Sir, – From Pat Leahy’s analysis of the result of the referendum defeats (“Is Ireland compassionately centre right or cautiously centre left? A lot hangs on the answer”, March 16th), it seems that the No votes are liable to be taken by the Government as an indication that Ireland is more socially conservative than might have otherwise been thought, and that this will steer the ship of Government until the next election and possibly beyond.
This, I suspect, is an unwelcome prospect for a lot of voters, and an unwarranted one.
It’s remarkable how much is read into what I would have thought are the unyielding tea leaves of the referendum ballots. Numerous arguments for voting No have been recorded in this newspaper by commentators hailing from very different parts of the political landscape, each of which might just as reasonably nudge Government in a particular direction; it would be a biased reading to construe these collectively as a nudge in a socially conservative direction. More fundamentally, a constitutional referendum should surely concern the proposed amendment at hand without any unwritten Governmental steer being also up for grabs. But if we’re to argue over the direction of such a steer, let me note that one of arguments for voting No was the view that the Government made a bags of a proposal that should have been relatively uncontroversial.
Could the Government instead take the result to mean that while voters may be eager for progressive constitutional reform, they expect the Government to approach this task with the due care and attention it deserves? That they don’t want them to make a bags of things? – Yours, etc,
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SHANE O’ROURKE,
Cork.
Sir, – Newton Emerson (Opinion & Analysis, March 14th), Gerald Howlin (March 15th) and Pat Leahy on Saturday (March 16th) all address a similar theme: why do two centre-right parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, keep trying to be more centre left?
In the hundred years of Irish independence, we have never had a centre-left government, or even a centre-left coalition government.
In 2011, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil combined won 53.6 per cent of the first-preference vote, falling to 43.1 per cent by 2020. Since then, opinion polls consistently show Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil combined below 40 per cent support.
And yet, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have concluded that instead of winning back those centre-right voters they lost, they keep wooing centre-left people who will never vote for them.
The recent referendums show that not only is there a gap in the market for centre-right politics, there is a huge market in that gap as well.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil need to stop wasting their time with voters who won’t vote for them in a month of Sundays, and get back to the people who get up early in the morning. However, are Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil willing and able do this in the six months to the next general election? – Yours, etc,
JASON FITZHARRIS,
Swords,
Co Dublin.