FF/FG win... but the real battle lies ahead

Nationally, the government won the elections. But in Mayo and indeed in rural Ireland generally, they didn’t just win: they walked it, notwithstanding how well independents did. After years when the government parties were on the back foot and when Sinn Féin were riding high in the polls, what sense can be made of it all?

The first thing to say is that elections are decided by those who show up. The people who vote make the decisions. What seemed to have happened in these elections is that the homeowners of Mayo – and elsewhere – came out to vote. And most of them voted for the government. Despite a torrent of negativity in our public debate, in Ireland in 2024, if you own your house, have a decent job, and have private health insurance, you are happy enough. Those comfortable people voted in their interests. And to add to that, the reality is that the government has – most especially since Covid – pumped the bumper receipts from Corporation Tax into all areas of society and the economy.

What are the big political lessons from the weekend?

101 years on, the Civil War is finally over. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are two sides of the same political coin. That observation isn’t new. Left wingers have been arguing this for decades. What is new is that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael no longer argue that it isn’t so. The next general election is about whether you want to re-elect the government or not. In that, Alan Dillon and Dara Calleary are essentially running mates. The transfer rate between the two parties and their candidates will therefore continue to increase.

Looking more at urban Ireland, the formal division between the three centre-left parties is similarly outdated. The Greens, the Social Democrats and Labour can aim for about 15% of the vote. They are essentially the same political entity. They just wear a different coloured coat when they go out to meet the public. 

The voters are not blaming the Greens for being in government. If you listen carefully to Labour and Social Democratic politicians in the Dáil, it is clear they don’t blame them either. If these parties want to claim there is a left alternative to Sinn Féin, they can do it as a serious bloc or as three small and separate parties. That’s a big choice and question for them.

Independents are big winners from these results. With such a big vote for them and five Dáil seats now in Mayo, surely at least one of the big independent vote getters will be tempted? Who is best placed? Patsy O’Brien, Michael Kilcoyne, Mark Duffy, Chris Maxwell? And more broadly, what does a vote for ‘independents’ mean? It would indeed be a widely based political party that would be able to accommodate all four of those vote getters.

How do we explain the Sinn Féin result? It cannot be done by looking at these elections alone. Before the general election of 2020, their vote increased massively and quickly. This time, their vote was falling in the run into the election for sure, but no one predicted how far it would fall, and so suddenly. What the opinion polls in the run up seemed to capture was the decline but not the floor. 

What explains these surges and retreats? They feel almost tidal, but tides at least can be predicted. There is no doubt that the party lost a great deal of support in its core areas on the issue of immigration. But it must be more than that. Is this rapid increase and decrease a sign of a general volatility in how people decide how to vote in these times? There will be much discussion on that in the days ahead.

One explanation suggested so far is not entirely convincing. Some say that there wasn’t enough hard work on the ground, and that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael incumbents in local elections have advantages and track records and so on. That is overdone, I think. There have been lots of hard-working TDs, councillors and MEPs of all parties who have been swept from their position by the tide of events. In the last general election, a Sinn Féin candidate was elected even though they went on holidays, and one can be sure that some defeated opponents in that election were hard workers on the ground.

There has also been a lot of harsh commentary about how this was the second time Sinn Féin got their candidate strategy wrong. But, with the level of volatility their vote has experienced, it is hard to be too critical. How do you plan with that level of change? If you were running a business, imagine trying to buy stock where your demand can double or halve in the space of a few weeks. This is not as easy as some might think. It is possible that if turnout in a general election goes up, their vote may well increase again. But it seems very difficult to see a circumstance in which they might run a second candidate in Mayo for the general election.

The leaders of the three government parties have done well – and Simon Harris and Fine Gael will be especially pleased. The government has got to be careful though. They would misunderstand this result if they think it means they are loved. The turnout will be higher in a general election, and that might bring out more of the less comfortable and younger people. Immigration as an issue damaged Sinn Féin in this election: it can do the same to the government parties.

Given that, what do they do now? Will these results mean we will have an earlier election? Many in the government parties will argue that we should. Does this result suggest they should go for a really generous budget, or does it provide evidence that people want stability and are less interested in extravagant promises? That will be a big political debate within government in the lead up to the budget itself. It would also be very wrong for the government to conclude that they can be elected by people who are satisfied in their housing situation – they must govern for everyone, and the housing situation is terrible, whether or not those affected by it vote in numbers.

The results also throw up a conundrum for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Do they campaign to return the government, with the Greens? Independents have been elected all over the country, many on an explicitly anti-Green agenda. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will want those votes back, but to get them, they might need to fight with their coalition partners. You might think that doesn’t matter, but Green issues don’t just affect a tiny wealthy minority in south Dublin. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael rely on voters in many places who think it is bad that the water is often undrinkable and unsafe to swim in because of, among other things, the over-spreading of slurry. We saw a glimpse of that when Barry Andrews broke ranks with his fellow Fianna Fáil MEP candidates on the question of the derogation on the Nitrates Directive. That will produce further tensions within Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael as their parties try and woo those rural independent voters, while not losing environmentally conscious ones.

But the big political lesson from this election is clear. The government can win the next general election. But that isn’t to say they will.