One Labour voter in our house is sticking to his guns, one is going rogue and our daughter wants a fairer society. Of course she does: she’s 18
NOTHING is going to change. On the darkest day of the campaign to date – literally and, by a happy accident, metaphorically – that’s what the first-time voter in our home told me. She’ll probably be working on polling day anyway, she says, and if she’s working late, then she’ll stay in town, which means she won’t be able to vote and, in any case, what’s the point? Nothing’s going to change.
We’ve had better days. We’ve had debates in which she fizzed so fast she could barely keep up with herself.
We’ve talked about fairness and equality, about women’s rights, women’s representation and women’s bodies. We’ve deconstructed the Left and, to be honest, more or less swept it into a pile and left it in the corner.
We’ve examined the civil war parties – though rather as you might peer into a glass case in a museum and we’ve (well, I’ve) over-used the phrase ‘lesser of two evils’.
We’ve had days on which she offers to vote for whoever we tell her to – and then we’ve had supplementary arguments because one of the lifelong Labour voters in this household is sticking to his guns and the other is going rogue, and the first-time voter has only the one vote up for grabs.
She wants a fairer society. Of course she does; she is 18.
She wants what most of us wanted at that age: a socialist utopia, with slightly better weather. But back at the start of this election campaign, nobody here could point her towards a party that could – in any real sense – deliver on her demands.
SHE agreed that the cold austerity of the past five years had reaped recovery-shaped rewards – we keep telling her that she would not now have a part-time job in a department store if we were still in economic meltdown – but she can also see that the people hit hardest by the economic policies of the past five years are the poorest and the most vulnerable. And if I can’t forgive the Labour Party for that, then she is unwilling to start a beautiful friendship with it on the same basis.
And so – like almost one in five voters – we started looking at the Independents. The media are always on the lookout for the ‘story’ of an election campaign.
Sometimes, at the start of the campaign, you’d put money on one motif being the story of the campaign. Usually, by the time polling day rolls around, that original trend or anomaly is long forgotten as several other stories are writing themselves all around you.
From some way off, this election seemed set to have just one story: a return to government for Fine Gael with a hugely depleted Labour Party and a couple of tame Independents in tow.
But then the doorsteps and the polls started to suggest another story: one in which there may be as many as 30 Independents in the next Dáil.
Even taking into account that it is practically impossible to second-guess the final numbers of Independents – unlike their partyaffiliated rivals, some solo flyers are transfer-friendly, some utterly toxic – we can still safely assume, in these dying days of the campaign, that there will be more Independ- ents in the next Dáil than ever in history. Having spent a good deal of time on the canvass in this election campaign, it’s obvious to me that one of the reasons for this swing to Independents is because from a long way out, people didn’t know who they would vote for but they knew who they definitely wouldn’t vote for. Starting from that negative point inevitably turned heads towards non-party candidates. Then consider the disaffected Labour vote: I can’t imagine too many people abandoning Labour over its time in govern
ment and rushing to support Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil instead.
Add to that the uncomfortable truth that many voters will never vote Sinn Féin – and for many, Independents are the only remaining option.
Then there is the issue of stability. While Independents propping up governments lend themselves to instability, we have just come through a long period of stable government and the electorate has a notoriously short memory.
And while I’m dissing our memories, I might as well take a cheap shot at our intelligence. Many Independents offer amazingly attractive policies, which can dazzle voters.
However, the reality is that they haven’t a hope in hell of implementing these, however well-intentioned the promises. They may as well offer to lasso the moon.
And then, last Monday, Stephen Donnelly didn’t just impress at the leaders’ debate, he – as one newly converted voter described it – ‘smashed it’. Suddenly, the Social Democrats were a story of Election 2016.
Out on the canvass in Dublin Bay south on Friday, the Stephen Donnelly effect was palpable. Several voters approached local candidate Glenna Lynch to tell her how impressed they had been with her leader, who isn’t a leader.
Many said that while they probably wouldn’t have considered voting Social Democrat before the leaders’ debate, they were now giving the new party their number one. The Social Democrats are running 14 candidates in this election: right now, that doesn’t seem enough.
YOU could get carried away with the Donnelly effect, so it’s probably worth taking a cold shower and accepting that while it’s certainly possible, it’s unlikely that they will secure the four seats needed to give them full speaking rights in the Dáil. But their percentage of the vote is bound to be significant and in that, they may well become the first party to win an election without taking an extra seat.
But their three TDs, like all small groups and Independents, are likely to be at least offered the role of kingmakers. Instability? Probably. But what an exciting prospect.
Back at bleak house, I told the newly franchised disenfranchised about the Social Democrats and she had a look at their website. She likes their plan to pay for school books for primary schools.
That, she says, is a decent social principle. They want to build an Irish NHS. My young voter, born prematurely into the NHS, sometimes wonders if it saved her life.
She didn’t care about their economic policy – she’s 18, not 80 – but I told her that Donnelly was sound on the economy – and had probably demonstrated a better grasp of the hard sums than anyone else on the television debate. ‘I could vote for these,’ she said. Not, ‘I know who I won’t vote for, so I’ll vote for these.’ Just ‘I could vote for these.’
Except she can’t. There is no Social Democrat candidate in our constituency. If there were, they would have two votes from our house and with a little arm-twisting and mental torture between now and polling day, they might even have got three.
Instead, we have one Labour, one Independent and one that he and I will probably have to fight over.
But in 14 constituencies, for the first time, and for the first-time voter, there seems to be a real leftwing option that is both economically sound and not bonkers.
The political landscape is changing and if the Social Democrats don’t screw up by supporting a coalition government that then runs roughshod over their ideologies – hello, Greens and Labour – then next time round, they could be a real force to be reckoned with.
In Election 2016, they are now a story. Next time, they could well be the story. Nothing ever changes? For the first-time voters of General Election 2016, everything may be about to change. I envy them their youth and the political road ahead of them. And oh, what a time to be alive.