Election 2020
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Even in the climate emergency the Greens are all carrot and no stick. By Michael Smith. I attended the Greens’ manifesto launch. I did it because, more than for any other party, their agenda – Green – matters. Being well-disposed I wanted to assess their fitness to deliver it. The media were there in force and about a hundred fairly presentable Green activists were on hand. There would be internal training afterwards. On the podium were three leaders of the party. The first two spoke mostly about particular sectoral issues, reading from scripts. Then Eamon Ryan gave a bit of a framework to it, some vision, an aspiration to ten areas where the Greens wanted more ambition, and an ambition to 15 seats which everyone seemed especially excited about. He said something, again, about senior hurling. There didn’t seem to be many hurlers in the crowd. Nearly half of the candidates in Dublin went to rugby-playing Gonzaga which brings its own biases. Then there were questions, led by Brian Dobson and the Irish Times‘ Green Party person, Harry Magee. The questions were mostly what a non-Green would ask, with a fiscal bias. Harry asked about insulation, and the budget for it. Eamon Ryan said if Ireland was to reach its emissions-reduction goals it will need to spend a total of €50 billion over 20 years to retrofit 750,000 houses to improve energy efficiency. I asked what they’d do about implementation of their agenda bearing in mind the problems with that the last time they were in Government. Eamon Ryan – an almost pathologically benign optimist – said what he always does, that you can achieve a lot in government (they didn’t) and that half the reduction in carbon in the period after they entered government was due to their efforts – the other half being due to the fact the imploded economy meant fewer people needed to get to work. He didn’t mention that any incursion on the soaring emission figures was highly temporary, and the energy improvements around that time were forced by the EU. I asked what they would do about sprawl. The answer was delegate more decisions to the community level. That is the right answer to nearly all questions. But not to this one. The answer is ensure the already-agreed National Planning Framework is implemented not just referred to. Indicatively, actually the Greens’ manifesto doesn’t even refer to it…or scandalously, outside of transport and climate, even refer to Planning. Nobody addressed my question on quality of life. It is elementary that environmentalists think quality of life should be measured, across a range of indicators, so it can be advanced instead of pursuit of a simple economic GDP metric. This is one of the biggest features of a green agenda. But there’s no reference to it in the manifesto. They didn’t advance it the last time they were in government, and clearly they won’t do it this time if they’re elected. The Green candidate in Dublin Central, Neasa Hourigan, often an impressive presence, mistook my question about introducing a constitutional referendum to reduce the power of property rights in order to promote a general pro-planning agenda for a question about housing. They seemed to be improvising on central policy issues. This would not matter if it were not probable the Greens will shortly be in government and if they had not achieved so little last time out. For it proves they have not learnt their lessons. When asked about what the Greens had learnt from being in government the last time out, and the question wasn’t particularly directed at the environment, then-aspirant-MEP Ciaran Cuffe stated that it was not to go into government in the worst depression in generations. That was not the right answer to give. Remember, this is the party that justified going into government with dodgy Bertie Ahern on the basis that the climate imperative necessitated it, and yet which failed to pass a climate act in three and a half years, leaving only a toothless climate ‘bill’ as their legacy. The Greens needed, indeed still need, to be tougher and more strategic. They need to plot out want they need to achieve in government, in particular policies; and to monitor its success. Just as you can monitor economic growth month to month they should be monitoring: quality of life, air quality, mortality rates and development patterns month to month; and adjusting policy to achieve clear strategic goals. The Greens’ manifesto is fairly thin – by comparison with Sinn Féin’s magnificently unwieldly one for example – but imaginative and progressive. It’s great to see a proposal for an 80% tax on windfall rezoning profits and the Green Party is serious about a site value tax. Implementing the Kenny Report on public compulsory acquisition would be exciting. Environmental journalist John Gibbons has applauded its plan to increase the amount of Irish land farmed organically to 20 per cent by 2030. I would find it difficult to argue with almost any of it as far as it goes. Though unfortunately it is not always entirely clear that it is a party of the Left, or that it favours radical redistribution. Though they support the radical measure of a universal basic income, their section on ‘Equality’ illuminatingly doesn’t mention income or wealth equality. It’s not even that detailed on the environment. There’s nothing on architecture or design. Or on urbanism; or on curtailing sprawl and one-off housing. There’s a bit on density but nothing on high-rise. Nothing from the Greens on Planning. It just doesn’t figure in the manifesto. Ciarán Cuffe must have been asleep. The Greens aren’t going to stop one-off housing – as that would generate an unholy row. And their approach to the suckler herd is likely to be as gentle as that of the Polish government to coal-mining. It’s an exception where we have a competitive advantage after all. And the lobby is frightening. Anyway, it calls for a 7 per cent per year fall in emissions to reach the EU CO2 reduction target of a minimum 50 per cent by 2030. The current government target
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Where they vote left, young voters tend to focus on redistribution and inequality. Only 31% of 18-24 year olds and 32% of 25-34 year olds support Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. By William Foley. Ireland is on the cusp of a general election which will see an unprecedented transformation of its political divisions. Surprisingly, it will be the first time in generations that questions of economic distribution will have affected the outcome. Evidence from opinion polls and surveys shows that where younger voters (under 29 years of age) reject the dominant right-wing parties they do so because they want greater economic equality. This gives the left a unique chance by focusing on their core issue – redistribution – to galvanise today’s youth to an egalitarian agenda if, despite the failure of commentators to read the situation, they keep clear heads and take the opportunity. In postwar Europe, political parties in most countries traditionally competed over who got what, and how much. Parties were aligned along an axis – on the right were those who believed that the market should be the primary mechanism for determining the distribution of wealth, and on the left were those who believed that this distribution should be fixed in large part by the government. Ireland has usually been regarded as an exception. Here, the main political division does not run between the left and the right. Here it has not been between those who favour greater redistribution by the state and those who are against it, but between descendants of the opposing sides in the civil war. Those lineages may have some importance today – Fianna Fáil would probably not have attempted to rehabilitate the RIC – but what they amount to in practice is a system in which the vast majority of people have always voted for parties which have been economically right-wing, at least since Lemass. This state of affairs has not prevailed because Irish people are inherently more right-wing than other Europeans. Political views are not the result of a simple transformation of broad values and social attitudes into party support; they are the indirect outcome of a process which filters those values and attitudes through a given ideological frame. These frames function like lenses, capable of magnification and diminution, distortion and concentration. Certain values may be filtered out – considered irrelevant for the determination of political preference. In Ireland, due to a conjuncture of historical reasons, left-wing ideological frames were largely absent. Other factors were at play which determined political identities: the legacy of a brutal and traumatic civil war, the personalisation and parochialisation of politics, the hobbling of economic development under British imperialism, the passive role played by the Labour party from 1916 onwards, and so on. Questions which concerned the just distribution of resources were simply filtered out by the dominant post-civil war frame. Historically, the left has failed to pry even one finger loose from the FF/FG stranglehold. Parties such as Clann na Poblachta and The Workers’ Party occasionally sparked into life, achieving fleeting electoral success before flickering out like tealights in a children’s nursery. Because one of either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael was usually in opposition, the see-saw effect of electoral politics meant that when one became somewhat unpopular, the other could take its place in government. But the confidence and supply arrangement that prevailed in the last Dáil has meant that, while Fianna Fáil were not in the cabinet, they were not entirely in the opposition either. The economic crisis dealt them a blow from which they have not really recovered, nor have Fine Gael truly taken their place. The result is that the two right-wing parties are more closely associated than ever – and more unpopular. Opinion polling since the general election seems to show them combined on about fifty percent or less. Most striking is the age gradient: only 31% of 18-24 year olds and 32% of 25-34 year olds support either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, according to an Irish Times / Ipsos MRBI poll. If these trends hold true, then what appears to be emerging in Ireland is a more traditional “left-right” divide, characterised by competition between parties who favour more economic redistribution and those who oppose it. Survey evidence seems to support the increasing relevance of attitudes towards redistribution for determining party support. Figure 1 Support for redistribution and combined support (%) for FF / FG over time. Figure 1 makes use of Irish data from nine rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS) to illustrate this dynamic. Each round of the ESS asks respondents to indicate their support for the following statement: “Government should reduce differences in income levels”. The respondent could say that they strongly agreed, agreed, neither agreed nor disagreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed. I recoded the question so that everyone who strongly agreed or agreed was categorised as “supportive of redistribution” and everyone else was categorised as “unsupportive”, excluding those who didn’t answer the question (about 2.7% of the sample). The ESS also asked respondents if they felt close to any party (about 36% did), and which party they felt closest to. I used this question to calculate the combined support for FF / FG over time, among those who are supportive and unsupportive of redistribution, excluding those who didn’t support any party. This relationship is shown in Figure 1. The data are weighted to reflect unequal probabilities of inclusion in the sample (though the unweighted results are the same), and the years given on the horizontal access correspond to the calendar years in which most of the Irish respondents were interviewed for each of the nine rounds of the ESS. These data probably overestimate support for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – at least compared to present opinion polls – but the emerging relationship that they depict is valid. As can be seen, preferences for redistribution matter a lot more after 2011. In the preceding years, those who are supportive and unsupportive of redistribution
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The parties’ election manifestos are elusive about the structure of the united Ireland to which they aspire. By Anna Mulligan. The biggest geo-political concern for this country is the possibility that in this decade, or even in the lifetime of the next government, a majority of people in Northern Ireland could be in favour of reuniting with the Republic. With the tide of Brexit-caused uncertainty receding, this general election campaign finally offers us a chance to think beyond the next budget – to discuss critically what reunification might mean. Since the Brexit referendum, commentators in the Republic have been falling into the trap of engaging with the question of reunification enough to raise hackles, but not enough to inform anyone of anything. From Fine Gael to Sinn Fein, many of the parties state that their eventual goal is a united Ireland, but none have a clear position on what a united Ireland would look like. If the Brexit referendum holds a lesson for us, it is not to call a vote on a massive, sweeping change without first developing an understanding of the specific issues involved. The very term “united Ireland” is part of the problem. The question isn’t whether we should have a “united Ireland”, but whether we should reunite Ireland, and how, and what kind of country that new state would be. The Good Friday Agreement is open-ended: it says that a border poll showing a majority in the Republic and the North for reunification would be a binding obligation on both governments to introduce legislation “to give effect to that wish”. The ambiguity in this statement – the nature of the wish, and how effect could be given to it – is ours to make sense of.In the Republic of Ireland, we have a bicameral parliament and a principally ceremonial President. We amend our constitution frequently by referendums. In Northern Ireland, there is a unicameral devolved legislature responsible for “transferred matters” (issues not reserved to Westminster) and for selecting the Northern Ireland Executive. This selection process is structured so that the Executive will include members from both unionist and nationalist communities, and the Good Friday Agreement requires that some controversial motions in the Assembly be passed by “cross-community vote”. A reunification process would involve reconciling these structures. In doing so, three issues are most urgent – devolution, power-sharing, and the constitution. Any kind of reunited Ireland would involve trade-offs between these three concerns. Keeping these in mind, there are broadly three ways that Ireland could go about the process of reunification: absorption, devolution, and integration. All of these options are on a continuum: any arrangement can be more or less federal, involve more or less power-sharing mechanisms, and require more or less constitutional change. As a result, differences of degree need as much consideration as those of kind. The German Option: AbsorptionI’m not going to hold up any one option as preferable, but I do want to dispense with one that merits no consideration: the German model, in which the Republic of Ireland “absorbs” Northern Ireland and changes almost nothing about itself, from its flag to its constitution to its legislature. This model abandons power-sharing, devolution, and the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement, while it leaves Bunreacht na hÉireann almost untouched. This model is the embodiment of unionist fears about reunification. There would be no protections for their interests as a minority, no safeguards to preserve the Good Friday Agreement’s delicate balance. The idea that a century of partition could be unravelled without compromise is unrealistic and inflammatory. At times, it seems that this is what the great multitude of people who have been pushing for discussion on the issue mean when they say “united Ireland” – but if it ever does happen, they risk a shock. Now that the threat of a hard border in the near term has lifted, there’s no excuse for raising a delicate issue just to play pretend. Parties and voters in this election need to understand that reunification is not a policy towards Northern Ireland, but a policy of transformation for the Republic of Ireland and the North both. The Federal Option: DevolutionOne alternative is a federal or confederal option. This would effectively continue devolution with the Dáil replacing Westminster, allowing the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement to survive in a version of Stormont. This model would seek to acknowledge that distinct political cultures have emerged on this island over the course of partition. The more radical option would be a “three parliament” solution, which was considered by the New Ireland Forum in 1984. This envisions separate parliaments and executives, North and South, along with an overarching government with relatively weak central authority. The “three parliaments” solution preserves power-sharing and devolution but would require serious constitutional change, and that a new Ireland bear the costs and complications of sustaining three separate bureaucracies. It was for this reason that the Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement rejected the “three-parliaments” option in its 2017 report. It proposed another federal option: the “two parliaments” solution. Stormont, it argued, has always existed as a devolved parliament with limited authority. Just as we have seen devolution all over Britain without any apparent need or demand for a devolved authority in England, so – the report argues – would there be little demand for a 26-county parliament in a united Ireland. This model would leave power-sharing intact at a regional level by retaining Stormont as is, while the Oireachtas would operate as Westminster does now. Sinn Féin’s manifesto appears to nod to this model, advocating for Northern MPs to be accorded membership in the Dáil – although there is no mention of whether this would foreshadow a similar structure after a vote for reunification. Fine Gael’s manifesto also discusses a commitment to the Good Friday institutions and to devolution that could be compatible with a federal or confederal model, but again, the situation envisioned after a border poll is
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By Rory O’Sullivan Election 2020 threatens to be another continuity vote with the Taoiseach yet again coming from one of Ireland’s two civil-war parties. Given their projected vote share this should be the left’s best election since the foundation of the state. Instead, despite having support equalling the combined vote-shares of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, they cannot hope to enter the next Dáil as anything more than a mere constellation of minority partners in a sprawling coalition. They have been muted and nearly silent so far in this campaign, with the traditional media effectively deciding that this is between Martin and Varadkar and skewing their coverage accordingly. Maybe the dusty corners of Twitter are right, and this is all because of bias; maybe the dominating past of the two parties and respective tooth-lengths of Ireland’s gregarious political correspondents have unfairly inflated their importance. But mostly it is because the mutual antagonisms and jealousies of the other parties mean that the only workable coalitions in the next Dáil will involve Fine Gael and/or Fianna Fáil, with some smaller parties, which has allowed them to dictate the terms of the campaign to everyone else. Labour have said they will never join a coalition with Sinn Féin, which removes even the faintest prospect of a government without either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. Those two could technically go into coalition together but it would outrage their bases, and surely accelerate their decline by making them even less distinct than they are now. Varadkar’s apparent offer to join a coalition with Martin in the Virgin Media debate was more an effort to seem grown-up than a genuine offer to share a government. Martin’s refusal earlier today to countenance any coalition with Fine Gael made this even clearer. This aside, neither party will govern with Sinn Féin, meaning neither can enough seats to govern without Labour and the Greens, which have both expressed a vague willingness to serve with both, even if the Greens will have to wrangle with their grassroots membership over a coalition agreement. This has meant that to ensure that one of them wins and can govern without the other, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have both been aggressively spinning to convince everyone that every big question about the next Dáil is pretty much settled, apart from that of which party will be the largest. It is for this reason that the two parties have collaborated and so far succeeded in setting the terms of the whole election. It is not simply that doing this sidelines the other parties, but that it pulls voters into an American and British-style binary decision between Martin and Varadkar; that in the next Dáil the Taoiseach will be one of those two has become the premise of the discussion rather than a potential outcome. The irony of Virgin Media’s head-to-head debate between Martin and Varadkar is that, while seeming to oppose each other, they were in fact performing nearly as great an act of strategic political cooperation as confidence and supply. Before the debates even began, they had won hours of airtime and pages of newspaper-print characterising the election as a contest between two men. Sinn Féin are right to be furious about it: it is a political coup, and they have been completely blindsided. The high polling numbers have made their exclusion even more controversial, but they are still not enough to overturn the logical conclusion of the last local election results: Sinn Féin are hitting their current electoral ceiling. They have tried to pivot from entrenched opposition party to party of government, only to find that no one wants to be in a government with them. But still to most Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Labour and Green voters they are toxic, bathed in historical violence, radical, unthinkable; to their own republican base and the rest of the left they are ever-less reliable. People like Martin Ferris, while dwindling in number and kept away from the television cameras, are still everywhere in the rank-and-file of Sinn Féin, and too many people know it for them to get away with it. Eventually, if they want to expand their coalition, they will need to take the short-term hit and jettison that support base. But even still, the moves to shut Sinn Féin out are an expression of weakness rather than strength. The only reason the two biggest parties are cooperating at all is that they have no choice; both will be scuppered if the election simply returns a result close to the same as now. Say, the Greens and Labour win no more than 15 seats between them (according to The Irish Times, a ‘bad’ day for both parties would leave them with a combined 14), and neither Fine Gael nor Fianna Fáil win more than 50: then, even with Independents and Social Democrats, the arithmetic becomes almost unworkable. For both men who hope to become Taoiseach there is only one, precarious, path to power that does not involve bringing a bitter end at last to the Irish Civil War. There is no chance of a straight majority for either because of the 40-50% of the country who won’t vote for them, most won’t vote for them at all. They know this very well; which is why their campaigns so far have largely been efforts by each to downplay their own perceived weaknesses in relation to the other, and win over their mutual swing voters, rather than serious attempts to win over anyone else. Fine Gael have always suffered from the perception that they’re a sneering elite who don’t care about ordinary people, and so their campaign and its slogan are targeted at the dormant guilt about poverty and homelessness among middle-class swing-voters. 2016’s “Keep the Recovery Going” has been supplanted in 2020 by “A Future to Look Forward to”. Fianna Fáil’s politicians have repeatedly mocked the Fine Gael slogan, and then with a straight face told interviewers that they have no slogan;
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Trump has killed tolerance, equality, international comity, the future of this planet, and of course decency
