The ‘20s Roaring (Again)

By Timothy G. McMahon

Tim McMahon ponders the results of this week’s election in Ireland, in the wake of Brexit and in the context of nationalist politics in Europe.

For what it’s worth, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the Republic of Ireland on the heels of the 2020 General Election. But I know what has happened. The ‘20s have happened, or they’ve started to at least.

On Saturday, nearly 63% of the electorate in the Republic cast their ballots, producing a nearly three-way tie in the popular vote, with Sinn Féin receiving 24.5% of the vote, Fianna Fáil 22.2%, and Fine Gael, 20.9%. It would be tempting—and it’s a temptation that has already enticed some wayward pundits in for instance, The Atlantic, to grab for the shiny bauble—to see the results of the election as an Irish version of the populist/nationalist wave that has hit countries across the globe, including The Philippines, India, Hungary, Poland, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. After all, a nationalist party, Sinn Féin, has shocked the system, outperforming the two traditional power parties (Fianna Fáil and Fina Gael) and attaining the second highest total of seats in Dáil Éireann, the lower house of Ireland’s parliament. Sinn Féin’s 37 seats are a revelation, given that the party did not perform well in recent local or European parliamentary elections. Amazingly, Sinn Féin candidates won 37 of the 42 races they contested, suggesting that just ten more candidates performing at the same breakneck pace would have produced as many as 45 TDs in the coming Dáil, surely enough to guarantee a Sinn Féin-led coalition. What has happened, though, is itself unprecedented in the last century, a virtual three-way tie between a left-of-center upstart and the two disappointed center-right parties. How they determine to work in the days ahead will determine the shape of Irish politics at the crucial time the country will deal with the aftermath of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.

Still, there are signs within the material produced since the election to undercut the concerns that this was a populist/nationalist wave election and to leave us scratching our heads about what is to come. For example, although a few individuals who are known to be rather right of Attila have won seats as Independents, those organized (a word I’m applying loosely) in far-right parties, such as the Irish Freedom Party, failed even to secure the 2 percent of first-preference votes needed to receive state election funding. Moreover, Sinn Féin seemed to tap into the broadly felt sentiment among those frustrated with the neoliberal domestic program of the Fine Gael government, particularly those who believed that the Cabinet largely ignored (or failed adequately to meet) the burgeoning housing and homelessness problem or to address the numerous faults in the health and social services provided by the HSE. In this Fianna Fáil deserved its own share of the blame because party leader Micheál Martin agreed to support the governments of Enda Kenny and Leo Varadkar in the name of stability. Exit polls indicated that voters held both parties to account, virtually ignoring the foreign policy achievements (significant though they have been) during the Brexit imbroglio and focusing on domestic issues at the polls. Younger voters especially went in this direction– that is, those who reached adulthood during or after the crash that Martin’s predecessors’ policies did so much to unleash and from which Varadkar’s party worked to claw out through policies that cemented rather than alleviated income and social inequities.

Photos from the Irish Times: Top left: Fianna Fail’s Micheál Martin. Top right: Mary Lou McDonald at the Royal Dublin Society vote counting centre on Sunday. Bottom: sitting Taoiseach Leo Varadkar with two colleagues looking at vote count yesterday. 

The pure electoral math suggests we’re likely to see either a hung parliament, followed by a fairly quick election, OR a cobbled coalition that may be difficult to hold together. As I see it, three scenarios seem broadly possible. A “grand coalition” of the center-right may make sense if enough in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are determined to keep Sinn Féin from power (this go-round), but even that pairing would need help: these once-safe leading parties can only must 73 votes together, eight shy of the 50%+1 needed to govern. Were they able to negotiate such a deal, Mary Lou McDonald and her colleagues would have ample opportunity to challenge their policies from the Opposition bench. But, as the Irish Times reports, Sinn Féin’s McDonald is herself reportedly seeking coalition partners from among the numerous smaller parties of the left and the newly elected independents. Tempting though that prospect may be to some, it would also entail coordinating policy among six parties and a host of independents, never an easy situation for a lead coalition partner, much less one new to governing. A further possibility is that Fianna Fáil backbenchers may convince—or attempt to unseat—Martin in a bid to achieve agreement with Sinn Féin rather than remaining alongside their longtime rival Fine Gael. Such a link would undoubtedly be preceded by hard bargaining, including over holds claim to lead the government, the leader of the highest vote getting party or the leader of the party with one more seat in the Dáil.

Although much depends on the specific interactions among the three major parties, none of those scenarios produces a settled situation; instead, each offers only the beginning of a new era in Irish politics. That may sound grandiose—”a new era”—but think about that phrase “among the three major parties.” The reality is that the Irish state is not the two-party state it has been for most of the last century, and it is unlikely to return to that place in the foreseeable future. Mind, I’ve not even mentioned Northern Ireland or the reality that Sinn Féin is the only party with the potential to sit in government in both jurisdictions on the island yet that too is the new reality. In short, domestic issues in the Republic have transformed the dynamic of north-south and British-Irish relations in a way that few anticipated and that even fewer can anticipate.

What all of that suggests to me, however, is that Irish politics have merely entered the decade of the 1920s. From the Swiftian catalyst of the Patriot Movement in the 1720s, to the heyday of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association in the 1820s, to the partition and rocky establishment of two governments on the island in the 1920s, the third decade of the past three centuries have been the consequential ones that shaped the politics of Ireland for the coming generations. The Twenty-first century stands at that moment now. We are witnessing a reshuffling, but what it portends remains open to conjecture.

Timothy G. McMahon is associate professor of History at Marquette University, author of Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910 (2008), and co-editor of Ireland in an Imperial World: Citizenship, Opportunism, and Subversion (2017).