It would be a silly exaggeration to call any general election a non-event. But in this case the overstatement would be slight. The things that did not happen seem a lot more significant than those that did. The outcome is negatively charged in five different ways.
The first is Ireland bucking the anti-incumbency trend of elections around the democratic world this year. Voters in Britain kicked out the Tories. In the US, they savaged the Democrats. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s allies were trounced. The three parties in Germany’s ruling “traffic-light coalition” each received a pummelling in state-level elections. In Japan, the deeply entrenched Liberal Democratic Party lost its parliamentary majority and the same happened to South Africa’s ruling African National Congress.
So there is something remarkable about Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael returning quite comfortably to power. It may not seem that way to us, but from an international perspective, their achievement is considerable. And yet their combined share of the vote has continued to contract.
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For now, 40-odd per cent is enough to form the centre of gravity in Irish politics. This is not a particularly good place for a democracy to be in: parties whose strength is inexorably shrinking and who do not have the support of 60 per cent of voters still have a lock on power.
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For much of the time in the RDS, one of the big questions was: what the hell is going on?
The second big thing that did not happen is that roughly the same proportion of the electorate as voted for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael couldn’t be bothered to turn up. In my constituency, an intensely fought three-seater where all the parties were visible on the ground, turnout was an abysmal 56 per cent. This, too, is a bad place for democracy to be in — alarming numbers of citizens now seem utterly disengaged.
The third negative occurrence is the derailing of what, until recently, was being configured as Sinn Féin’s royal progress towards power. The party ran an excellent campaign, produced impressive policy documents on housing and health and had in Mary Lou McDonald easily the most forceful of the party leaders. It still dropped from one-quarter of the vote in 2020 to one-fifth. It dominates the oppositional space but remains unable to present itself as a convincing alternative government.
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The fourth dog that didn’t bark was immigration. It is very strongly present as background radiation: 41 per cent of those surveyed for the exit poll regard it as a negative for Ireland. But it remains difficult for hard-right or far-right candidates to channel that sentiment into votes. A staggering 50 per cent of Fine Gael voters are anti-immigration, but they nonetheless voted for the status quo.
About 60 candidates who could be regarded as anti-immigration stood for election. A few of them — notably Noel Thomas in Galway West — did well. But it is striking how even those who won seats in the local elections in June failed to make an impact. Figures like Patrick Quinlan, Philip Sutcliffe, Derek Blighe and Gavin Pepper proved, for the moment, to have a lot more bark than bite.
It would be a huge mistake to be complacent about this failure. But the basic fact of life for right-wing authoritarian movements is that they need a duce. The anti-immigration factions in Ireland still have far too many of them. They can’t get their duces in a row.
The fifth negative occurrence is the blotting out of the Green Party. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary got his wish — he told sniggering Fine Gaelers at Peter Burke’s infamous campaign launch that the big project was to “weed out” the Greens. Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil set out to destroy their loyal Coalition partners by spinning a deeply dishonest narrative: all the pain of the transition to a decarbonised economy is the fault of the Greens. The big lie is that, by savaging the party that finally forced them to act on the climate and biodiversity crises, they can now make those crises go away.
But this too is a void, a big fat nothing. The Greens’ policies were not really a party programme — they are the minimum necessary for the State to comply with its obligations under EU law and the Paris accords to which Ireland is a signatory. The incoming government will now have to intensify the implementation of those same policies without being able to nod and wink that they were all a concoction of those sandal-wearing loons.
An incidental effect of this staggering cynicism is that potential coalition partners like the Social Democrats and Labour have a preview of their fate if they embrace such treacherous friends. They would (as Hamlet puts it) go to dine, not where they eat but where they are eaten.
And so, after what was universally agreed to be a strange election, we have a suitably strange outcome. It’s peculiar because, on the surface, there has never been a more upbeat campaign with everybody promising everything to everybody and an apparently infinite amount of money to pay for it. Yet this positivity is curiously absent, outweighed by the accumulation of non-occurrences.
We will have a government formed by a party whose slogan was Moving Forward Together and its Doppelgänger whose punchline was A New Energy. But does it really feel much like forward movement and fresh vigour? Or more like Ireland is entering a holding pattern, cautiously circling a future that lies somewhere between high anxiety and extraordinary opportunity?
Albert Einstein (and Roy Keane) famously defined doing the same things and expecting different results as stupidity. Yet that’s what the Irish people (or rather that portion of them that could be bothered to vote) have, in their wisdom, decided to do. They have been promised starkly different results: a government that delivers transformative change on housing, healthcare, infrastructure, care for the vulnerable and efficient use of public resources.
But this radical transformation is to be driven by the same people who have left us needing it so badly. Perhaps the unwritten winning slogan was: The Same Only Different.