While a series of key elections are on their way, the question in Ireland is... when?
NEXT year will be a year of elections. It is simply a question of how many. At the end of 2024, the world will turn its eyes to the United States. Never before has America – or the international community – faced such jeopardy in an election. It looks certain that the populist Donald Trump will again face a fading Joe Biden.
If Trump wins, which is possible, we will be plunged into a new dark age that will complement a corrupt, fixed-up result in Russia earlier next year. The European elections will be held and we will know if a populist surge from the right will accelerate across the continent.
In tandem, we will hold local elections here, and by these elections in Ireland we will be able to gauge if our own long anticipated populist surge – this one of the left, with Sinn Féin – is really coming.
What remains unpredictable is the timing of our general election. It is accepted by some that we are ‘going to the country’ in the autumn of next year. Others want to go all the way to the last day.
If the Government doesn’t crash, then the decision will be for Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to dissolve the Dáil, and it appears his options are to do that either in the autumn, after the Budget between early October and November, or else on Deadline day, March 2025.
AUTUMN 2024 PROS
This rough election date first began to be discussed when heavy hints were dropped by Mr Varadkar nearly a year ago. He told Fine Gael colleagues at a meeting last January, upon his resumption of the office of Taoiseach, that he did not want a ‘winter election’.
TDs and senators interpreted that as Varadkar wanting to go to the country in October or November 2024, as soon as the Finance Act – putting into law the provisions of the budget – was rushed through the Dáil and Seanad.
This Legend of the Fall had, in fact, taken root as early as October 2022. There was a welcome from all sectors of unprecedented positivity for the budget last year, Budget 2023. Remember, we were gripped by a cost-of-living crisis (which hasn’t abated for many of us, but according to the media and opposition it was a bigger crisis then) and pressure came to hold the budget early. It was held in September and it brought in a series of once-off cost-of-living payments and enhanced welfare payments.
The Coalition received plaudits and a boost in the polls. Sinn Féin had erred badly, calling for the type of unlimited household bill caps that helped cause a Tory prime minister to resign and the Government was happy all round.
The early election idea took hold then. The reasoning was to have a giveaway budget and go to the country immediately – the electorate would be gorged on enhanced welfare and once-off payments (even the rich get them) and feel positive towards those who granted the bonanza.
Since the budget was moved from a December date to an October one more than a decade ago, a ‘zone of imminent danger’ has emerged in Irish politics. It is said to last from the day after the budget to December: looking back in politics, all the trouble – motions of no confidence, heaves, dissent – seems to happen in that Bermuda Triangle. And, next winter, with a legally binding election deadline of March 2025, the efforts by ambitious individuals to be the one to bring the Government down will be incessant.
The case for autumn is to go to the country when the voters have a few quid in their pockets, catch the opposition on the hop and avoid the winter storms (actual and figurative).
CONS
Leo says he doesn’t want a winter election. Yet, after the summer and autumn we’ve just had, many of us will ask when winter starts and ends? It is a salient question, however, to ask whether an election in late October or November as opposed to February/March 2025 really matters in terms of national mood.
The last three general elections in Ireland were held in February.
In 2011 Brian Cowen’s Fianna Fáil/Green coalition collapsed in ignominy under the weight of the financial crash and the February election ensued during a national crisis that forever marks this as the blackest of campaigns.
Resisting internal pressure to go to the country in late 2015 – to capitalise on positive ratings – Enda Kenny went all the way to the fiveyear limit and another February election. Again the minority Government, led now by Leo Varadkar, was about to collapse in February 2020, and the Taoiseach jumped before he was pushed.
Those close to Varadkar say he doesn’t want to be knocking on doors in the cold and dark of February or even early March. Yet politicians hate elections, no matter when. Is November or late October that much different in the Irish climate? November means you’re getting dangerously close to Christmas and will just irritate voters. I don’t believe you can get a budget, a Finance Act and a general election campaign squeezed in without hitting the cold, dark nights.
ALL THE WAY, MARCH 2025
PROS
I think a lot of the ‘pro early electionists’ haven’t factored in housing, but a narrative is seeping out that the Coalition is getting some successes in this sector.
Yes, homelessness is still soaring, young people can’t afford to buy a home and there are still queues for flat rentals. And of course immigration is putting added pressure on the supply of accommodation.
But people are commenting in my community on the increasing evidence of house building, and consequently the clamour is less shrill. Minister Darragh O’Brien said last month that the 100,000 new-build houses since 2020 indicated that real progress had been made. The Government recently approved funding of €448m to deliver 250 affordable-purchase homes and more than 1,650 cost-rental homes.
Housing remains a crisis and is bound to decide the next election. If that is so, then it is a simple calculation that there will be more properties built by March 2025 than there will be in October 2024.
Fine Gael, because of retirements, will have an awful lot of unknown candidates. Precedent tells me that every extra day that allows the electorate to get to know a candidate is vital.
Both Eamon Ryan and Micheál Martin want to go all the way.
Martin, too, wants to give his candidates as much time as possible on the canvass and he told the Dáil (as Gaeilge) last week that he wants to go the full term.
If Varadkar wants a return to power, he can only realistically do so in a coalition with Fianna Fáil, and he would not want to risk a poisoning of relations.
But the overriding reason to go all the way? Sinn Féin is finally on the back foot, having fallen 3% in two major opinion polls. Its motion of no confidence in the Justice Minister, in the wake of criminal anarchy on Dublin’s streets, will prove to be one of the most grievous political mistakes of modern times.
And six months longer as Taoiseach lengthens Mr Varadkar’s term in the best job in politics.
CONS
There is something to the theory that trouble arises in that period after the Budget.
The confidence-and-supply government nearly came down in 2017 over a motion against the then minister for justice, Frances Fitzgerald (she was sacked).
A motion of no confidence in Eoghan Murphy, then housing minister, in December 2019, was the real end for that Fine Gael minority. Yet Sinn Féin is finding trouble now too. However, you may sense that I’m running out of cons, which will point to the verdict.
LEE’S VERDICT
All the way to spring 2025. The last true, voluntary ‘snap’ election was Charlie Haughey’s aborted attempt to grasp an overall majority in 1989. We just don’t do them.
Modern elections are massive undertakings, a war without weapons, and political parties don’t go into them lightly.
What government of dignity goes to the country because it wants to avoid a bit of political turbulence over the winter, rather than further enacting a political programme it has true faith in?