Tribes and Chieftains Are the Only Things That Count in Irish Politics

An article in yesterday’s Irish Times made a bold prediction about a change in direction of Irish politics:

Political leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump not only redefined what their party stood for but redrew the lines of political competition in their countries.
A Leo Varadkar leadership of Fine Gael potentially presents a similar realignment of the Irish political system in a way that none of the other declared or potential candidates at this point appears to offer.

There is an elephant in the room here, tapping its foot impatiently.

The elephant is the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that leadership or ideology matters a hill of beans in an Irish general election. There are no general elections in Ireland; there are forty-something local elections, depending on the constituency count, with a government being formed as an afterthought to those individual local wars.

Two things matter in Irish elections – tribes and chieftains. Anything else is either a bell or a whistle.

Discussing the presence of Jim O’Callaghan and Stephen Donnelly on the current Fianna Fáil front bench, the author makes a point based on “my experience in the UK.” Experience in the UK is as much in Irish politics as experience on Mars, the Red Planet. Irish elections are utterly different from British elections.

The British House of Commons has 650 seats. There are four Independents among those 650 MPs, three of whom were elected on party tickets and either resigned or lost their party whips. The only Independent elected as an Independent in the 650 constituencies is Lady Sylvia Hermon, MP for South Down.

Dáil Éireann has 158 seats currently. Fourteen of those seats were won by Independent Candidates, possibly more depending on how exactly you count them (are the Independent Alliance or Independents 4 Change “Independent”?). This is a situation unthinkable in the British system, but it is par for the course in Ireland. Ireland has a completely different way of doing things. Completely different.

Those fourteen Independents got two hundred and fifty thousand votes in the last election. The Labour Party, worried about the “face on the poster,” changed leader after the 2014 local elections and ended up with 140,000 votes, slightly better than half that of the Independents, and with less than a third of the Independents’ seats.

So the crystal clear lesson here is that it doesn’t matter if it’s Leo Varadkar’s, Simon Coveney’s or JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy’s face on the poster. Irish elections are local elections for local people. Irish governments are formed by backroom deals on “issues” like Waterford Hospital, Stepaside Garda Station and flood barriers in Athlone, and have nothing on God’s green earth to do with “liberalism, globalism, equality of opportunity, enterprise and greater personal liberty and responsibility.”

And this is exactly the way the people like it. The system is set up to reward our lesser angels, and the current crises in the HSE, the Guards and the absence of any sort of contingency planning for Brexit is the result. The boys at home get sorted no matter what, and let the country take her chances with what’s left.

A Second Election is the Only Sensible Solution

Enda Kenny must do the sensible thing. He must go up to the Park and tell the President it’s time to give the wheel another spin.

The strong media consensus that a Grand Coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael was not only the only possible result from the election but that it was the only sensible result from the election has proved to be so much blather.

It would take a seismic change to overturn a political culture that has lasted for nearly eighty years. As it happens, that seismic change happened five years ago, but instead of a radical realignment of Irish politics, we got a return to the Fine Gael / Labour coalitions of the ‘seventies and ‘eighties. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were just as ideologically similar then as now, and they certainly had numbers to form a coalition, but nobody was talking about an FF/FG coalition being either inevitable or obvious then.

Five years on, we have stalemate, as the difference between how elections are run in this country and how governments are formed are clearer than they ever have been. In theory, the voter goes to the polls with the intention of selecting a government for the country. In practice, the voter goes to forty different polls and votes for the candidate that will best represent his or her local area when it’s time for goodies to be handed out.

Hence the impasse. In the past, the dominance of the major parties has been such that the flaw inherent in the system was never exposed. Fine Gael’s loss of a TD for not building a school in Ballycarrick was made up by the gain of a TD who was passionate on the retention of the garda station in Carrigbally. Checks and balances.

Unfortunately, the slow dissolution of the two-and-a-half party system has not been matched by a likewise evolution of political awareness in the electorate. This is partly a western thing; it doesn’t seem that the US electorate are having a particularly statesmanlike moment right now either, while the Tories in the United Kingdom are pointing a gun to their own heads while threatening to shoot the hostage. Extraordinary behaviour.

But the Irish context seems worse, somehow. Not least because the country is so small, and it shouldn’t be so hard to communicate what’s actually happening. For a small country to be independent, the citizens must be more active than they have to be in the big country like the UK or Germany or the USA. In big countries, there will always be enough clever and/or informed people to keep the political show on the road. Here, we need more hands to the mast.

A second election, then, but an election like no other. This second election, if it comes soon, will be the first honest election in God only knows how long. It will be an honest election because the electorate will be eager to know just why it’s going through this all again, and this will involve asking hard questions of the politicians.

Elections are understood to be about what different parties will do if given the chance to govern. This election has been unusual in electing a substantial number of TDs who are not trying a jot to govern, or who cannot muster support because they are independents. It will be interesting see them answer the question of why anyone should vote for them next time out.

For that reason, the Taoiseach should accept that, while the people have spoken, what they’ve said is unintelligible. Therefore, they must be asked again. Enda Kenny bottled a chance at remarking the politics of the country after the 2011 election by coalescing with Labour, rather than forcing Fianna Fáil to support their own policies. It is that choice that allowed Fianna Fáil to rise again so spectacularly.

But now Enda Kenny has that rarest of things in life: a second chance. By calling a second chance he can expose the limits of clientelist system and bring the voting public to a new understanding of politics and what good governance can actually do. The people will see that they must vote for a government, rather than a county councillor with super powers.

For what it’s worth, your correspondent doesn’t expect that happen. Some sort of government will be cobbled together that will pass a budget (Berlin permitting), and then collapse in 2017, leading to the election then. But things will have moved on by then, and the moment will have passed. New politics is difficult for old politicians, after all.

And yet that hope still glimmers. Enda Kenny has a very rare chance to really make history. I hope he takes it while it’s there.