Why does the election campaign seem so dull? Not, I think, because so much of it is dishonest – but rather because the dishonesty is so transparent. There isn’t even the drama of outrageous fabrications. The big parties are, rather, going through the motions of mendacity. Their hearts don’t really seem to be in it.
The first weary charade is encapsulated in a pitiful little word: spats. A spat isn’t a proper row. It’s a squabble, a bicker, a marital tiff. And that’s what we’re getting from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, an old couple joined at the hip, perfectly happy together but persuaded that they ought to spice things up a bit in front of the neighbours.
The extremely self-conscious uncoupling of the two centre-right parties is so obviously an act that it feels like a game of cards in which the stakes are matchsticks or a high-wire act in which the wire is half a metre above the ground. There is no danger – we know that they have spent four very comfortable years together and will be only too happy to do the same for the next four years.
The second unconvincing narrative is the dreary game of blaming the Greens for everything the outgoing Government has done to begin to address the twin climate and biodiversity crises. These are the biggest issues facing the world, and last time any of us looked that’s a place that includes Ireland. We have, not just moral obligations, but legal ones. We are required under the Paris agreement and EU law to achieve rapid cuts in carbon and methane emissions and to reverse the alarming deterioration in our natural environment.
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Again, everybody knows this. None of the three big parties is suggesting to the electorate that these crises are not real or that they do not demand profound and sometimes painful responses from government and society. But at the same time they are unsubtly suggesting that somehow those responses were foisted on us, not by the reality we can see and feel or the international obligations we have freely accepted, but by a small party that unfortunately forced its way into a little bit of power after the last election.
The fuss over Michael O’Leary’s silly remarks about teachers at a Fine Gael constituency event distracted from the much more substantial point he was so anxious to make: that the country needs to “weed out” the Greens. “We’ve learned now for five years”, he mused, “that the Greens are just weeds. They poison enterprise, they’ve destroyed transport ... The sooner we get rid of the Greens the better it would be for everybody in this country.”
What’s queasy about this is not that O’Leary’s underlying narrative is climate change denial or that his Fine Gael audience was so obsequiously anxious to show its delight and admiration at his wisdom. It’s that all of this is completely phoney. It has no purchase on any kind of political reality.
There is no conceivable government that might emerge from this election that could or would reverse Green policies – for the simple reason that they are not just Green policies, they are national imperatives. It’s pure posturing and I doubt even the star-struck Fine Gaelers in that room believe otherwise.
But neither Fianna Fáil nor Sinn Féin is any better. Take a concrete example: Ireland’s derogation from the EU’s nitrates directive. This is a piece of legislation designed to stop the pollution of rivers and lakes with the nitrogen that runs off the land, mostly from cattle farming. Ireland managed to get a renewal of our partial exemption from its requirements in 2021 even though our own official review that year showed that we had managed to dump, since 2017, an extra 40,000 tonnes of nitrogen into our waterways, destroying much of the life they sustained.
Everybody knows this can’t go on. During the recent European Parliament election campaign, Fianna Fáil’s Barry Andrews quite rightly said that farmers are being misled by their leadership in relation to the possibility of extending the derogation. But last week, what did Micheál Martin tell farmers? That securing an extension to the derogation will be not just be a goal of the next government, but nothing less than a “priority”. This, apparently, is to be the great national cause – stopping foreigners from interfering with our right to kill the life in our waterways.
And the main opposition party? Sinn Féin is, hilariously, “committed to securing Ireland’s Nitrates Derogation and also improving our water-sources” – the equivalent of being committed equally to smoky coal and clear air. And as for the broader issue of the climate crisis, Mary Lou McDonald’s most passionate statement so far has been on carbon taxes, which she told us last week are not a “silver bullet”. But no one, ever, anywhere, has claimed that they are.
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The third burlesque is the dumb show on taxation. Voters know very well that Ireland is dangerously dependent on the windfall of corporation taxes we get from a handful of giant American multinationals. They also know that the re-election of Donald Trump has potentially huge implications for that revenue. What Ireland needs very badly is a robust, fair and sustainable taxation system. This was actually recognised in the outgoing coalition’s Programme for Government: it established a Commission on Taxation and Welfare that produced an excellent report.
Has anybody heard a word in this election campaign about what it proposed or how we should insulate our tax system from the clear threats that will face the next government from Trump? On the contrary, much of what is actually being proposed is about further weakening even the existing tax base.
Voters know that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are two peas in a pod, that the climate and biodiversity crises demand hard choice even if the Greens are “weeded out” and that promises of largesse based on windfalls are innately unreliable. Worse, though is that they also know the parties themselves are selling lines they don’t really buy themselves.