post-election Archives - Village Magazine

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Transfer pattern augurs well for Left

by Frank Connolly 30 March, 2016 0 Comments

Transfers matter under proportionate representation though perhaps more for psephologists and party tacticians than in terms of actual electoral difference. Noel Whelan, for example, notes that: “only 12 or 13 of the 158 deputies in the new Dáil will win their seats because of transfers. If we stopped counting after the first counts and declared the results, all but a dozen or so of the seats would have been filled by the same people”. The most dramatic difference transfers made was of Maureen O’Sullivan, a notably gentle and non-partisan independent in Dublin Central. She polled badly on first preferences, getting just 1,990 votes. The quota was 5,922. She was in sixth place. Everyone assumed she was out for the count but in the end she took the last of the three seats. In the same constituency in 2007 Bertie Ahern, then ascendant Taoiseach, brought in his running-mate Cyprian Brady in 2007, though he had polled 939 first preferences. The only other candidate ever to be elected with fewer than 1000 first preferences was Brian O’Higgins (later President of Sinn Féin from 1931–1933) elected in Clare in 1923 on DeValera’s transfers. The Right to Change campaign, which involved around 100 candidates, both party and non-party, helped Sinn Féin to secure transfers that pushed a number of their candidates over the line. As well as a strong transfer pattern (76% as opposed to 58% in 2011) between SF candidates running in the same constituency the party enjoyed a good return of more than 23% from other left candidates who endorsed the campaign. In Dublin Bay North, which had one of the longest counts in the election, Denise Mitchell of Sinn Féin was assisted by significant transfers from John Lyons of People before Profit (PBP) as well as from her party colleague, Micheál MacDonncha who was eliminated at an earlier stage. Similarly, SF candidate and trade unionist, Louise O’Reilly, won a seat following strong transfers from Barry Martin, also of PBP and a running mate of Clare Daly’s in the Fingal constituency. Richard Boyd Barrett who was always likely to take a seat in Dun Laoghaire, was helped by the votes transferred from Sinn Féin candidate Shane O’Brien on his elimination. Across the country, there were other examples of the Right to Change arrangement benefitting successful candidates. AAA-PBP transferred significantly more votes to Sinn Féin than any other party with independents the next block to gain from their transfers. Sinn Féin performed exceptionally in its internal transfers with an unprecedented rate of 76% which augurs well for its future prospects where it stands two candidates. Sinn Féin has historically been quite transfer unfriendly, but in 2016 they have improved significantly on their own transfers as well as taking 28% of the transfers from AAA-PBP. With the exception of Donegal where it overrated its chances of taking three of the five seats, leaving Pádraig MacLochlainn as the party’s most prominent casualty, it came close in several other constituencies to bringing in a running mate. Fine Gael also displayed strong transfer discipline. The transfer rate between Fine Gael candidates was much better than that between Fianna Fáil candidates. In 2016 this discipline brought Fine Gael an even bigger seat bonus than it got in 2011. It benefited from 54% of its own transfers as well as 53% of those of Labour candidates. What is also evident and perhaps a harbinger of the future is the number of transfers between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Where a candidate had no running mate or he or she had been eliminated or elected, Fine Gael was more likely to transfer to its big right-wing rivals than any other party and vice versa. 18% of FF transfers went to FG candidates and 16% of FG transfers nished up with FF. As the two beasts prepare the ground for an historic coalition it would seem that their supporters do not share the view that their differences would make the ending of civil war politics impossible. Frank Connolly

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Post-election 2016

by Village 27 March, 2016 0 Comments

The general election was tedious and it’s not really clear what message it purveys. The electorate seemed jaded and the politicians delivered no memorable new policies, apart from Renua’s utterly regressive at tax proposal. Village believes that elections should be all about ideas, ideology, policy (and how best to implement them). In these terms the election and its participants were a two-out-of-ten failure. Commentators from the equally idea-free media have interpreted the results in heterogeneous ways. Every sort of theory and cleverality was deployed to describe the drearily and precariously hung Dail: a triumph of democracy, a triumph of social democracy, the end of the civil war, the end/beginning of the beginning/end of the civil war. The perennial smart view that the electorate has failed the parties got several outings. If the second-rate sages had been able to they would have loved to interpret it as a triumph of angry white men. They couldn’t. Some saw it as a victory for the small parties and independents. But the Social Democrats did not increase, Renua was wiped out, the Greens gained only two seats in an era of climate-apocalypse. The People Before Profit/ Anti-Austerity Alliance finished up with only one more seat than they had before the election, and Direct Democracy did not gure. Before the election these were the only small parties. The truth is that this election was a triumph of the interchangeable FF/FG (FG/FF) duopoly, though its trajectory has been definitively defined as downward. Ideology is what political parties apply when they run out of policies. Since most of the parties’ manifestos are short and the events to which policies must be applied are unpredictable it is reasonable to expect that your candidate will have an ideology to guide her. Village for example favours an agenda of equality of outcome, sustainability and accountability. The ideology is comprehensive, it provides a solution for any situation, and a template against which policy formulation can be benchmarked. Candidates shouldn’t have to reflect Village’s ideology, but they’d be better having some sort of one. Neither civil-war party has an ideology. It is impossible to know what they will do once elected. How, therefore, could anyone who does not live under a stone be enthusiastic about a government of FF and FG? FF is a conservative party that believes in so little that it surrendered its entire ethos to a culture of provincialism and cronyism, last time it was in government. It believes in no more now so, though it is touting a centre-left agenda there is every danger it will return to populism, short-termism and promoting the only agenda it understands – the interests of the people its representatives actually know – a cronyist populism that always finishes up favouring those who shout loudest. It is naïve to think of FF as Micheál Martin and when it is the movement it has always known itself to be, of Eamon OCuív, of Barry Cowen, of Pat ‘the Cope’ Gallagher; and tens of marginally more presentable sons and daughters of best-forgotten FF dynasts. Kevin O’Keeffe, son of Ned O’Keeffe, anyone? FG is a conservative party currently dressed up as a Christian Democrat party. The ethos is exible enough that under Garret FitzGerald it was in effect Social Democrat. In its latest incarnation it has been right of centre, at a time when most people want fairness and an improvement in services. It failed to deliver an agenda of accountability and its representatives seem to believe in little beyond sound money, ‘Europe’ and law and order. Having once appeared to be purer than FF it is now tainted by the Moriarty Tribunal report and a perceived ongoing proximity to Denis O’Brien, Ireland’s richest man, as well as by its large number of low-grade County Councillors, whose corruption record is a hairsbreadth from as bad as FF’s. Though essentially conservative, both FF and FG contain some social democrats and liberals in their midst. These aberrations and those who vote for them are delaying the day a real Social Democratic party with coherent left-of-centre platform can become a force that could anchor a government. On the other hand it is clear that more people than is desirable voted FG in 2011 to get FF out and then FF in 2016 to get FG out. These people need to acknowledge that they are forces forconservativism. The incarnation of this is the dangerously articulate Éamon Dunphy who apparently voted FF in 2016 because he really believes in People Before Profit (or Sinn Féin. It isn’t clear). Anyone who thinks that FF was the solution to our problems in 2016 is part of the problem. So what next? FF and FG should merge as a conservative party though even coalition is for the moment some way off. FF is tactically sharper than FG and FG is in retreat so it is likely FF will tantalise FG to weaken and demoralise it during this Dáil. Nevertheless the (non-)ideological compatibility of the parties has been exposed and will generate its own momentum. While allowing this momentum its space the Left of all hues must use the logic of the momentum against FF and FG, and social democrats must colonise some of the space the dinosaur parties have occupied for tragically long.

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Responsive parties don’t want reform, responsibility or even power

by Eoin O'Malley 1 March, 2016 0 Comments

The election is over, but the prospect of forming a government is still somewhat distant. This probably shouldn’t surprise us. Apart from the outgoing Fine Gael-Labour government none of the other parties were really proposing to go into government. Their campaigns were based on a critique of the incumbent government. The Irish people roundly rejected the outgoing government. But it is not clear what positive choices the voters were making, if any. The result was remarkably similar to the result of the local elections in 2014. Local elections are regarded as second-order elections, in which voters aren’t making a decision on the choice on offer, rather making a judgement about the government of the day. These are protest elections. In 2016 each party came within 1.5 percentage points of their result in the local elections. This Dáil will have the appearance of a protest meeting. It’s not just the Trotskyite left, but also Sinn Féin and many independents. It is not that these don’t have any interest in policy – they do – but they have no interest in taking responsibility for policy delivery. At the moment Sinn Féin repeats relentlessly that it will not compromise its principles. We have rarely seen so many on the left anywhere greet the prospect of a right-wing government (of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) with such jubilation. But, problematically, they are in effect telling their voters – the ones living in hotels, or lying on hospital trolleys, or waiting for treatment – that they don’t matter. Those people will have to wait five years until the party is bigger, because their political movement’s long-term growth trumps effecting real change to people’s lives through compromise. These are ‘responsive’ politicians, responsive to every real or perceived grievance on the part of the citizens they represent. Populists on the left and right offered voters simple solutions to these grievances. All we needed to do was tax the rich, burn bond-holders, spend more money and everything would be solved. They appear to believe that we live in a world without external constraints. These parties and independents were not only responsive to voters’ concerns, they fed them. They sought to say to voters that any problems experienced by them or their own community were the direct responsibility of the state. Though many rise up as ‘community activists’, by being so demanding of the state they are actually disenfranchising their communities. The government parties’ politics were ‘responsible’. The Greens took responsibility. Labour took responsibility. Certainly they made mistakes; in pursuit of ‘responsibility’ they were often too anxious to please markets and Europe. They ignored, or weren’t responsive to, the often genuine concerns of voters. But surely the establishment parties’ unwillingness to promise the undeliverable wasn’t one of their mistakes? Between the harsh realism of ‘responsible’ politics and the utopianism of the ‘responsive’ politics, languish ordinary people who struggle with increasing insecurity. Issues such as rural services saw the rise of independents, issues such as the affordability of childcare, homes, and transport led to ‘responsible’ parties seeping votes to ‘responsive’ parties who have no real solutions. The ‘responsive’ don’t want reform, they want to protect failing systems. They offered few ideas beyond investing more money into services. That we already spend above OECD average proportions of GDP on health appears not to matter. They want to protect poorly designed redistributive payments that help create a small underclass so removed from society that many of us cannot actually understand them. Accepting that people’s diminished disposable income, which affects their ability to afford consumer goods – atter at-screen TVs – is a genuine problem that the state needs to care about, the ‘responsive’’s answers to issues such as the housing crisis are firmly rooted in the twentieth century – rent controls and rent allowance. They are more interested in protecting failing teachers than helping the children they damage. All their answers deal with the symptoms of inequality, accepting the disease of inequality of opportunity as if it is the natural order of things. If our politicians are going to be ‘responsive’, voters need to start to take responsibility. We should avail of the time over the next month or so when there is no ‘government’ to reflect on whether punishing parties who make compromises is going to deliver anything other than more fantastic promises by parties who eschew power and, especially, its responsibilities. Eoin O’Malley

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FF won’t see coalition as an ideological issue and FG is glued to stability

by Conor Lenihan 1 March, 2016 0 Comments

The most extraordinary coalition formed in Ireland was the first one, in 1948. It involved Fine Gael and a then-new party headed by Sean McBride, Clann na Poblachta. The Clann was a lively mixture of liberals, left-wingers and Republicans with a deep immersion in the IRA. The surprise with the Clann was that its youthful enthusiasm and vigorous campaigns against partition very nearly toppled De Valera from his then hegemony over Irish politics. McBride himself was a former IRA Chief of Staff who subsequently cut out a career for himself as an international eminence becoming a Nobel Prize laureate and founding member of Amnesty International – the campaigning global Human Rights body. Because of lingering republican bitterness against General Richard Mulcahy’s role in the civil war, Mulcahy, the Fine Gael leader, stood aside to facilitate a coalition with the Clann and its tooth and claw republican militants. John A Costello became Taoiseach in the coalition instead. The point of all of this is to illustrate that, from the very outset, coalition formation in Ireland has been a pragmatic business where big parties and small ones dispense with ideological or philosophical differences in order to provide an alternative government and run the country. Down the years few, if any, Fine Gael or Labour leaders worried too much about the differences of left and right when it came to forming a government designed to extract Fianna Fáil from prolonged periods in power. In 1989 Charles Haughey led Fianna Fáil for the first time ever into a coalition arrangement with the Progressive Democrats, stating cheerily: “Sure, it was only me that could have done it”. His party colleagues resisted it furiously believing non-participation in coalition an absolute core value for the party up to that point. The bitterness of doing this coalition was magnified by the presence of Des O’Malley and his new party – composed of individuals who had fought Haughey, then split from him to create their own party. For Haughey it was just another deal but for the Progressive Democrats, who claimed to be policy-focused, it was about taxation and other precious policy items, including a public Tribunal into the goings on in the Beef Industry. Haughey worked hard to save his own skin and persuade his ministerial colleagues of the merits of going into coalition. Apparently at one stage in the discussions around the cabinet table he held out his arms sideways demanding in relation to the opposition: “D0 you want to give them all of this?”. Shortly afterwards the new Taoiseach Albert Reynolds formed a coalition with the Labour Party which followed an election in 1992 which featured advertisements generated by Fianna Fáil scaremongering about a left-wing takeover of the country by Labour. This was no small tactic and involved giant billboards and full-page newspaper adverts in a bid to frighten voters in a move that was redolent of the ‘red scare’ tactics of the 1950s and 1960s. During the actual campaign my father, the late Brian Lenihan Senior. When all about him were these banner advertisements called for an alignment with Labour rather than the PDs. His rationale was that Labour were more compatible with FF than what he viewed as the “Thatcherite ” Progressive Democrats. He was dismissed by the party bosses during the campaign only to find himself instrumental, behind the scenes, after the election in putting the coalition deal with Labour together. Albert Reynolds, a businessman, proved to be very pragmatic when faced with the post-election numbers and getting back into power. My father had key relationships and friendships within the Labour Party and within the labour movement generally. These relationships and ability to communicate became vital to the formation of this government. When people set out to cross party divides there is a need for credible and dependable intermediaries who can give assurances on policy and how the share out of ministries will play out when the negotiations get real. This was my own experience when I set out, at the request of Bertie Ahern, to put in motion the process of having a coalition with the Green Party in 2007. In fact the groundwork had begun in the immediate aftermath of the 2002 election. Ahern was already entertaining doubts about the future sustainability of the PD coalition because of problems with both policy and numbers. I knew a number of the key figures in the Green Party, including Trevor Sargent and had been in university with both Eamon Ryan and John Gormley. Part of the reason for having a coalition with the Greens was a concern within the party about the right-of-centre nature of the PD coalition, as well as a fear that the party was already becoming too visibly identified with the building industry and big capital. It was also made easier by the overarching atmosphere of mainstreaming environmental or green issues. When the post-election numbers showed a Green coalition was necessary Bertie pressed the buttons and appointed a skilled and experienced team of negotiators so that his own ministers were locked into the items agreed with the Greens. The government itself worked well together though it has to be said it was much more difficult for the Greens to get the coalition deal past their activists than it was for Bertie to get it past his parliamentary party. Rural TDs were the most resistant regarding Green policies on farming incentives as tantamount to treason. In the event they overcame their difficulties. As with the previous Labour Coalition, outside of the main negotiations, a series of reliable and discreet intermediaries were on hand to smooth out any issues that arose in the talks. Ahern himself was a very accomplished negotiator. General Election 2016 has been dominated by speculation of a grand coalition between the once very dominant big parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The fact that both parties combined now count for slightly less than 50% of the popular vote has hastened a frenzy of speculation about such a