As this briefest of election campaigns comes to a close, a sense of weariness has descended on the campaigners and a jaded electorate. Though only three weeks old, it seems the protagonists have all but run out of new things to say.
In large measure this is because the election has been fought on such narrow ground, an agenda defined by consensus on the “fiscal space” logic, with the parties competing only to prove themselves worthiest to take on managing broadly shared programmes.
There is little of the “vision” thing, no reimagining of our economy and state. Even outsiders Sinn Féin, as a columnist reflected here yesterday, is less preoccupied with confronting the establishment than establishing its credentials to join it.
What has been centrally at issue is whether Fine Gael and Labour have successfully managed a sustained and genuine recovery, although its benefits have yet to trickle down. The two parties, whether or not they have manifested the competence they claim, have rightly identified a deep desire in the public for a steady-as -she-goes government, above all a safe pair of hands on the tiller.
Ironically Fine Gael, which dreamed up the strategy and is most associated with such values, in an own-goal moment of tax-cutting zeal, announced it would entirely abolish the USC . In doing so it shifted the dynamic of the election, opening itself to both the charge of fiscal irresponsibility – how to plug the gap? – and of social unfairness – the rich benefiting most. It has paid a price.
Labour has struggled with a contradictory, not altogether convincing, message – boasting both its willingness to do the difficult cutbacks for the sake of the country, while claiming it would all have been much worse if it hadn’t been there.
The reality that no single party has any possibility of governing alone has meant that the competing manifestos are not in any real sense political promises, but illustrations of competing approaches to governing, shopping lists of aspirations to be bargained away in coalition talks. However voters, as Labour has found to its cost, continue to take “promises” at face value.
This has also seen the election largely transformed from a contest between parties into a competition between leaders over their fitness to assume a role at the helm of government.
For Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, this has meant an endless recycling of his previous history, particularly as Minister for Health, a mixed record, acknowledged but deftly diminished on Tuesday night with the admission that being part of the pre-crash consensus that the boom would go on forever was his biggest political regret. Redeemed by his humility?
And doubts about Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams’s competence and paramilitary past and connections – and refusal to come clean on them – continue to hobble his acceptability to much of the public.