There was a time when I paid more attention to polls than I have over the last six or seven years. To be honest I lost interest in trying to analyse them because with the increased frequency of each publication the variation between them became limited.
In yesterday’s Inside Politics podcast from the Irish Times there’s a superb conversation hosted by Hugh Linehan with Theresa Reidy and Aidan Regan on the apparently sudden collapse of sentiment for Sinn Féin in the south (particularly in Dublin).
It’s a great conversation between three well grounded commentators, so I recommend the listen. There are some real dilemmas facing the party at the moment, not the least the challenge (as Reidy notes) to maintain two separate platforms north and south.
The other one that stands out is that just as they made their pitch for the middle, they found their disgruntled base (the impoverished C2s, Ds and Es) either heading to the extreme right, or drifting back to a government currently awash in cash.
If I have a quibble with the discussion of possible ways out before the next election, it’s the assumption that the most important distinction in Ireland is a left/right point of difference. This can lead people to neglect the issue of position in key policy areas.
Few in the Republic seem to account for Micheál Martin’s governing hand on the 2020 PfG. Whatever its shortcomings, it has denied SF space on housing by pitching realtime outputs against ideologically based objections to ‘the wrong sort of funding’.
Party spokesman Eoin O’Broin’s book Home is long on dreaming but inexplicably short on how the digging might get done in face of a generational crisis. On the other hand, new door keys resonate with those in need of affordable accommodation now.
When I was looking more regularly at polls, I’d describe those historical Fianna Fáil voters who broke decisively from them in 2011 as a sort of caravan of voters out looking for a new home. En masse they moved to Labour first, then between 16-20 to SF.
Now they’re fragmenting. SF is no more able to control them than FF was in 2011 to stop them leaving. Some (a few) will go back to FF or Fine Gael but the rest (the 20% Theresa mentions who have always been far right) will head to the Independents.
Hugh was right to mention France where the right and the former leftist areas overlap. Labour and the Soc Dems will struggle to get back those who formerly voted for them but who now want political red meat and really don’t care who else will pay for it.
Ultimately, Sinn Féin will struggle to pull things out of the fire as they did between 2019 and 2020. Back then they were able to benefit from controversy over housing shortages without having to adopt a clear position for themselves on the matter.
This lack of positioning has helped the party in Northern Ireland since they very rarely get caught on the wrong side of blame when the boom comes crashing to the ground, and they could always blame the DUP/Unionists for whatever didn’t happen.
In the Republic they’ve been seen to flip flop on issues like immigration and gender identification. On housing they’re slowly being outbid by a government that has proven to be far more activist in urban working class areas than many pundits predicted.
Ironically it’s Sinn Féin’s near terminal indecision over policy (part of a highly centralised party culture which has developed and deepened over 20 plus years of extraordinary electoral success in Northern Ireland) that’s starting to hurt it in the south:
POLL/POBALBHREITH — Dáil Éireann
FG: 24% (+5)
FF: 20% (+4)
SF: 18% (-9)
SD: 5% (-1)
LAB: 4% (+1)
GP: 4% (-1)
PBP-S: 3%
AON: 2% (-1)
INDs & Others: 20% (+2)+/- vs. Bealtaine/May 2024
Via @OpinionsIE /@IrishTimes
D: 13-19 Meán Fómhair/September 2024
S: —#Ireland #Poll pic.twitter.com/5mTUMllbZf— Ireland Votes (@Ireland_Votes) September 21, 2024
Positioning really does matter in democratic politics. And occupation of the centre is critical to gaining power. A fact certainly not lost on Mary Lou, whose move centrewards has lost her a chunk of her base to a bunch of second plantation angry heads.
The recent riots in Dublin found her “idir dhá áit”, trapped in an acid rainstorm between the nativist strains of her party’s militant nationalist past that had once appealed to the rioters and its newer pitch to be liberal advocates of ethnic tolerance.
Handling change is problematic for most parties since it must be negotiated internally as well as with its voter base, but it’s particularly difficult for a party as organisationally top heavy and as civically unrooted (at least in the south) as Sinn Féin.
Its hard outer shell and inner hollowness derive from the polarisation that has brought success in the first twenty six years of post Belfast Agreement Northern Ireland but has left it unseasoned in the art of negotiating between competing interests.
In contrast, the older parties had a chance to renew from the ground up, giving them a much stronger civic presence. For example, one issue noted in the podcast is that many new SF TDs were elevated from the council seats they had won in 2019.
That loss of capacity to connect with local people created a vacuum for which they were punished last June. The expected Great Leap Forward at the locals didn’t happen because the leadership was so tilted towards national issues and the general election.
It’s impossible to quantify how all this will play in the next general election in the south. They still have strong national spokespeople whom the media still pay attention to (though not as closely as they once did as new disrupters of old politics).
The party should let go of its pre fabricated arguments of old (like the border poll that never comes) for more dynamic ones that align with the needs of the communities they aim to serve. Also, realise that polarisation comes with its own severe limits.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
Discover more from Slugger O’Toole
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
