The disturbing reason my friends are eyeing up SF
WHEN Liadh Ní Riada ran as the Sinn Féin candidate for the presidency in 2018, I wrote a column here saying I never could vote for her because of her anti-vaccine stance. As expected, I got abuse on social media, and one friend, a lifelong member of that party, wrote to me to say he was saddened to see me engage in Shinner-bashing.
I wasn’t annoyed that he did so – I’m very fond of him – but I explained myself. I thought the party’s health spokeswoman Louise O’Reilly was very impressive on the CervicalCheck scandal, which was why I also felt Ms Ní Riada’s opposition to the HPV vaccination seemed totally at odds with the party’s concern for women’s health.
In short, I was judging Sinn Féin on policy and a seeming anomaly in its message, and not on its past – only by doing the latter could I be construed as making some sort of raw attempt at ‘Shinner-bashing’.
Over the course of this election campaign, there have been many attempts to raise Sinn Féin’s legacy ties to the IRA and its perceived obeisance to the army council. Then came the attempt to claim that MLA Conor Murphy never accused Paul Quinn, beaten to death by thugs, of criminal behaviour, before the proof was found that he did so.
Not only had he to apologise, so too had party leader Mary Lou McDonald, who had erroneously protested his innocence in an interview with Bryan Dobson. All of these things matter, of that there is no doubt, but based in its manifesto, I personally would find it hard to vote for Sinn Féin tomorrow. What has surprised me is just how many of my friends are planning to do so.
Pension
Like me, many of them come from working-class backgrounds and lived in what we used to call council houses. Through education, ambition and determination, we now are resolutely middle class. Heaven knows I’m far from loaded (my rainy day fund would last literally that long), but I can afford to heat my house and have a decent bottle of wine and a T-bone steak at the weekend, and it keeps me out of trouble. I am, in many ways, a man of simple tastes.
But also, like most of my friends, I will be 57 this year, and while that once meant I was just eight years away from the state pension age of 65, I instead have to work for 11 more years.
Born after January 1, 1961, my pensionable age now is 68, which has special resonance for me, since that’s the age my father was when he died, and I have it in my head I’ll never get to pensionable age at all.
I understand the demographics and I know we’re all living longer and all that, but there is a feeling that my generation somehow has been cheated. We started work earlier than most young people nowadays (on my 68th birthday, I will have been working and paying income tax and PRSI for 51 years and one month), and we paid 58% tax in the Eighties, and my mortgage interest rate once hit 17%.
Having been crucified many times before, we felt like we were being crucified once again.
Sinn Féin seized on that mood very quickly and was out of the traps within minutes to say it would restore the pensionable age to 65. That was the lure that first grabbed the attention of my friends, even though everyone else now has fallen in step to ensure we don’t have to humiliatingly apply for jobseekers’ benefit for three years.
Given our backgrounds, most of us wholeheartedly support the concept of social housing, so the party’s plans in that sphere also seemed attractive. Even more so, perhaps, was the promise of affordable housing. All my friends love their children but maybe didn’t expect they still would be living at home in their late 20s, we certainly weren’t. Others are forlorn that their children had to emigrate to find the work for which they studied and trained. I know far too many who now are watching toddler grandchildren growing up in the UK or Australia via FaceTime and Skype when all they long for is a cuddle.
Someone has to be blamed for that, and that’s why there is a kneejerk anathema to voting Fianna Fáil, for getting us into the mess in the first place, and Fine Gael and Labour for not doing enough to get us out of it.
We might indeed have a functioning economy again, but we have a dysfunctional society in which too many have been left behind – not just the obvious cases such as rough sleepers and those in need of better healthcare, but also the middle-class sons and daughters paying so much rent that the prospect of ever owning a home is slipping ever further from their grasp.
Neither of the two main parties seems to have learned any lessons from the Brexit debacle and the election of Donald Trump. Both, in essence, were protest votes, delivered by people sick of the politics of old. Nor did they seem to be aware of the Mary Lou factor – the significant majority of my friends considering voting for Sinn Féin are women fed up with the male, stale and pale choice they have been offered since the foundation of the State.
What my pals do not seem to have considered is the Sinn Féin manifesto itself. I’m no economist but a quick read of it leaves you under no illusion that the only people likely to fund its ambitious giveaways are those of us in advancing middle age.
It contains infographics explaining how various cohorts will be better off – those on social protection, couples with young children and so on – but not much in the way of 56-year-old men living alone, or even of empty nesters. In fact, the latter, after a lifetime of prudence and planning for old age, actually might be taxed on their savings or because a house bought 30 years ago now is worth many multiples of what they paid, leaving them asset rich but cash poor.
Protest
As things stand, we are told by independent bodies we have one of the most progressive tax systems in Europe – complicating that, and increasing corporate tax, won’t serve as bait for further foreign direct investment and, in our globalised world, easily might see some existing players depart for lowerwage and more affordable economies elsewhere in the EU.
That wouldn’t happen overnight, given that Sinn Féin’s realistic prospects are limited to being a junior coalition partner, but any involvement in government will send a signal to the big tech and pharma firms here that unpalatable change is on the cards, and they will plan for all eventualities.
That is a serious consequence of a middle-class uprising against the status quo, a protest against austerity and national debt. In one sense, we are fortunate to have Sinn Féin as the lightning rod for that protest – it certainly is better than a major swing to the sort of hatred and division we now witness in the UK and United States.
Nonetheless, it exposes the fundamental abyss democracy has fallen into in Ireland. No one I know who is planning to vote for Sinn Féin is doing so because they love its policies – they’re contemplating it solely to give our centuries-old parties the bloody noses they believe they deserve.
And no matter how we all vote tomorrow, that is a truly shocking indictment of the lazy, facile, patronising, inert and often corrupt politics we hitherto have accepted as the norm.