Image of housing horror that defines the election
As first weeks of campaigns go, this was a rotten opener for Fine Gael, much of it their own making. The real test is how they cope with the aftermath
POLITICAL parties plan their General Election campaigns in minute detail – launching their manifestos, setting out their preferred talking points daily, and preparing their candidates for interviews – and then things get derailed by tales of the unexpected.
Fine Gael’s Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy went into this campaign knowing he would be put under enormous pressure to defend the Government’s record on housing provision, rent increases and the homeless numbers.
What he could never have anticipated was that a homeless man would suffer the most serious and painfully inflicted life-changing injuries when his tent was being removed from the bankside of the Grand Canal by a mechanical digger, the operators oblivious to his presence within.
To make matters worse for Murphy, the photographs of the site where it happened showed his election poster on the lamppost adjacent. He was castigated by some for its positioning, then again for announcing that he had taken it down. Attention for that was somewhat distracted when his party leader Leo Varadkar seemingly tried to make political capital out of the tragedy by demanding the Dublin Lord Mayor, Paul McAuliffe, a Fianna Fáil candidate who might take Noel Rock’s seat, make a statement on the issue.
The rows about responsibility for homelessness continue – even if, in this case, there are myriad other issues to take into account, such as the provision of safe accommodation for those sleeping rough, and mental health concerns for some who choose not to take advantage of what is offered to them. And while the Government may have prepared some arguments, this unexpected twist made Fine Gael’s actions over the last nine years harder to defend.
AT the start of the campaign it seemed that housing and health would be the issues that would dominate. They still will, but violent crime, and the State’s ability to deal with it, has now come front and centre. The shocking murder and mutilation of 17-year-old Keane Mulready-Woods focused attention in a way that hasn’t happened in years. The killing of 20-year-old student Cameron Blair in Cork on Thursday evening – stabbed in the neck, apparently by young louts who were trying to crash their way uninvited into a house party – was also deeply upsetting. Are our young people not safe in this country from unwanted harm?
And then came the news yesterday that two men had been shot not far from Dublin Airport – one, at the time of writing, in critical condition – acted as another jolt: those responsible care not a whit for public opinion, the outrage that has been expressed in recent days by all responsible citizens.
Worse, they seem not to fear any retribution from the State, they seemingly do not expect to be caught or punished.
Only last November Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said that the State had not lost control of an environment in which criminal gangs protect their enormous illegal drug trade by means of extreme violence.
But the actions of recent weeks belie that contention. The turf war, or feud, in Drogheda has been going for at least two years and has had murders before this week’s shocking one. The Coolock area of Dublin has been blighted by drug gangs long before parts of Mulready-Woods’s body was dumped there on Monday. Curtailing the so-called Kinehan-Hutch feud, with its mounting body count, is not the only crisis overstretched gardaí have had to face.
Fine Gael could point out, with some justification, that many of these problems have been brought upon us by the willingness of so many people to buy illegal drugs, such as cocaine, from the scum who use teenagers and children as delivery agents and who criminalise them at an early age with the most cynical of intentions. But voters don’t like to be told when they are the ones to blame and react to such truths as a form of deflection.
Part of Fine Gael’s problem in trying to defend its record in Government is that many voters tend to react emotionally rather than rationally, look at broad strokes rather than specifics, are interested in less detail rather than more.
Some give out without understanding all the details of a particular problem and grasp for the seemingly easy solutions without investigating if they are really deliverable or affordable. (Yes, I understand that the media can often fall into that trap too.)
Voters too often cast their preferences according to self-interest rather than the greater good… and can astound serving governments with their apparent ingratitude, as the Fine Gael and Labour coalition found to its shock and horror at our last General Election in 2016.
ONE of Fine Gael’s problem is that it may not get any credit for the undoubted economic recovery that has taken place under its watch. In many respects what has been achieved is extraordinary, a tribute not just to the strategy of the Enda Kenny/Eamon Gilmore-led Government but also to its execution, something that is often too easily dismissed. That we have a record number employed in the State – 2.3million or so – and that the budget is now run to a surplus are extraordinary achievements given where we were a decade ago. It is too easily dismissed by some complacent voters.
But while it is clearly part of the Fine Gael strategy to remind voters of the basket-case economy it inherited from Fianna Fáil (and to ask, fairly or not, how you could trust the leopard again) the voters seem to remember more the austerity that was imposed to rescue the economy than what caused it.
And for all the successes that Fine Gael’s minority Government has had in keeping the recovery going (don’t laugh), much of that has been undermined by the failure to deliver broadband nationally and by the extraordinary cost overruns in the construction of the National Children’s Hospital. And
then there is Brexit, which is unlikely to deliver many votes to the outgoing Government.
Fine Gael is proud of its performance in helping UK prime minister Boris Johnson to get a deal done with the EU, the Liverpool meeting of the two prime ministers in October being crucial in helping to avoid the crash-out Brexit that would have brought about an immediate restoration of the physical impediments of the border on this island. But is that diplomacy actually going to win any votes?
Fine Gael seems to want praise for that and the restoration of the Northern Assembly (again, rightly or wrongly, does the latter matter to most voters in the Republic?) and voter support accordingly.
Voters don’t exactly reward competency but they punish perceived incompetency. The suspicion is that voters who are paying attention reckon that Micheál Martin and his team would do much the same on Brexit if in power and that, in any case, the heavy lifting in this year’s talks about a new deal between the UK and EU will be led from Brussels and, to protect Irish interests, by Commissioner Phil Hogan.
Worse for Fine Gael, I suspect many voters have lost much of their interest in Brexit for the time being, having been worn out by the protracted publicity of recent months and now buying into Johnson’s line that he would ‘get Brexit done’ and that he has indeed.
Instead, they have become reengaged by debacles such as the plan, hastily shelved, to honour the Royal Irish Constabulary of 100 years ago. Again, nuance as to its role has been lost and the
Government has been backed into a defensive position. But Fine Gael is not the only party to have suffered a difficult and unexpected first few days.
Sinn Féin has also found itself victim of tales of the unexpected, this time courtesy of audio everyone can hear for themselves, the podcasts of its celebrity councillor, the MMA fighter Paddy Holohan.
Holohan’s views on Leo Varadkar’s lack of suitability to be a leader because he is not a father and comes from Indian heritage – and his lurid belief that teenage girls lure men into sex so they can subsequently make false rape allegations – could be easily enough ignored or dismissed if he was not an elected representative.
Things are made worse by the fact that many in Sinn Féin have sought to occupy the highest moral ground in Irish politics. This is a form of gaslighting when you consider that notwithstanding the undoubted intelligence and good political intentions of many of its candidates, it is a party that still carries murderers and terrorists, many of whom are in highly influential positions.
SINN Féin has been to the forefront of those who, correctly, criticised Fine Gael’s carrying of Verona Murphy as a by-election candidate before belatedly jettisoning her as a General Election standardbearer. But although Holohan is not a candidate it still erred badly in its initial handling of the revelation of his Neanderthal comments.
McDonald accepted Holohan’s non-apology apology on Thursday – in which he did tried his own bit of gaslighting, accusing people of misrepresenting what they could hear clearly and doing the now standard thing of apologising for any offence caused, rather than saying what he had said was wrong – when she should have initiated the investigation immediately.
Now, on the subsequent revelation of his rape allegations, she has suspended his membership. Better late than never but it has still drawn attention away from Sinn Féin’s attempts to highlight its positions on housing, the economy and other issues.
Fianna Fáil shouldn’t be laughing at any of this. It may feel that all is going to plan at present but the same laws of unintended developments apply to it as anyone else. Unless it is very lucky something, somewhere is likely to happen over the next few weeks that will put it on the back foot.
The big question now may be how Varadkar turns this around. Fine Gael may be depending on a succession of opinion polls that suggests it remains more popular than Fianna Fáil, but such polls almost always underestimate the latter party’s support.
Many pundits, even at this stage, are now speculating that Fianna Fáil could end up between ten and 20 seats ahead of Fine Gael and in a position to form a government.
Varadkar has to repay the trust put in him by the Fine Gael parliamentary party when it secured his position as leader ahead of grassroots favourite Simon Coveney.
As he’s not the smartest street performer when it comes to canvassing, he needs to get in front of the biggest number as often as possible via the broadcast airwaves, but when he does so he needs to match his undoubted intellectual intelligence to the emotional variety.
Because it is the latter that seems to matter to so many voters.