Does a Dail election truly matter any more?

When general elections bring no policy change, we’ve only the Presidency as a choice of values, writes Gene Kerrigan

WE’VE got two elections to deal with in the coming period. One Presidential, the other a general election. Of the two, the Presidential election is somewhat more significant.

Usually, the opposite is true.

The office of President is largely ceremonial, with few powers. A general election, on the other hand, decides which of the 158 TDs elected will make up the government. In theory, the Dail election matters most.

But, we’re in peculiar circumstances.

We’ve officially had a “national emergency” over the state of the public hospitals for the past 12 years and four months. It was declared by the then Minister for Health. And the hospitals ain’t getting any better.

Conservative estimates based on international research suggest the hospital chaos causes at least 300 premature deaths a year.

For five years we’ve had growing concern about homelessness and the housing chaos, and it’s now out of control.

As long as it was just homeless people and the poor who suffered, many shrugged the problem off. Now, rents exceed those during the Celtic Tiger bubble. About 92pc of rents are beyond the hope of those on rent support.

Many students are unable to rent shelter, so the crisis is affecting education. Dublin rents are beyond young people on low wages, so the crisis affects the make-up of the capital and the availability of certain talents.

Perhaps most alarming for politicians, their beloved companies in the tech and finance businesses are worried about moving to an out-of-control housing market.

Thankfully, we’re a parliamentary democracy. We can vote out one incompetent shower and vote in the crowd that offers a different policy.

Except, we can’t.

For historic reasons, Dail politics is dominated by twin halves of the party that split during the Civil War. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael spent 50 years exchanging insults about 1922. Today, FF and FG exchange insults about which is the most efficient, and the least corrupt.

The old parties, embedded in local structures for decades, are extremely difficult to shift.

Whatever the crisis, they each react with a variation on the same right-wing policy.

They’ve taken turns making a pig’s mickey of both the health and the housing crises — pumping large subsidies into private sector solutions that don’t work.

At intervals, grandiose new “plans” are announced to deal with health and housing, expensively marketed gimmicks, each failing as fast as the previous nonsense.

It’s not that we don’t know how to deal with the problems.

The health crisis is about hospital beds. We have about half the OECD level of beds per thousand of population.

Both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, however, have been sincerely committed to cutting hospital beds since the 1980s. We didn’t always have half OECD levels — it took FF and FG a lot of hard work to get it down to that.

By making the public system dangerous, they drive people into the private system — this, they reckon, will allow them to eventually cut spending on the public system.

But, today, they’ve done so much damage that they spend record amounts of money patching up the system to stop further collapse.

The housing crisis is about supply and affordability.

Both FF and FG have been obsessional about jacking up house prices, and equally committed to eliminating affordable housing. Rising house prices are good for the banks. And the shareholders in the landlord companies. And the land hoarders, the estate agents, the builders and the speculators — much of the base of the right-wing parties. (Rising house prices also make house owners feel rich, and the feel-good factor pays off in votes.)

Municipal housing, which used to provide a stable base to the market, has been ruthlessly eradicated.

We’ve had housing crises before, and the answer is building affordable housing — but both right-wing parties are committed to discredited private sector solutions that don’t work.

So, voting out one incompetent shower and replacing them with a government with a different policy isn’t on. What we have is not two parties, it’s two wings of the same party, the Landlords and Shareholders Party.

(The Irish Examiner checked the register of TD interests and found that one in five TDs is a landlord.) What about Labour? Oh, dear. As it does every time it’s in trouble, Labour talks about dumping its leader. It did that in 2014, discarding Eamon Gilmore. Joan Burton was ditched in 2016.

Now, Labour is afraid that Brendan Howlin doesn’t enthuse voters. It seems he was a minister in FG’s austerity government, after Labour got a mandate to oppose FG austerity.

Labour councillors have found a new champion, Alan Kelly, and they want Brendan to bugger off.

(Alan was also a minister in that same FG austerity government, after Labour got a mandate to oppose FG austerity. But the Labour councillors think we won’t notice that.) And Sinn Fein? Just as FF and FG’s double-act has run out of steam, SF has promised to put one or the other of them back into government after the next election, if the numbers add up. That should be fun.

These are, you must admit, peculiar circumstances.

And here comes a Presidential election.

And, unlike the Dail election, this one offers us a genuine choice. OK, it’s a position without significant power, but since Mary Robinson’s election, the Aras vote has become a useful weathervane to indicate the political drift of the electorate. Not in party political terms, but in the wider, more important sense of the political mood.

And the way this election is shaping up, the choice will be informative.

Michael D Higgins brings out the worst in some people. Going back years, other politicians sneered at his alleged radicalism. In a moment of daftness, for some reason Des O’Malley warned voters that if they voted for Higgins he would “go mad in government”. They really believed that.

Higgins, in government, remained all too sane for my liking.

With a mixture of human rights speeches and cuddlesome appearances, Higgins has been widely deemed to have done a good job in the Presidency. Yet, there’s that same odd resentment of a mildly leftish politician.

In 1966, civil war bitterness was still alive, and Eamon de Valera was a hate figure, so Fine Gael felt bound to oppose his bid for a second Presidential term. Apart from that, every incumbent in the history of the presidency who sought a second term was granted one unopposed. Until Michael D Higgins.

Given the alleged front runners, this Presidential election might settle into a straight fight — Higgins versus Dragons’ Den.

At time of writing, Sean Gallagher remains coy about whether he’ll run — an election website has appeared, he’s thrown shapes, but it’s all very vague.

Gavin Duffy, the other Dragons’ Den chap, is upfront about his ambition. I’m sure TV3 would love to do a show in which the two of them “pitched” their candidacy to a panel, so they won’t split the Dragons’ Den votes, with the winner challenging Higgins.

We may yet have a leftish human rights candidate versus a business game show candidate.

In our peculiar circumstances, that would be a more useful contest of opposing values than would a Dail contest between the two wings of the Landlords and Shareholders Party.

‘The Aras vote has become a useful weathervane to indicate the political drift of the electorate’