The final leaders’ debate of the 2024 General Election campaign will take place at 9.35pm on Tuesday on RTÉ One.
Fine Gael’s Simon Harris, Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin and Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald will feature in the live Prime Time debate, presented by Miriam O’Callaghan and Sarah McInerney.
Given the most recent poll results, the debate has now assumed an outsize importance for the three big parties in what has become an uncertain race. So what should we be watching out for?
The fight of his life
Can Simon Harris steady the ship? The past four days have been the most difficult of his career – the Kanturk disaster followed by two opinion polls showing sharp drops in party support, the second in The Irish Times on Monday which recorded a six-point fall for Fine Gael.
So Harris needs to find a way to reassure his wobbly party and to speak to voters at home – in a way that reminds them of why they were recently rather impressed with him. He is likely to raise the prospect of Donald Trump’s incoming administration and threat it poses to Irish prosperity. But his hardest job will be to explain why if there are difficult and potentially very difficult times coming for the economy, he has spent so much of the last three weeks making huge spending promises. It is hard to overstate the importance of tonight for Harris.
Mary Lou on a roll?
The Sinn Féin leader is having a barnstorming election campaign and her party is insisting to everyone who will listen that it now has the “momentum”. Evidence for this is sketchy – the party was up by only a point in The Irish Times/Ipsos B & A poll – and observers on the campaign trail would tend to suggest that while Sinn Féin is getting a bit of a bounce, it is nothing like the surge the party enjoyed in 2020. In that campaign, which saw Sinn Féin win the largest share of the votes, McDonald’s performance in the debates was crucial to her party’s progress; her dismissal of the FF and FG leaders as “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” was probably the line of the campaign. She is a formidable debater when arguing for “change”, though she sometimes struggles on detail. Outlining credible detail of what she proposes to change to will be her biggest task tonight.
Two versus one?
The visual images from the ten-way leaders’ debate last week were instructive – Harris and Martin, standing together, in navy suits, agreeing with one another. Positions for the debate will be decided by lot this afternoon, but wherever they stand, it’s two Government voices against one from the Opposition. That’s unavoidable – these are the only three candidates for Taoiseach – but it helps McDonald make her arguments for change. It will be intriguing to see how Harris and Martin differentiate themselves from each other. They need to emphasise separate identities – and they are, remember, rivals for votes in every constituency – but a return to the sniping and bickering of the first week is unlikely to impress voters. For Micheál Martin, who finds himself ahead (if only by a nose) in the race, the task is to present himself as the senior of the FF-FG combination – the “adult in the room”, as his allies have been suggesting for months now.
The economy, stupid
A campaign that has been marked by promises to spend tens of billions of euros over the next five years has also been overhung by the prospect of Ireland’s prosperity being battered by a combination of global uncertainty and the promised trade tariffs of the incoming Trump administration. This has given the campaign an almost schizophrenic quality – with parties simultaneously promising to quickly fix enduring social and economic problems and the next minute warning about the dangers ahead. They have all been guilty of it. How the three candidates for Taoiseach play it tonight will be revealing.
Stand back and let them at it
The ten-way debate was highly moderated by RTÉ’s Katie Hannon, as it had to be to keep any semblance of order. Tonight is different. With only three participants, the scope for direct debate between the leaders is much greater. There are two moderators this time, Miriam O’Callaghan and Sarah McInerney, who will put questions to the leaders. But it is not them that people are tuning in to see. There is often a palpable personal edge to the exchanges between McDonald and Martin and between McDonald and Harris in the Dáil. Viewers may respond to real engagement, but they won’t like shouting over each other. A big audience is expected – almost one million people tuned in at some stage for the ten-way debate last week.
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