Election 2024Analysis

The choice of the Irish people is clear: they want more of the same

Margins are tight, but decisive; Fianna Fáil looks set to have a clear lead when all the seats have filled

Election 2024: Micheal Martin and Simon Harris during the election campaign. File photograph: PA
Election 2024: Micheal Martin and Simon Harris during the election campaign. File photograph: PA
Pat Leahy's picture
Pat Leahy Political Editor
Sun Dec 01 2024 - 19:00

In every one of the 10 western countries that has gone to the polls in the past year, the outgoing government has received a shellacking from their voters. This is the first time this has happened in 120 years. But in Ireland’s general election, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have bucked that trend.

In the blizzard of information emanating from the 32 count centres and the 43 counts over the weekend, this is the big, important fact.

If elections are about the choice of free peoples about who should govern them, the choice of the Irish people is clear: Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are on their way back to government for another term. Many voters will find this an uncongenial outcome. But not enough of them to make a different outcome likely.

After campaign competition between the two parties that was more than occasionally tetchy, but which never threatened a continuation of their partnership, Fianna Fáil has had the better of it. It won the largest share of the first preference vote, with 21.9 per cent, ahead of second-placed Fine Gael on 20.8 per cent and Sinn Féin in third place on 19 per cent.

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Those margins are tight, but decisive; while all the counts are not yet completed at the time of writing, Fianna Fáil looks set to have a clear lead when all the seats have filled. Estimates vary from the mid to the high 40s, while Fine Gael is expected to be nearer the 40 mark, with some analyses suggesting that the party might not break 40.

Likewise for Sinn Féin, which has employed better vote management on the ground, but didn’t have enough votes. Mary Lou McDonald’s party will also be fortunate to break 40 seats.

It is the latest chapter in the remarkable political story of Micheál Martin. First elected as a TD when Charles Haughey was leader of Fianna Fáil – and he was a staunch Haughey loyalist – he was a young Cabinet minister throughout the boom and emerged from the bust as a grizzled, if only middle-aged, veteran, the political scars visible on his back.

When Cabinet colleagues retired from the fray in the post-bailout apocalypse for Fianna Fáil, Martin stayed and became leader in the weeks before the election. He returned with 19 TDs. At the time there was real doubt whether the party could even continue. But it did, and much of that was down to Martin. He returned to government in 2020, to the Taoiseach’s office in the middle of a pandemic. And now he has come out on top – insofar as anyone can be said to have won this election, the two big government parties did, and Fianna Fáil is in front of Fine Gael in all important measures.

In the competition among the bigger parties, Sinn Féin came off the clear loser. The party’s exuberant celebrations and ubiquitous expressions of delight may well be spontaneous, or they may be a deliberate effort to distract attention from this fact. But Sinn Féin has dropped by 5.5 percentage points since its 2020 result. That is a bad result in anyone’s first official language.

The party is entitled to take solace from the fact that it could – and for a long time it looked like it would be – a lot worse. McDonald has dragged her party out of the doldrums after a disastrous local and European election result, bringing it through a trial by ordeal in recent months as it battled with a series of scandals and controversies. But while she is a natural campaigner on the stump, McDonald stuttered in some of the interviews and debates, finding it hard to spell out the answer to the real question of a party offering “change”: what exactly does “change” mean?

Sinn Féin now faces another five years in opposition – and an inevitable question: does it change its approach, or keep ploughing on and hope things will get better next time?

Elsewhere in the opposition, Independent Ireland has established itself but will not make the sweeping gains it had hoped for. Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín may or may not have company in the new Dáil but after a strong campaign, his party has exceeded the 2 per cent threshold for State funding, enabling him to turbocharge his project of party building. It is going well, so far.

A diverse array of Independents will enliven the new Dáil, as is now customary – with some of them likely to be edging towards the government side of the house, whether informally or as part of a deal to support the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael partnership. Some are already queuing up to serve.

Labour and the Social Democrats both had highly successful elections, with Marie Sherlock’s victory over independent Gerry “the Monk” Hutch in Dublin Central perhaps the standout moment of the weekend. Both parties are just under 5 per cent of the vote, both could break 10 seats. They may be natural allies, but they are also rivals. Their relationship – whatever they decide, together or separately, on participation in government – will not just be one of the features of the next Dáil; it will be pivotal for the future of the Irish left.

What of the poor Greens? The former Fine Gael deputy leader Simon Coveney, who was minister for foreign affairs during one of the most acute foreign policy crises in the history of the State, said historians would praise the Green Party for bringing the issue of climate change into the mainstream of Irish politics.

Politicians love the approval of historians. Forced to choose, though, they might prefer the approval of their voters.

It is certainly noteworthy that as the effects of climate change become more and more unavoidable around the world, in changes to weather patterns and more extreme weather events, Irish voters have chosen to chuck out the party that has spent two decades warning about it, and then actually sought to do something about it while in government.

That is the electorate’s right, of course. It seems unlikely that the voters were punishing the Greens for not doing enough about climate change.

So what now for the Greens? This is not the first time, of course, that the party has been wiped out in a general election. The bailout election of early 2011 saw the party lose all its seats and its State funding. It came back tentatively in 2016, and then strongly in 2020, winning 12 seats in the election and then joining the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil coalition. Now it’s back to square one; or maybe, depending on the counts in a couple of constituencies, square zero. It’s a salutary lesson in the realities of Irish politics. It’s not always the case that the small party in a coalition with Fianna Fáil and/or Fine Gael gets monstered (the PDs were once an exception); but it usually is.

Watching with a sort of horrified fascination are all the potential government partners – if indeed partners are needed at all – and contemplating the decision that awaits them.

The Greens knew this could happen, but they considered the policy wins they could achieve – introducing new climate legislation, funding public transport, and cycling, and so on, and they went ahead anyway – accepting at some level that the end of their political careers might be an acceptable price to pay. That is certainly unusual in politics.