If there was a general election this week, the most likely outcome would be another general election.
But there is no general happening next week, or next month. In truth… barring some major political catastrophe… there is no chance of an election this side of the 2024 Local and European elections, but the shape and context of that next election will be framed once the summer recess is over.
As the government could continue into 2025 as the polling could be held as late as the start of March 2025 it could decide to deliver another Budget next year. It is possible, but also unlikely as the feel-good impact of that Budget (assuming there were any) would not be felt in voters’ pockets until later in 2025.
So, assuming the next election will be in late 2024 and the economic parameters of that campaign will be set in the Budget due to be announced in early/mid-October (most expect that Budget Day will be Tuesday Oct 10th) what can we currently say about the state of the parties and, in particular, about Sinn Fein’s prospects of leading the next government.
Speaking about a slight dip in Sinn Féin’s polling support earlier this year, I said at the time that I thought then that it was “presumptive to assert that its support has peaked too early”.
Four months later, I think it not unreasonable to suggest that Sinn Féin’s support is flatlining, to put it at its mildest. There is some polling evidence across all four regular polling series (Red C, Ireland Thinks, Ipsos and B&A) that the party’s support is slipping marginally back.
As I observed in March, Sinn Féin strategists will not be overly concerned by this development, especially a year or more out from a general election. They know they have recovered from worse.
By worse I mean May 2019. The 2019 local and European election saw the party’s vote plummet. It lost half its council seats and two out of its three MEPs. It was a rout. Though opinion polls either side of those elections had the party in the mid-teens, on polling day it struggled to get to 10%.
An internal review concluded that the party’s problem lay it is being seen as just a party of protest, not a party of solutions. The party need to look, act and sound like an alternative government. So, less than 10 months after the electoral mayhem of May 2019 the party had more than doubled its vote, hitting 24.5% (thanks also Micheal Martin’s disastrous extension of confidence and supply, which I have comment upon here before, many, many times).
While Sinn Féin’s polling numbers, across all polls, are consistently and continually in the low 30s and it enjoys a double-digit lead over its nearest rival – be that Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, depending on which poll series you prefer – the polls over the past twelve months do not support the notion that Sinn Féin is on some unstoppable march to government.
Neither does the 2021 Dublin Bay South by-election result where the party dropped 2000 first preference votes compared to the general election held 16 months earlier. Their vote percentage remained roughly the same, down by just 0.3%, thanks largely to a massive get out the vote (GOTV) operation in the areas inside the canal which masked Sinn Fein’s significant drop in percentage support in areas outside the canal, such as Rathmines and Donnybrook (See Ian Richardson’s tally map).
The excellent Irish Polling Indicator estimates that Sinn Féin’s current support is within a range of 30.5% – 34%. This compares well estimated ranges for Fianna Fáil of 18.5% – 22% and for Fine Gael of 18% – 21.5%.
Sinn Féin is around 8% ahead of its February 2020 vote share while the two main government parties are roughly 2% behind theirs. This is an impressive performance by Sinn Féin, but is it government changing?
In my opinion, it isn’t. The main opposition party should be much further ahead in the polls than it is today. This is not to say that it cannot turn it around and see its poll numbers again creep back up into the high 30s, but for that to happen it needs to pull more votes away from the government parties – and in reality than more means Fianna Fáil than Fine Gael – and with the government sitting on a big pile of money to spend in October, that seems unlikely. As of today, the political advantage lays with the two main government parties.
This assumes that everything over the next twelve months continues along the same trajectory as it has over the last twelve… but who can say?
Tempting though it is at this juncture to lob in the old Harold MacMillan events, dear boy, quote, I will instead dip into my copy of Donald Rumsfeld’s autobiography and/or the Errol Morris documentary about Rumsfeld: The Unknown Known
…as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
So, while there may be some unknown, unknowns which may yet impact or affect any of the parties and help decide the outcome of the next general election, Sinn Fein has several very significant “known knowns”, including some it prefers not to address.
Let’s look at two of these known knowns.
The first is the resistance of a sizeable chunk of the electorate to the idea of Sinn Féin entering government. I say resistance, though total opposition may be a better description. For these voters Sinn Féin is not just linked to the Provos, it is the Provos and has been since its inception in 1970.
This view is solidified by the party’s continued justification for the Provo’s campaign of violence and terror, especially by younger party spokespeople with no direct connection to it. It is also turbo-charged and taken from the historic and made current by the Jonathan Dowdall affair.
They see Sinn Féin senior officials meeting with the Royal family and attending such commemoration ceremonies as Armistice Day and the Battle of the Somme, but then see those same officials glorifying Provos at such recent events as the “South Armagh Volunteers commemoration” which celebrates the Provo’s South Armagh Brigade which is thought to have murdered over 150 security force members and many dozens of civilians.
They see today’s Sinn Féin leadership continuing the Adams re-writing of the history of the past 60 years to portray themselves as the hapless victims of a “war” that was “brought to them” and not the perpetrators of acts of senseless and needless violence that deepened and prolonged the conflict.
Mary Lou McDonald’s recent “signals” that she would not, as Taoiseach, attend events commemorating the Provos is far from clearcut. Responding to a direct question on attending Provo commemorations such as the one mentioned above or others which she had attended as leader and deputy leader, she circuitously said:
“If I were Taoiseach there’s a set pattern of what the Taoiseach attends and does not attend.”
An Ireland Thinks/Sunday Independent poll in June 2023 sought to discover which was the most transfer-toxic party. It asked voters which party would they not support and discovered the Greens and Sinn Féin almost tied for that honour. The Greens Party was just fractionally ahead of Sinn Féin, which scored 46%.
Fine Gael scored 39% on this toxicity scale, compared with 36% for Fianna Fáil. Lower down was Labour (23%), the Social Democrats (18%) and Independents (6%). None of these numbers are shocking. Parties with strong levels of support usually attract similar levels of antagonism, but as Bertie Ahern’s leadership of Fianna Fáil showed, being able to reduce your toxicity can be as electorally advantageous as increasing your support.
It appears that Sinn Féin is not only content to live with these levels of perceived toxicity, it may even see these as a driver of support. It may have concluded that there is a cohort of voters it can not persuade, or that the words and actions it would need to get that cohort to listen risks putting a sizeable portion of its own core vote at risk. Perhaps it takes the view that these resisting voters are older and that younger voters will be less interested in the party’s past.
If this is its view, it is a mistaken one. I do not believe this is a known known that time alone will remedy. Though Sinn Féin believes it is focused mainly on the future, it speaks about its past just as much as its detractors. The problem for Sinn Féin is that it has yet to arrive on a settled view of that past.
Its highly simplified and romanticised portrayal of Provos as freedom fighters who were forced into a conflict is ahistorical. It stands in stark contrast to the narrative of many other republicans, particularly John Hume. He experienced the same injustice and discrimination from a sectarian State and concluded that political action was the way to progress and unity. Not the establishment of a provisional organisation infiltrated with British agents and pre-occupied with intimidating fellow citizens who sought non-violent alternatives.
Sinn Féin’s other big known known is perhaps more amenable to remedy, but once again the party may worry that applying the necessary remedy risks alienating long standing supporter.
This second known known is the worry in the minds of some wavering voters, that Sinn Féin does not have the policies to back up their rhetoric. This second known known is compounded by the degree to which Sinn Féin appears to have dialled back on its rhetorical attacks over the past twelve months.
Though Sinn Féin talks a better game on housing, are their alternatives all that dramatic when you examine their specific proposals? Sinn Féin has proposed a refundable tax credit for renters and a complete and ban on rent increases.
Doubtless these would be popular with those already in rental accommodation, but how would such demand side proposals help those trying to find affordable rental accommodation. Where are the big supply side solutions?
This is a double-edged sword. Sinn Féin faces into the next election as the main party of and for change. It is not just the alternative to the current government; it is the alternative to the two main parties that have dominated Irish politics since independence.
A vote for Sinn Féin is a vote for change. Simply having Sinn Féin in government is a major change, but is a change of ministerial personnel and outlook sufficient?
I think that this may be enough for many voters and this sufficient to keep the party in the high 20s. These voters see Fine Gael as squandering the economic recovery by allowing the market to distribute the extra resources, thus causing a housing and accommodation crisis for many. They see Fianna Fáil as aiding this process by keeping Fine Gael in power.
But that still leaves a group of voters who want to know now what Sinn Féin plans to do differently if it gets into government. They understand that the approach will be different, but what will that look like? What new policies will they implement? Is there a risk that a left-wing Sinn Féin led government would frighten away investment?
This latter point does appear to worry Sinn Fein with the Business Post reporting earlier this month that,
“…in private briefings, business leaders are being told that life under a Sinn Féin government will not be all that different.”
This has a ring of truth and seems to mirror what it has done in government in Northern Ireland over the past two decades, well… for the brief periods when the Executive was operating. In the North Sinn Féin has hell the housing and finance ministries and the sky didn’t fall in. The problem though is that not much happened. Sinn Féin went into Stormont, and little happened.
Ironically, in Northern Ireland Sinn Féin lauds the South’s economic success as a model to follow, down here it sees that same model as a disaster that has failed us. These two views cannot both be right, but that doesn’t stop Sinn Féin persisting
What’s this column’s TL;DR?
Well, it is in the first line. I think the most likely outcome of the next election, whenever it is held, is another general election.
Though Sinn Féin will be the biggest single party in the next Dáil, politics is a numbers game, and I cannot see it being able to persuade sufficient other groups or individual TDs to either join it in government or support it from outside.
What about Fianna Fáil going in with Sinn Féin, I hear you cry… especially you Fine Gael-ers. Surely there are enough Fianna Fáil TDs who want to either extend their time as Ministers or to get a chance to be junior ministers to swallow hard and enter government with Sinn Fein?
I am sure there are. But I am unconvinced that the two parties together will have sufficient seats to make this a viable option. The combined Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil seat total would need to be so large, so far in excess of an overall Dáil majority, that it could allow for the defection of several Fianna Fáil TDs, who would split from the party rather than go through the lobbies to elect Mary Lou McDonald.
There could even be some Sinn Féin TDs who would see a return of Fianna Fáil ministers to office as a bridge too far. Either way, there would only have a handful of potential defectors to make the option impractical.
Ok… that’s enough speculating for one column. The next blogpost will be my Summer political reading list and that one will probably be followed by an analysis of the forthcoming constituency boundary review, which is expected within a matter of weeks.
I offered a preview of that report here last month
derekmooney.ie 