Taoiseach twists the knife after a bad weekend for Sinn Féin as talk of early general election grows

“It’s for Sinn Féin to speak for themselves,” Taoiseach Simon Harris told a media scrum minutes after arriving at the RDS election count centre on Sunday, before going on to speak about Sinn Féin at length.

Yes, the Fine Gael leader made all the right noises about his candidates, the voters and the Government going the full term (we’ll see about that), but at its core his message was at its most energetic when describing the terrible weekend Sinn Féin is enduring in the local elections.

Harris had clearly been listening to Mary Lou McDonald’s comments to reporters at lunchtime. Standing in the same spot just a few hours earlier she had sworn she would double down, deliver more detail about what Sinn Féin would do in power, give “real clarity to the solutions and the plans” the party has and not be “merely diagnosing what is wrong”.

The Taoiseach said this represented the penny dropping for McDonald after “six years as leader of her party”; he said it was “unedifying” and “insulting to the Irish people”, saying she second guessed them and had suggested they had not understood the issues. “The people knew exactly what Sinn Féin were saying, and they didn’t want to buy it.”

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And he wasn’t finished there. The Irish people, Harris said, see through the noise and don’t believe they live in a failed state, twisting the knife by saying that it was McDonald’s second local elections and the second which had been “an unmitigated disaster for them”.

Asked about the strong Independent vote, he returned to the well once more. “The story here is not a surge in support for Independents, the story here is the absolute collapse in support for Sinn Féin.”

It’s hardly surprising that the Taoiseach is revelling in the difficulties of the main Opposition party. Even though the Coalition will lose seats at local level, and still faces a scrap to maintain its overall headcount in the European Parliament, the early narrative around these elections is set and the momentum is only going in one direction.

McDonald insisted earlier that she would welcome a general election in the morning, but internally her party must be wondering what their message to the people would be if one was called. The changing dynamic, which she has leant on for four years, appears to be faltering; the prevailing mood of the electorate shifting; and the seam of support that flowed towards the party from its potent critique of Government housing failures has been interrupted.

Meanwhile, the odds must be shortening on the election coming sooner rather than later. Opportunity is a fleeting thing in politics, and Harris will be aware that when Leo Varadkar hesitated with a Brexit deal in his back pocket in late 2019, the electorate had no difficulty in trouncing him just months later.

There is a wider sense among some in Cabinet, even those who favour going fullterm, that the stars are aligning for an earlier dissolution of the Dáil.

If, in the final reckoning, the results of these elections and subsequent polling suggest the Government might command 50 per cent or more at a time when momentum is against Sinn Féin, the question may become: why wait?

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