What now for leaders of the main parties?
DUBLIN Bay South has certainly lived up to its status as the cruellest of constituencies, with all the main party leaders left battered and bruised to varying degrees.
A by-election that will set the summertime mood did have a small group of winners, namely Ivana Bacik, Alan Kelly and former constituency TD Kate O’Connell, who cast a bigger shadow in absentia than the party’s failed candidate James Geoghegan.
The loser’s enclosure, however, includes all of the main party leaders – a rare feat in the Irish PR system which normally has something for at least someone.
MICHEÁL MARTIN
Dublin Bay South has provided us with the worst performance by a Government party since Meath East in 2013 took the wind out of Eamon Gilmore’s sails and set Labour up to be the fall guys for austerity. Martin even managed the double by coming up with the worst electoral performance by a Fianna Fáil party leader – yes, worse even than Brian Cowen.
Labour never really psychologically recovered from the fall in Meath East from being poll toppers in 2011 to falling below 4% in 2013. FF will, of course, note that having fallen that low they stayed low.
As the party that looks as irrelevant as wallpaper found itself duking it out with Mannix Flynn and Peadar Tóibín’s Aontú, a frightened Fianna Fáil now wonders if it is poised for a similar fate.
The party was already psychologically shattered by the utterly unexpected denouement to election 2020 where it went from picking out the furnishings in
Government Buildings to going cap in hand to Fine Gael. The one thing it had to avoid in Dublin Bay South was being detached from the political herd in a similar manner to Labour in 2013.
Instead, this is precisely what has happened.
Leadership coups can be like bankruptcy in that the beginning can be slow, but the ending is fast.
In the case of Martin and the leadership, the sense already is that the wolves are circling and he will have to bring certainty to the party’s perilous path ahead.
LEO VARADKAR
Much of the attention may be on Fianna Fáil but this is a bad result for Fine Gael’s electoral Svengali who increasingly resembles a Noonan rather than a Kenny.
This election was a case of the leader’s candidate, the leader’s strategy, the leader’s date, and no Kate.
Fine Gael attempted to sell the claim that it at least had maintained its general election vote.
It was a nice try, but retaining the poorest Fine Gael support levels since the 1950s wasn’t what Varadkar was hired to do.
After 11 years in government, more prescient observers note there is a sense that the party has become very detached from the lives of the people, those whom Varadkar said ‘get up early in the morning’.
The view within Fine Gael is that the Varadkar hierarchy is becoming increasingly errorprone. People whisper about it not being the brightest of ideas to alienate female voters in the most liberal constituency in Dublin, courtesy of the silencing of O’Connell.
TDs talk of ‘a furious sense of drift, a sense of detachment from us and the people’.
For Varadkar, Dublin Bay South is not the beginning of the end.
But after a three-year apprenticeship which hasn’t witnessed much sign of improvement, we may be watching the end of the beginning.
MARY LOU McDONALD
In the aftermath of the count, Sinn Féin was furiously spinning faster than a Tasmanian Devil. Nothing, though, could disguise the reality that in Dublin Bay South the Sinn Féin surge went soft once it left the heartland of Ringsend.
For a brief period, the party peaked to such an extent it thought it could be a contender. But even prior to the polls, on the ground the party faithful were experiencing voter chill once they hit the leafy suburbs.
As gloomy canvassers sped back from upmarket spots such as Terenure with gloomy reports, Pearse Street ended up getting canvassed by Sinn Féin so often one source noted the party should have applied for asylum.
It was a result which suggested the ‘middle Ireland’ of Terenure, and the posh Portobello set are not, despite the willingness of
Lynn Boylan to drive the brave political mile, quite ready for a Sinn Féin Taoiseach just yet.
The polls suggest the party can aspire to leading the next coalition, but nothing beats the hard currency of real votes if you are looking for an accurate guide to political form.
That said, they are not too keen, apparently, on a Fine Gael or a Fianna Fáil one either. Interesting times lie ahead.