Do Frank Flannery’s Transfers Patterns Prove Transfers Don’t Matter?

The Magill Summer School is a regular agenda setter during the slow news period of July/August. This season is unlikely to be any different and Frank Flannery’s speech as reported in the Irish Times bears out two important points about the election earlier this year. First out is that PJ Mara was, once again, correct. He was to be found regularly on radio shows telling us that transfers are not really all that important in an election. Transfers decide few seats and what really matters is getting out there and attaining number ones. At the time I am sure I wrote that he would be proved wrong in a close election where seats were far more tightly contested and there was less of a landslide about it.

Flannery’s figures seem to disprove my thesis somewhat, since the Fine Gael challenge to Fianna Fail was present and quite strong. They got in the region of 30% of transfers against Fianna Fail’s 26%. This puts them in the enviable position of being akin to Newcastle United under Keegan, “everyone’s second favourite side”. It is all well and good being popular but it doesn’t seem to put bums on seats. And PJ knew it and told us so. Fianna Fail got 4% less in transfers and still beat Fine Gael out the gate to get to Government Buildings.

The second point that his analysis bears out is that real politics only begins once any election is over. In the election a public give their verdict on candidates and parties but, as Pat Rabbitte’s shimmying early on in the campaign (and Trevor’s too) indicate, there is real politics to be played out after the event. In the election on 9% of Green voters showed an appetite for Fianna Fail partnership in the form of transferring to them. There was a conference of the party to go into power but broadly speaking it was not necessarily what ‘the people’ had in mind when they voted to get a government of FF/Green/PD.

This isn’t sour grapes, it was a great election by Fianna Fail and they picked their partners to suit their needs, and both parties went in for the deal the saw as fair. This is to point to the fact that often times elections are but the crude outline drawing of the will of the people, the task of colouring in the finer detail falls to politicans, political handlers/advisers and sometimes journalists. It is an interesting process but one which gets lost in the hype of ‘letting to people decide’. The evidence suggests that people don’t really decide but they in fact gesture in a general direction, a direction open to creative interpretation should it be needed.