It is another busy day on the Election2024 campaign trail. Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, junior Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill and Senator Barry Ward were setting out Fine Gael’s justice policy, Fianna Fáil was revealing its plans to tackle crime and keep communities safe, Labour unveils its health policies and the Social Democrats publishes its housing policy.
It’s a week since the election was called and we have our first opinion poll taken during the campaign in today’s Irish Times. It’s good news for Fine Gael – at 25 per cent, the party has a clear lead over its rivals in Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, both on 19 per cent. There’s a caveat, though; Fine Gael is down by a couple of points, and Simon Harris’s satisfaction rating is down by five points.
If you have anything that you feel could or should be highlighted, you can email me on ronan.mcgreevy@irishtimes.com. I’m also on X at @rmcgreevy1301.
Key Reads
- Support for Independents jumps but Fine Gael remains most popular party
- Pat Leahy: Voter volatility may yet cost Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in tight election finish
- ‘I want someone to take an actual stand on immigration’: How will TCD student debaters vote?
- Justine McCarthy: What’s the point of an election if it inevitably means the same parties get back in?
Facial recognition technology will not affect the civil liberties, McEntee insists
Fine Gael’s proposals to introduce facial recognition technology (FRT) to help investigate serious crimes will not affect the civil liberties of citizens, outgoing Minister for Justice Helen McEntee has insisted.
The party was launching its justice policy in Dublin with a raft of proposals including the recruitment of 6,000 additional gardaí, a new prison at Thornton Hall, full roll-out of body-worn cameras, and the use of FRT.
The specific proposal on FRT envisages its use for serious crimes with a maximum sentence of five years or more and for missing persons cases.
The Meath East TD said that if FRT was deployed it would have expedited the investigation into the Dublin riots last November by a considerable period of time.
In some instances it is also proposing the use of live FRT in cases of terrorism, national security and missing persons.
Ms McEntee insisted that there would be strict safeguards in place to ensure that FRT is used appropriately.
“I am very firmly of the view that our Garda Síochána should be provided with the technology and with the tools that they need to be able to respond to Serious Crime.”
“We saw last year in November in our city centre, we had guardians trawling through thousands of hours of CCTV footage to try and identify culprits, to try and identify those who were involved in the riots.
“Facial recognition technology would ensure that that could be done in a matter of hours, in a matter of days, and that people could be before the courts with that clear evidence and hopefully prosecuted it in a much quicker timeline.
“I don’t think anybody should apologise for providing the gardaí with the tools that they need.”
She argued that in certain circumstances gardaí should be allowed to use FRT in real time where there is a risk to national security, a terrorism threat, or where a person is missing, where we know time is of the essence.”
Asked about the implications this would have for civil liberties, she said there would need to be very clear oversight.
“It would have to be preauthorised, that there would have to be engagement with our judiciary.”
Heath is the second most important issue at 18 per cent, according to the latest Irish Times/Ipsos poll.
Yet Ireland’s spend on health at €5,998 per person per annum is the third-highest per capita in the EU behind Luxembourg (€6,590 per annum) and Denmark (€6,110).
Ireland’s health spend is almost 50 per cent higher than the EU average which is €3,685 per person per annum.
This information comes from data on healthcare expenditure published by Eurostat and relate to the spend in 2022. This article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article on healthcare expenditure.
In 2022, in the EU, the ratio of current healthcare expenditure to GDP stood at 10.4 per cent. The highest relative expenditures were recorded in Germany (12.6 per cent of GDP), France (11.9 per cent) and Austria (11.2 per cent).
In contrast, healthcare spending in Luxembourg was 5.6 per cent of GDP, in Romania 5.8 per cent and in Ireland 6.1 per cent of GDP.
As GDP is not a reliable indicator of the true size of the Irish economy, the Irish health spend was much higher than that. The Gross National Income (GNI) would suggest that Government health spending was 11.3 per cent in 2022. That does not include the billions that Irish people spend on private health insurance.
What are the issues that Trinity College Dublin students care about most. Sarah Burns has been speaking to them. Sienna Ní Riordáin (below), who is originally from South Africa and now living in south Dublin, is particularly impressed with the Social Democrats and likes watching Instagram reels of their party leader Holly Cairns speaking in the Dáil. “I think it’s genius, because young people want to passively consume political content,” she says. “They want to open Instagram and have it right in front of them. Read the full article here.
What are the issues that exercise voters the most, according to the latest Irish Times Ipsos survey?
The cost of living is by far the most important issue at 30 per cent.
This should worry the Government parties as inflation is the principal reason why Donald Trump has won a second term as US president.
Voters were prepared to ignore all the issues surround him and to punish Kamala Harris for the rampant inflation which occurred on the Biden administration’s watch.
Closer to home there has been an increase in the proportion of voters saying that the country is generally going in the right direction, up by five points to 42 per cent. This roughly correspondents with the combined vote of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael (44 per cent).
Yet half of voters (50 per cent) say the country is generally going in the wrong direction, down by four points since last February.
Voters were also asked what was the issue that will have the most influence on their vote.
Next on the list of priorities was health (18 per cent) and house prices (17 per cent), followed by immigration (9 per cent), the economy (6 per cent), the cost of rent (6 per cent), law and order (5 per cent), climate (4 per cent) and tax (3 per cent).
The big winners, according to the latest poll, is independents who are up four points to 20 per cent.
It’s an indication of how fiery the general election coverage has become on the airwaves that Matt Cooper practically yawns in excitement as he surveys the campaign to date. “It really hasn’t caught alight, has it?” the presenter observes on The Last Word (Today FM, weekdays), as he looks back on the first week of electioneering, write Mick Heaney in his very popular radio review.
“I think we can safely say the nation has released a long breath and is bored already,” replies his guest, Prof Gary Murphy of DCU. Candid though this verdict may be, it’s hardly the cue for wavering listeners to stay tuned for the next fortnight, particularly given that the calm and careful Cooper isn’t naturally inclined towards creating on-air fireworks.”
You can read it here.
The government parties of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are on 44 per cent between them (FG 25 per cent, FF 19 per cent), but there is no room for complacency in their campaigns, political editor Pat Leahy suggests.
He writes: “With many voters unlikely to finally make up their minds until closer to election day, the race seems set to tighten further.
“Fine Gael is well out in front on 25 per cent and Harris remains the most popular party leader with a 50 per cent satisfaction rating. But its lead over Fianna Fáil has been cut from eight points in September to six today and with so many new Fine Gael candidates up against proven vote-getters in other parties, things could get even tighter.
“Either way, with Irish politics marked by extreme volatility in recent elections, it is too early in this campaign to be in any way definitive about the outcome. Fine Gael is six points up at half-time; that’s a decent lead but it’s all still to play for.”
You can read his full analysis here.
