potential to create a new party that would, finally, end the civil war era of Irish politics. She had the moral authority that comes from giving up all she had, politically, on a point of principle, and she had a constituency desperate for change and reform.

But, perhaps through lack of vision on her own part, and certainly through extraordinary cowardice on others’ parts, Creighton could never rally people to her flag. Stephen Donnelly could have brought the Reform Alliance into life, cementing their status as fiscally responsible while take the right-wing Catholic edge off them. But he stayed put, and all Lucinda can do now is wait for Enda Kenny’s Night of the Long Knives and rejoin Fine Gael once Kenny’s head is in Mme La Guillotine’s basket.

Sinn Féin are soaking up the votes because there’s nobody else there. Fianna Fáil remain in ribbons after the 2011 election, while neither Fine Gael nor Labour realise just how betrayed so many of the people who voted for them in 2011 feel. They people didn’t get what they wanted at the last election, so now they’ll give the other crowd a try. That’s how it works, isn’t it?

The prospect of Sinn Féin in power horrifies the Irish political Establishment. As such, the media – who are as much part of the Establishment as An Taoiseach himself – have been bending over backwards to demonise Sinn Féin at every opportunity. But all they’re doing is making Sinn Féin stronger, because anybody can see the extraordinary bias in their coverage.

Mary-Lou McDonald’s expulsion from the Dáil last week is the latest case of this. All the coverage – all of it – dismissed McDonald’s expulsion as a stunt. Nobody was interested in teasing out the story a bit further.

For instance, did anybody ask if Seán Barrett is as even-handed as he ought to be in his role as Ceann Comhairle? Mary Lou McDonald’s isn’t the first name to make his bad books.

Former TD Luke Ming Flanagan has been vocally critical of Seán Barrett too. It’s not Sinn Féin’s imagination. That should make Barrett’s Ceann Comhairle-ship is a legitimate point of debate, but it’s not.

The second point is – does any of this matter? The Dáil’s theoretical purpose is to hold the executive to account, but the country is now run by a four-person junta, comprised of the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. The junta showed the Dáil exactly how much it mattered during the Irish Water debate. There wasn’t one. Irish Water was set up by fiat, just as things are done in any other totalitarian state.

And that’s why people are willing to give Sinn Féin a go. Because there’s nobody else there and, having been promised reform, the people still seem to kind of want it.

IN order to provide some vague alternative, the extraordinary prospect of a Fianna Fáil / Fine Gael coalition, to “safeguard democracy,” is now being floated. There is no notion that expresses the elitism of the governing classes so much as that idea.

A Fianna Fáil / Fine Gael coalition won’t stop Sinn Féin getting into government. All it will do is delay it, and ensure that Sinn Féin will have even more TDs and therefore more cabinet places in the election after next. If the people vote for Sinn Féin, they have to get them.

There is also the lesson of history in not giving the people what they voted for. Dick Spring’s Labour Party were never forgiven for denying the voice of the people in 1992.

If Sinn Féin get a mandate from the people to govern at the next election that mandate has to be respected, no matter how many stomachs churn at the prospect. That’s what democracy is – the people get to select their government, and not have their government decided by juntas and elites.

If the three establishment parties want to win more votes than Sinn Féin, they would be better off making it clear to the people why they’re worth those votes, rather than briefing against the dirty Shinners and hoping wool will be pulled over people’s eyes. The nation is sick of wool by now.

Irish Politics - Leaning Left, or Keeling Over?

First published in the Western People on Monday.

There’s nothing like seeing ourselves as others see us to find out who we really are. As such, the New York Times’ report on Saturday evening about our elections is particularly interesting.

“Ireland has taken a decisive step to the left in local and European elections,” reported the New York Times, going on to say “early returns on Saturday showed that the big winners were Sinn Féin, formerly the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, and Socialist independent candidates.”

And when you read that you have to suddenly stop and say: is that what we’ve just done? Is that what’s going on here? Is Ireland, nearly one hundred years after independence, going to have its first-ever left-wing Government come the next general election? Has the wheel turned full circle for Sinn Féin?

Certainly, the fact that Sinn Féin is less and less toxic to the electorate with each passing election is clear as a bell. But it does not necessarily then follow that Leo Varadkar is correct when he suggested on Saturday that the next general election will be a two-horse race between Fine Gael and Sinn Féin. There are more tea-leaves swirling around than that.

Equally, the rise of the socialist independents isn’t entirely robust as a theory. Catherine Murphy and John Halligan, both late of the Workers’ Party and both current Technical Group TDs, welcomed the rise of the independents on RTÉ as if it had something to do with them. But does it have something to do with them? Is there a red tide rising in Ireland, or is something else going on?

The success of Murphy and Halligan’s fellow Technical Group TD and future MEP if press-time polling is to trusted, Luke “Ming” Flanagan, is the most spectacular result of the election. But Ming isn’t like any other politician – the national media likes to group him with Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, but Ming is infinitely smarter than Wallace and not as ideologically tied up as Daly.

Luke Flanagan’s campaign was a textbook example of how to get elected in modern-day Ireland. He didn’t put a foot wrong in any of it. Flanagan spent the first week or ten days of the election running in the five and ten kilometre races that are all over the country now. Why? Flanagan’s biggest image problem in this constituency is that he’s a good-for-nothing layabout stoner, and he conquered that immediately by running the races and proving himself healthy as a trout. Genius.

Flanagan’s second, and no less inspired, tactic in the campaign was to loosely ally with other independents who were running in the locals. They got a slice of Flanagan’s charisma, of which he has buckets, while he got his leaflets distributed.

What was that worth? Think of it this way. On his Facebook page on April 16th, Flanagan thanked an independent candidate in Athlone for taking seven thousand leaflets to distribute. You know those bales of paper that you can buy in the supermarket for your printer at home? Seven thousand leaflets is fourteen of those bales, and would cost €4,200 to post. Genius.

But is Ming the exception or the rule? Did people vote for Luke Flanagan because he’s perceived as left-wing, or because they can’t help but like the man? Did people vote for Sinn Féin because Sinn Féin are left wing or because the anniversary of the 1916 Rising, the source and origin of the state itself, is looming and Sinn Féin seems to be the only party that wants to celebrate it, rather than hide it in some bizarre stew that also includes Passchendaele, Ypres and the sinking of the Lusitania?

It got very little coverage overall because it was a skirmish on the side of the great battles of the local and European elections, but the real soul of Irish politics could be seen in the Longford-Westmeath by-election. There were nine candidates on the ballot, of whom eight were from Westmeath and just one from Longford.

That single Longford candidate, an independent (of course) called James Morgan, entered the race late on a platform of “A Vote for Morgan is a Vote for Longford.” He polled 5,959 votes on the first count, of which 5,900 are unlikely to have come from Westmeath.

And that’s Irish politics in the nutshell. We pretend elections are about issues, but they’re not. Not really. Left/right, pro/anti Europe don’t matter a hill of beans. Irish elections are about defending the home patch because the entire culture has been set up that way for generations.

For the people of Longford to have put merit over geography is like the unilateral disarmament theory during the cold war. It seems noble, but you’re only inviting someone who isn’t noble to blow you away to Hell. Everything about the Irish system of elections is set up to ensure the continuance of this parish pump culture, where the back yard is more important than the nation.

Why are chronically ill children being denied medical cards? Why has something terribly rotten at the heart of the Garda Síochána been allowed to fester unchecked? Why will we be paying for water that we can’t even see through, to say nothing of drink?

Because the Irish political system makes fighting over whether Ballyglenna or Ballyknock loses its post office more important than the health of the nation’s children, the policing of the state, or access to clean water.

Is Ireland leaning to the left? Only insofar as we’ve decided to chase our own tails anti-clockwise for a change. Above anything else, Ireland needs reform of its political culture to elect a new type of politician and bury civil war politics for once and for all. It then needs comprehensive public service reform so it can raise sufficient taxes to protect the vulnerable, something it cannot do currently in the culture of wanton waste.

It will take twenty-five or thirty years for these things to come to pass. But until they do, until we have a functional democratic system instead of one ruled by clientelism, favoritism and nepotism, all the blood shed for Irish freedom will have been shed for nothing. Every precious drop of it.

General Election 2011: Winners and Losers

Labour and Fine Gael are the big winners after Friday, but for different reasons. Fianna Fáil are listing in heavy seas, but reports of their death are premature.

The Coquette in Courtship Ritual
Labour are big winners because their vote spiked in the final week after showing a decline in the polls. Why? Niamh Breatnach opined on Morning Ireland on Saturday that Labour got in because people wanted to protect their jobs. There will undoubtedly have been that vote, but also people who genuinely believe that on the one hand, on the other hand government works. Perhaps they also hate to think of a camel that doesn’t have two humps – who knows?

The negotiation between Labour and Fine Gael will take place behind closed doors – open Government, me hat – but what a pity it won’t be on telly. It would make compulsive viewing. Labour are out of the blocks quickly, with Eamon Gilmore telling the News at One yesterday that, even though Labour were the second biggest party and therefore the natural leaders of the opposition, they were prepared to serve in a national government in the national interest.

The implication of this is that while Labour themselves would be much happier with RBB and the boys in opposition, shining hammers and sharpening sickles, they are prepared to suffer ministerial mercs for Ireland. It’s a classic coquette strategy, and it will be interesting to see how Fine Gael respond.

Fine Gael’s Greatest Ever Day
Fine Gael themselves will surely have spent yesterday crushed by the most epic hangovers known to man or beast, and they will have deserved them. This has been Fine Gael’s greatest ever day.

The RTÉ exit poll that saw Fine Gael in the mid-thirties will have given them a sinking a feeling on Saturday morning but election are about seats, not percentages of votes. Garret Fitzgerald’s Fine Gael got seventy seats from 39% of the vote thirty years ago. Enda Kenny’s Fine Gael is in the mid-seventies on 36%.

There are factors behind that, such as superb vote management and the quirk of the system that sees parties with momentum do better in seat terms that strict proportionality would allow. Fianna Fáil benefited from this in 2002. This year, it’s Fine Gael’s turn.

Are Ye Dancin’?
Fine Gael have spoken about stable coalition government this weekend, but this does not necessarily mean that coalition with Labour is inevitable. Labour have already began their courtship by scorning a Fine Gael advance that’s yet to come. Depending on the numbers, it would make perfect sense for Fine Gael to start ringing a few independents and see if they fancy being baptised in the faith. Or rebaptised, as the case may be.

Of the seventeen independents elected so far, both Shane Ross and Michael Lowry are Fine Gael genepool. Luke Flanagan will listen to whoever knocks at his door. There’s no real point in bothering with gobaloos like Mattie McGrath, but of the other genepool Fianna Fáil independents, it’s no harm to give them a ring to see exactly how apostate they are. Stranger things have happened.

Fianna Fáil Doomed From the Outset
As for Fianna Fáil, the reality is that the election was lost when the banks were bailed out 2008. Not necessarily because they were bailed out per se – how many people understand the banking business anyway? – but because the party’s position was neither explained nor defended.

In the absence of government explanation or defence, the vacuum was filled by condemnation, ranging from accusations of incompetence to graft to treason. None of this was taken on by Fianna Fáil spinners, through either the front channel of the Taoiseach addressing the nation or the back channel of getting media people onside (as Fine Gael got media people onside, for instance).

By the time the election rolled around the electorate had its mind made up that Fianna Fáil were absolutely and utterly to blame for the recession and nothing that Fianna Fáil could have done or said during the campaign was going to change that. Aughrim had long been lost. Long faces and pussing about suffering from putting the country first were no good.

If the people thought Fianna Fáil had put the country first, the people would reward them. If not, then the whole democratic system is a sham by definition. But while Fianna Fáil talked about putting the country first, they never convinced the people that they had done that. Maybe history will be kind to them. The electorate was not, and dispensed summary justice to Fianna Fáil candidates all across the nation.

Is This the End of Rico?
Is this the end of Fianna Fáil? Who can say? A lot depends on the formation of the next government, and when the next election will be. The real end would be if Fianna Fáil were to coalesce with Fine Gael as a natural right-wing alignment, and the pattern of vote transfer between the parties would indicate that this makes sense.

But the political establishment faces the same problem in doing this that Nick Clegg faced in Britain last year. The clear judgement of the people is that they don’t want Fianna Fáil in office under any circumstances. The only way that could happen would be if the Fianna Fáil party were to dissolve and its members join Fine Gael. That’s not likely. Having gone through what they’ve gone through, they’re not going to chuck it now.

Besides. A Labour/Fine Gael coalition will be the best thing that could happen to Fianna Fáil.

Follow the Money
The most under-reported story of the election was the Fine Gael fundraiser in the Aviva Stadium. One of the reasons that Fine Gael got elected was because they had so much more money to spend. The people who were funding Fianna Fáil are now funding Fine Gael. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But while those boys might have been happy enough to have Jack O’Connor and the unions sign off on things when cash was flush, they’ll be a lot less happy to see whiskery trade unionists in Government when it’s time for the blade. RAF moustaches are ok, but beards are not business friendly. So will the pendulum swing back to Fianna Fáil now that Fine Gael didn’t achieve a majority?

Fianna Fáil have never taken anything even vaguely like the battering they’ve taken in this election, but time is now on their side. An Spailpín Fánach doesn’t think history has been made yet. And while everybody was talking about political reform during the election, it’s been this blog’s experience that talk is cheap. We’ll wait and see how many plates of chicken and chips Micheál Martin has to eat before he can get stuck into the squab pigeon from Touraine once more.

FOCAL SCOIR: Almost all the pics are from the Irish Times. Aren't they outstanding? I almost feel bad lifting them. The only that isn't is the dinner. I lifted that from somewhere else. My own dinner would be a lot more chicken and chippy. And eaten in the middle of the day.

Five Constituency Bets. Because We Might As Well Have the Craic

An Spailpín Fánach is enjoying Ivan Yates' constituency betting tips on Betfair almost as much as he's enjoying the statesmanship of our politicians, who surely put Periclean Athens in the ha'penny place.

Ivan is very much the insiders' insider, of course, while An Spailpín Fánach considers himself more of an outsiders' outsider, despite having never dispensed advice to the Minister for Finance in his kitchen, and being in the habit of putting his money where his (very big) mouth is.

Here, then, in ascending order of price, are An Spailpín's hugely unscientific bets to give you a bit of interest on Friday. Might be best to calibrate your stake according to price, by the way. No point in taking a complete bath. And these aren't necessarily endorsements, either, before someone takes the head off me. An Spailpín's dream of a United Federation of Planets, as outlined in Star Trek, burns brightly still.

Luke "Ming" Flanagan, Independent/New Vision. Roscommon-South Leitrim. 10/11.
Luke Flanagan is the nap of the meeting, for two reasons. Firstly, the electoral circumstances are made to order for a protest vote, and the electorate of Roscommon South-Leitrim will search long and hard to find a candidate less like those that have gone before than the Emperor.

Secondly, what people who have never met him may underestimate about Luke Flanagan is that the man is a consummate politican. He is supremely gifted in the political arts and, to borrow a favourite phrase of my father, if you burned Ming for a fool you'd have wise ashes. How else could he poster all of his constituency? War Rocket Ajax has been dispatched. Deal with it.

Maria Corrigan, Fianna Fáil. Dublin South. 10/11.
Media darling Senator Shane Ross is favourite to get the fifth seat here, but An Spailpín has heard that resentment towards George Lee still festers among the leafy suburbs. This will hurt Fine Gael's chances for a third seat, Alan Shatter and Olivia Mitchell being shoe-ins, but it will also hurt Senator Ross, who is nothing if not George Lee lite. The Fianna Fáil vote has to go somewhere, and Senator Corrigan is a reasonable bet for enough of it to remain in house to wash her ashore in fifth place. There are very few sisters running in the election, and that might stand to her in this particular constituency too.

Therese Ruane, Sinn Féin. Mayo. 2/1.
An Spailpín is a long time in exile from that earthly paradise that is the County Mayo, but my God, four Fine Gael seats out of five is a lot to ask. It would require vote management of the highest calibre for even the Free Beer Party to win four seats in an Irish five-seater, and it's doubly difficult in a constituency with as much ground to cover as Mayo.

The fifth seat will be down to transfers, which are a lottery, plain and simple. Getting 80% of the transfers on the ninth count is no good if you've been eliminated on the eighth. Again, as with Dublin South, the FF vote has to go somewhere and Sinn Féin is the natural destination for a disillusioned Fianna Fáil voter in the West. The two candidate strategy is risky, as it's assuming that policy will be more important than geography when either Ms Ruane or Ms Conway-Walsh is eliminated, thus arguing against a two candidate strategy in the first place, but how and ever. Ms Ruane will get more votes outside Castlebar than Mr Kilcoyne, the independent, and she gets the shilling on that basis.

John Gormley, Green Party. Dublin South-East. 3/1.
Ivan Yates assures us it'll be two Fine Gael, two Labour in Dublin South-East, but An Spailpín Fánach cannot get it out of his head that John Gormley's defence of his patch against the curly black smoke of that nasty incinerator won't stand to him.

It was hard not to pity Gormley on the Frontline leaders' debate last Monday. He seemed the most rational and thoughful of the five of them, but he's like one of those Japanese soldiers on a pacific island who fought on forty years after the Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima. He's worth a punt at threes, God love him.

Gerry Kilrane, Fianna Fáil. Roscommon-South Leitrim. 10/1.
This is the longshot punt of the card, but my goodness, could it really be true that county Leitrim could be without a TD for two consecutive Dála? An Spailpín can't come to terms with that, irrespective of party. Ivan didn't even mention Gerry Kilrane's name in his review of Roscommon-South Leitrim, and seems to believe that Martin Kenny is the only Leitrim candidate on the slate.

An Spailpín believes that Gerry Kilrane, despite the Fianna Fáil downturn, is more voter-friendly than Martin Kenny in Roscommon and can bubble up to the third seat on Kenny and Connaughton tranfers. It's a longshot, but that's why you get tens. You get nothin' for nothin' in this mean old world.