There’s no honeymoon anyway, that’s for sure.
Less than three months since the new Government was formed, it has the look of an under-pressure midterm administration with grumpy voters and a surging main Opposition party.
There is one undeniable bright spot for the Coalition: support for Fianna Fáil is holding up and Taoiseach Michéal Martin is the most popular party leader.
His party is at 22 per cent, up one from our last (pre-election) poll in November and on a par with its general election result. Fianna Fáil will be especially pleased to be holding up in Dublin (21 per cent), while the reliable older voters – it’s at 30 per cent among 50-64 year olds and 33 per cent among those over 65 – remain the bedrock of its support.
Martin’s satisfaction rating is well in advance of that of Simon Harris and Mary Lou McDonald.
There, the good news for the Coalition ends.
It is a shocker of a poll for Fine Gael. At 16 per cent, the party is down three points from the November poll and five points from its general election result. Tánaiste Simon Harris’s approval rating slips by four points to 42 per cent.
You’d have to go back to 1994 for the last time Fine Gael returned such a low poll rating in The Irish Times series. The news will almost certainly prompt the question in the party: how low can we go?
[ Analysis: Sinn Féin back on top at 26% as Fine Gael support slides 3%Opens in new window ]
And yet. Except for the Covid bounce and the period immediately following Harris’s election, the late teens and early 20s are where the party has tended to be in Irish Times polls. From late 2021 until this year, excluding that post-leadership bounce last year, the average for Fine Gael is 19.6.
So this may be less of a collapse and more something like a reversion to the mean, or at least to within shouting distance of the mean. But that’s not to dismiss the real-time political effects of it.
Harris has more than two years to wait before he is due to return to the Taoiseach’s office. If he keeps getting poll results like this – or indeed worse than this – then his party will start to get jumpy. That is the nature of politics. It is certainly the nature of Fine Gael.
For Sinn Féin, the six-point jump to pole position at 26 per cent is cause for some satisfaction and will be taken by many in the party as a vindication of its aggressive, oppositional stance since the new Dáil met, epitomised by the disruption in the chamber during the row over speaking rights for Independents.
The six-point jump is matched by a similar jump in McDonald’s rating, though she remains the least popular of the big party leaders. But at least things are going in the right direction.
Party supporters, however, might be forgiven for asking themselves: why couldn’t we do this last year for the local and European elections and the general election? Sinn Féin led in the polls from Covid until a few weeks before the local elections last year and came third in all three sets of elections held in 2024. What’s the use in leading the race until the last 50m?
[ Analysis: Simon Harris boom well and truly bust in latest poll findingsOpens in new window ]
For Sinn Féin, the challenge is as it was in midterm in the last Dáil: how does it translate soft support built on, among other things, the unpopularity of an incumbent government into a firm intention to vote for the party at the next election? It is a complex question with no clear roadmap to an answer.
But at least the party has a recent memory of what did not work. And, on the evidence of today’s numbers at least, it seems likely to get a second chance to answer it.
With the economic outlook darkening due to the threat of a US president Donald Trump-provoked trade war, with all the possible consequences for the State’s economic and public finances that would entail, the prospects for the Government seem rather less than sunny.
Voters are already grumpy about the composition of the Government – more than half profess themselves dissatisfied with the return of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to power. The deal with the Independents is no more popular. An overwhelming majority disapproves of the role of Michael Lowry in putting together the Coalition.
Satisfaction with the Government registers at not much higher than a third of voters (36 per cent). An administration surfing the wave of optimism and early popularity, this is assuredly not.
The Government might argue that its satisfaction rating is at about the same rate as it was when it was returned to power, or at least most of it was, by voters late last year. And that’s true.
But perhaps that holds the key to understanding the outcome of the last election and the state of play now. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were not re-elected on a wave of enthusiasm and approval of their performance over the previous term. Rather, they were returned because voters, unimpressed by the alternatives, couldn’t think of anything else to do.
