If I had to sum up in one word why the centre cannot hold in Irish politics, it would be: biopanic. I’ve just used a phrase from WB Yeats but here’s another one: “ ‘And time runs on,’ he said,/ ’And the night grows rough.’ ”
Time is running on for very many Irish voters and accordingly the night has grown rough for the once-invincible duopoly of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. This is not just a political phenomenon – what makes it so profound is that it is also biological. Body clocks are ticking and their alarms are going off.
Biopanic is a phrase invented to describe, often in highly sexist terms, women in their late 30s who have not yet had a child. But it is useful in understanding what is going on in Ireland, especially if we think about two key groups of citizens and the issues that led them to vote for radical change.
The soundtrack of the election is the great twang of patience snapping at different ends of the working age range
Those groups are people in their 30s and people in their late 50s or early 60s. Their issues are, respectively, housing and health. For different reasons they both feel they are running out of time.
The big thing that shaped Irish society after the great crash of 2008 was patience. Some of us raged against what was happening, but the solid mass of Irish people acted as if they were in a hurricane. They decided to batten down the hatches, stay alive and wait out the storm.
But the storm has passed, the troika has been gone for five years and the economy has recovered. There are now more people at work in Ireland than there were when the boom was at its boomiest. The waiting game is all played out.
Implied deal
For most younger people, their temporal horizon is the point in the near future when they will have a place of their own, a settled relationship and the possibility to start a family.
The point, that is, when you have really grown up. In post-bust Ireland that horizon receded, but still the implied deal was that you could get there – just a bit later than you might have liked. Patience would be rewarded. Most of that generation accepted the deal, even it meant that you could have a decent job and still be living with your parents because rents are astronomical and you can’t get a mortgage.
But as the body clock ticks on, anxiety sets in. Questions start to nag at you: this isn’t going to change, is it? What if this is not a life on hold but a life I’m never going to have?
People know very well that there are no quick fixes in housing, health of any other area, but they have lost faith in slow fixes too
What if this is not a temporary aberration in Irish society but a new norm of permanent insecurity and infantilisation? And when a general election arrives, a rough answer offers itself: do something dramatic right now or you’ll be stuck in this limbo forever.
For the middle-aged, meanwhile, the body clock is ticking relentlessly towards an ever greater likelihood of illness and dependence on the health system. The cloak of invulnerability that is wrapped around the young is increasingly threadbare.
It no longer keeps out the cold realisation that biology is destiny and that your destiny is to be one of those people whose conversations increasingly consist of the competitive recitation of ailments. Your elderly parents are already there. So you look at the health system and you ask yourself the same grim question: this isn’t going to get any better, is it?
You can see this rough divide quite nicely in the exit poll: housing is by far the biggest issue for people under 35; health draws level with it for those between 35 and 50; and for the 50- and 60-somethings, health is way ahead of housing.
But the reason the election has been so seismic is that the two issues affect people in the same way – biopanic. For both groups, the anxiety is similar: I am getting older and I can’t wait any longer. The soundtrack of the election is the great twang of patience snapping at different ends of the working age range.
Climate change
And remember that, all the time, there is another clock ticking too: climate change. It may not have emerged with great force in the exit poll (though more people cited it as their primary concern than cited taxation), but it is literally and figuratively in the atmosphere.
There is a bigger kind of biopanic – a profound anxiety that time is running out on the fragile biosphere we inhabit.
What does this mean for the formation of a government? The imperative of urgency. Telling voters that patience is a virtue will not work when their patience is exhausted.
They will not be impressed by a drawn-out courtship dance among parties more concerned to tell us what they are ruling out than what they intend to do. And when a government is formed, it will have to make an immediate impact.
People know very well that there are no quick fixes in housing, health of any other area, but they have lost faith in slow fixes too. To stop the panic, the new government needs to signal that it too knows that time, for it and us, is running on.