It was a year of elections across the world, not least in Ireland. After four years in which not one nationwide vote had been held, the electorate got the opportunity to cast their ballots few times over the course of 2024. The outcomes of those votes would define the trajectory of the political year – as well as the years to come.
2024 opened with speculation already rife about the timing of a general election. But the first national poll came in the form of two referendums on amending the Constitution’s definition of family and the role of women within the home. Some concern had been expressed over the speed with which both amendments had been rushed through the Oireachtas. There was also criticism of the proposed new wording on carers and the family. But with support from almost every party in the Dáil, along with a wide range of civil society groups, the expectation was that both proposals would pass.
In fact, the two amendments were rejected by historic margins. The result led to some soul-searching about a disconnect between the political establishment and popular sentiment. It was also a harbinger of political difficulties ahead for Sinn Féin and the Greens. But the most immediate and consequential aftershock came two weeks later with Leo Varadkar’s resignation as leader of Fine Gael and taoiseach. Within days, Simon Harris had effectively sewn up sufficient support to be confirmed by Fine Gael as Varadkar’s successor in both roles.
The new Taoiseach faced a rising drumbeat of controversy over the handling of a growing refugee crisis. Having welcomed almost 100,000 people displaced by the war in Ukraine since 2022, the State appeared unable to cope with the rising numbers of applicants for international protection. Desperate efforts to find premises to house those arriving were met with local opposition across the country, some of which escalated into ugly scenes of arson, violence and racist abuse. After the announcement that new arrivals would no longer be guaranteed accommodation, tent cities sprang up in central Dublin, adding to the sense of a crisis spinning out of control.
As candidates prepared for the local and European elections in early June, there was speculation that these tensions could spark an electoral breakthrough for far-right or anti-immigrant parties. While a handful of individuals espousing such views were indeed elected, the results were most notable for the collapse in support for Sinn Féin. The party, which only a few months earlier had held a commanding lead in opinion polls, now found itself trailing well behind Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The Greens also suffered, losing both their European Parliament seats and a tranche of councillors. The following week Eamon Ryan stepped down after 13 years as Green leader, to be replaced by Roderic O’Gorman.
By the end of summer, Harris’s ‘s “new energy” seemed to be successfully lifting his party’s spirits as well as its electoral prospects. Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil’s new Minister for Finance Jack Chambers and his Fine Gael colleague, Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe, were fashioning a budget that, despite their protestations, was clearly engineered to woo voters in the upcoming general election.
Despite increasingly absurd attempts to maintain that they were not even contemplating such an action, the Government parties eventually called an election for the end of November. The short but oddly uninspiring campaign that followed was marked by extravagant promises from nearly all parties to boost spending and cut taxes. Fine Gael, which had gone into the election as clear frontrunner, made a number of unforced errors. Only in the closing stages was any reference made to the looming threat posed to Ireland’s economic model and buoyant public finances by a second Trump administration.
The picture that emerged after the election looked remarkably familiar. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s share of the popular vote was very similar to what the two had achieved in 2020, with Micheál Martin’s party a nose ahead and extracting a significant seat bonus. Sinn Féin dropped five percentage points from the previous general election but it too achieved a seat bonus through canny vote management. The Greens were almost obliterated as a parliamentary force, with most of the slack taken up by Labour and the Social Democrats.
At the end of a year of political turbulence and electoral contests internationally, the image which Ireland presented to the world at the end of 2024 was one of unusual stability and continuity. The two large incumbent parties had come through the election effectively unscathed, bucking the international trend, and seemed well positioned to form a government with Independent support in the first few weeks of 2025. While it faces the same pressing questions as its predecessor over housing, infrastructure and services, the greatest challenges facing that government are likely to come once more from external shocks in an uncertain and unpredictable world. How well equipped the current political model is to cope with such challenges remains an open question.