FG hits this winter’s toxic tipping point

WHEN they are analysing the results after the general election next year, Fine Gael will probably conclude they lost it in early winter 2019. Reviewing last week’s by-elections they will also amend the traditional political view that the homeless don’t matter because they don’t vote.

They know now that the housing crisis affects many middle-income families and ignoring homelessness has electoral consequences.

The public’s anger has focused on the Housing Minister but it is too close to the next election for the Taoiseach to replace Eoghan Murphy – and, in turn, he will now be less visible or available.

In case voters forget about him, the opposition will probably book smart-alec advertising featuring Eoghan Murphy on an FBI-style ‘wanted’ poster above a list of scandalous statistics.

And it will be ironic if the poster boy for a new techno-chic Fine Gael is paraded in public as a reminder that his party is a slave to harsh market-led ideology.

The accommodation crisis has moved far beyond the tiny but hapless minority of the hopeless homeless.

THE housing crisis now affects families across the nation struggling to cope with soaring rents and the prohibitive cost of starter homes. More and more students cannot find the money to even share a flat and 20 and 30-something children cannot afford to leave their parents’ homes to start their own families.

Living in such cramped and disruptive circumstances leads to problems and magnifies to families the poignancy of children sleeping in Garda stations and other horrifying housing stories.

Housing has corroded Fine Gael’s reputation for getting things done. But while Minister Murphy hides before the next announcement of meaningless statistics, the Government’s ineptitude will surface again and again.

Next month, the number of patients waiting in trolleys in A&Es for hospital beds will be leading news bulletins and the front pages of newspapers – accompanied by pictures of the Health Minister.

Simon Harris will be relaying complex stories to explain the pictures of the very old and very ill waiting on trolleys – but as the cliché says, when you’re explaining you’re losing. A harsh winter will lengthen the queues at A&Es, deepen the frustration of medical staff and amplify the public’s anger about the overspend and underperformance of the health service.

This weekend, 214,737 children are waiting for hospital care – and one in four of them are waiting for more than a year.

This is after the new National Children’s Hospital, which will cost €1bn over budget and provide, according to Fianna Fáil, just a handful of extra beds.

EVERY year the health service bursts its budget and gets a top-up but the extra money just gets them over the latest crisis without adding anything permanent. The cost of the rural broadband plan soars exponentially, although it raises serious questions about whether or not it will give taxpayers value for money.

Recent events have punctured Fine Gael’s reputation for integrity. The party’s percentage of the vote across the four by-elections was 20.7% – just one point short of its share in the four constituencies in the 2016 general election.

Their candidates in Wexford and Cork were in second place on the first count but were passed out as the count neared finality. If that transfer toxicity is repeated in the general election, Varadkar’s hope of Fine Gael leading three consecutive governments is doomed.