Has team Varadkar backed the wrong horse with their focus on Brexit?

THE General Election campaign is barely a week old but already it looks as though Fine Gael’s decision to focus their campaign around Brexit is failing to resonate with voters. While Fine Gael’s message might not be as ill conceived as the woeful ‘Keep the recovery going’ slogan they employed – to considerable derision – back in 2016, Leo Varadkar’s party still seem out of tune with the public mood.

Fine Gael candidates have been at pains to argue that Brexit has been coming up regularly on the doorsteps but anecdotal evidence, and the claims of countless non FG candidates, would suggest otherwise.

Of course, opposition politicians have a clear motive to dismiss and talk down the main plank of the Government’s election message but the truth is that Brexit is simply not on many voters’ radar.

Away from the border counties, sidle up to most bar counters across the country and it is housing, crime, health and insurance that are on the tip of most tongues.

The Government has received – and deserved – great credit for its handling of Brexit but on the list of most voters’ priorities the UK’s relations with the EU are well down the agenda.

The fact that it still remains a somewhat nebulous concept and that a ‘ hard Brexit’ was averted lessens its importance even more.

Like the ‘Y2K bug’ panic in 1999, scare stories about a hard Brexit ceased to matter the second the deal to stop the UK crashing out of Europe was agreed.

As those who worked to ensure the ‘millennium bug’ wouldn’t shut down the country in an instant, people tend not to give much credit to people who, supposedly, stopped something that didn’t happen.

Look to the lessens of history, those who end a war are remembered far more than those who prevented one.

It remains to be seen how the campaign will play out but with one week down, and despite the outgoing Government’s best efforts, the focus has very much been on housing and crime.

The horrific events in Drogheda where a young boy was brutally slaughtered by gangland thugs and the incident in Dublin where a homeless man was seriously injured when he was plucked from a canal bank by heavy machinery have dominated headlines and the campaign.

With the numbers on trolleys in our hospitals growing worse by the day and the housing and homeless crisis showing no sign of ending, Mr Varadkar and Fine Gael will find themselves hard pressed to divert attention away from health, crime and housing.

The issue of rising insurance costs and the perception that the Government has done little to deal with Ireland’s rampant compo culture – not helped by the Maria Bailey controversy – is also waiting in the long grass.

Fine Gael – and in particular Simon Coveney and Helen McEntee – deserve tremendous credit for how they handled Brexit, but pinning their re-election hopes on it seems like a major miss-step.

As they did with their 2016 recovery mantra, are Fine Gael once again in danger of entirely misreading the public mood?