By-elections have a habit of making a mark in history. What will this poll reveal to us?

Irreverent. Irrepressible. In the corridors of power

IROUNDED a Leinster House corner and encountered Fine Gael éminence grise, Frank Flannery. It was 2009 and there was a by-election in Dublin North to fill the seat of the deceased Tony Gregory. We casually discussed events in the constituency, until recently bestrode by political colossus Bertie Ahern.

Strange as it may seem to younger readers, this was an election of desperation for Fine Gael. It had endured 12 years of Fianna Fáil government. Party leader Enda Kenny, who was to face a heave a year later, wore a hunted look.

However, Mr Flannery was rarely ruffled, and he mentioned as a prescient throwaway that he thought Sinn Féin was a coming force, and one day could be in government. Indeed, said the legendary Fine Gael strategist, his party could one day join Sinn Féin in coalition.

When we splashed this news across our Sunday front page, it caused a political storm. In 2009 the concept that law-and-order party Fine Gael could join barely detoxified Sinn Féin in government was as outrageously implausible as coalition with Fianna Fáil.

There was uproar. Although there were also local and European elections on that same day the Flannery story dominated. Svengalis like Mr Flannery rarely say anything accidentally. Having looked at the figures, Flannery reckoned the relatively unknown Fine Gael candidate could only get in if he got some Sinn Féin transfers.

THAT by-election, a local scuffle, was viewed as nationally totemic, as potentially foreshadowing more seismic political shifts. Today, take a small step across the River Liffey, and you will find the parties fighting another by-election. Again, we are being sold the reasons why this is a momentous clash, as important to our futures as the D-Day landings. The morale of candidates, canvassers and those posing as pollsters must be kept up.

Nevertheless, with nothing else available to predict the future let us use the 2021 Dublin Bay South by-election as the rosetta stone to interpret the futures of Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald and others.

Mr Martin tries to project a noble image of a technocrat, stepping Christlike above the polluted waters of political chicanery. Yet, in the last year he has pulled strokes Boss Croker would have admired. In overlooking Jim O’Callaghan for Cabinet, he cunningly appointed a Cabinet that poses little threat to him. The presumption in Fianna Fáil is that the leader again acted in Machiavellian fashion by appointing Mr O’Callaghan as candidate Deirdre Conroy’s director of elections. Few give the disarmingly likeable Ms Conroy a chance of winning. I, however, do not believe that Mr Martin sees any advantage in defeat.

He will know that the performance of Fianna Fáil anywhere, more than any party, ultimately reflects on the leader. The leadership of Fianna Fáil has unique political symbolism. Few remember the director of elections at a by-election. If Ms Conroy fails to reach double figures, it will accelerate Mr Martin’s journey towards the exit. If she gets anywhere near Mr O’Callaghan’s 2020 general election 13.8%, it will buy Mr Martin time.

There is a perception that Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar finds it difficult to put aside personal slights. It is an unfair characterisation, but the choice of James Geoghegan as candidate over Kate O’Connell is mystifying. It is true that Ms O’Connell would get in a row in a phone box but Mr Varadkar likes a win. With all the other major contenders putting forward a woman candidate and given her high national profile, it made sense to select Ms O’Connell. And don’t go for this ‘the local organisation selected Mr Geoghegan’ talk. A party runs the candidate a leader wants.

It seems that Ms O’Connell made one jibe too many on radio recently when she said that Leo was failing to deliver. Mr Geoghegan is seeking to fill the seat of outgoing TD Eoghan Murphy and has all his predecessor’s supporters and intelligence. He has the precedent of a combined 27% Fine Gael first-preference share in 2020 to capitalise on. He is favourite, alongside Sinn Féin’s Lynn Boylan, but a failure to be elected is a high possibility. Mr Varadkar is getting a name as a bad electoral performer and a loss could make it a long, attritional trek before he re-emerges as taoiseach in December

2022. A loss would damage him more than the FG director of elections, another putative challenger, Simon Harris.

The momentum is behind Sinn Féin, which collected mindblowing vote totals in 2020. Chris Andrews took 16.1% of the first-preference vote here last year, 0.1% ahead of Fine Gael’s Eoghan Murphy. Ostensibly this was an incredible performance in a constituency that had never before elected a Sinn Féin TD. Mr Andrews, however, has deep roots here, is from a revered Fianna Fáil dynasty and had topped the poll as a Fianna Fáil candidate in 2007. A good performance will do Sinn Féin no good – only a win will maintain Mary Lou McDonald’s Kim Jong-un-like infallibility. By-elections are strange. There aren’t 41 other constituencies to dilute what is, in modern politics, the toxic torrent that will come a candidate’s way during a campaign. Yet, as with all elections, it is numbers that matter. It has been quickly forgotten that the Green Party, too, had a historic election result last year, and party leader Eamon Ryan topped the poll in Dublin Bay South with 22.5% of the first-preference vote. Claire Byrne, a long-serving Green councillor, is in the reckoning. Many of the mundane issues do not concern voters here, so the life-and-death issues of polar bears are often foremost. A Green victory would reinvigorate a march that is less worrying to the middle classes, but just as inexorable as Sinn Féin’s.

In 2009, Maureen O’Sullivan, Tony Gregory’s ally, was elected. Where the by-election did foreshadow coming political events was in the fate of Bertie’s brother Maurice Ahern, who came fifth. Less than two years later Fianna Fáil was to be obliterated in an epoch-defining general election.

In the 2009 by-election Labour’s Ivana Bacik came third. She is again running for the Labour Party, 12 years later in the constituency she is more at home in – Dublin Bay South. Second place in 2009, went to then-senator Paschal Donohoe. He is now Minister for Finance. These by-elections get nasty, but we must not forget this is electoral politics, not war. Faced with annihilation Winston Churchill said of war, ‘without victory, there is no survival’. In a by-election, a loss does not preclude future prosperity. But not for all.