Election 2011: End of Showtime

We had four ‘Leaders Debates’ in this election and the best thing that can be said about them is that there were three too many. One would have been more than enough, preferably late last week before the weekend where the ‘don’t knows’ traditionally make up their minds or the decided-undecideds switch their votes in response to leaders’ performances. Instead the debates have been more about the respective presenters and their status in the media hierarchy as a result of their moderating skills rather than throwing much light on what the party leaders can do about the problems facing our country.
Last night’s Prime Time effort was described by one of the tabloids today as a snooze fest. It was a hard watch to endure to the end, alright. But the main impression the debate left on this viewer was that there’s no limit to the capacity of politicians to demonstrate their ignorance of basic economic facts; their indifference to the plight of those whom they would presume to govern and the triumph of their ambition over their respective abilities to do the job to which they aspire to be appointed by the electorate.

On the banks they were all at sea; a tit for tat contest about who voted for the ill-fated guarantee or who didn’t. Fine Gael think they can find a quick buyer for AIB and that the unworkable ‘good bank/bad bank’ solution they advanced at the outset of the crisis would have worked, even though the problem with it, as noted by every expert on the subject but their own, was that all the developers’ loans were interconnected across all the financial institutions making such a solution impossible to implement. Fianna Fail gloss over the fact that they announced the NAMA concept and then spent eighteen months dithering with it, so that by the time it was implemented the whole situation had deteriorated out of hand. Labour, God help us, are stuck in the rear view mirror of no solutions, only righteous condemnation, indignation and negativity along with a proposal to add to our national banking woes by imposing a so-called ‘strategic investment bank’ – without any capital resources, mind you – on top of the existing mess.
  The parties’ respective job creation proposals stand exposed as sheer bunkum.  ‘Green jobs’ creation only adds to the joke of the respective parties’  job creation targets; since so-called ‘green jobs’ are being axed just about everywhere else in the developed world. The Green Party’s early election claim that they had created 20,000 green jobs in the economy during their tenure in office had to be abandoned early on in the campaign, once it transpired that no such contention could be stood over by the Sustainable Energy Authority or anyone else. The true picture is probably more one of jobs lost, rather than gained, as many green energy supplies’ companies have collapsed due to loss of demand for their products following the onset of the recession.
 Job creation relies on economic growth. Projections for economic growth by the Department of Finance – on which all the parties’ tax, growth and fiscal redemption targets are based – are regarded by the EU, the OECD and the IMF as more than a little optimistic. So the respective ‘no increases in income tax’ pledges are likely to fall apart pretty damn quick before the next Budget, as will promises of no further cuts in social welfare or education – or silly promises to ‘reverse’ some of the existing cuts – in the face of fiscal reality. Last night on the Prime Time debate and today on radio, Fine Gael’s leader, Enda Kenny and his director of elections, Phil Hogan, sounded respectively like they were rehearsing the wording for the grand excuse that will be trotted out from the steps of the Dept. of Finance in Merrion St. two days after the new government takes office – ‘Oh things are so much, much worse than we were led to believe by the outgoing government of Fianna Fail, so our plans will have to be postponed….indefinitely, tough and all as it is for you. Sorreee…’
 As for raiding the NPRF, or selling off the semi-state silver over the next three or four years (as specifically proposed by Fine Gael) to create a jobs stimulus fund; well you’d think they’d all have tired by now of the fiction that the NPRF is some sort of bottomless money-pit that they can dip in or out of at will; or that national state assets sold right now would raise anything like the 7bn euro that Fine Gael anticipates they might. Even if you could sell them in the current international environment. To be fair to him, at least Michael Martin challenged the specifics of his adversaries’ more grandiose plans, especially Fine Gael’s increasingly threadbare Health Plan that will cost individual citizens a fortune in insurance payments per family – as much as 5,000 euro per household according to some figures thrown about –  if it is ever implemented. Though judging by the final opinion polls of this campaign, it doesn’t matter what Martin says about anything anymore; his party is well-goosed and about to be plucked to near political death come Friday next.
   The Paddy Power/Red C poll this morning contains no shift of any great significance in the national ratings for any of the parties. But FG are clearly within grasp of an overall majority. The clue lies in the regional breakdown of party support. Fine Gael at 34% in Dublin are now eight points ahead of Labour in the capital. Fianna Fail at 10% are in fourth place behind Sinn Fein’s 13%. Apart from a near wipe out of Fianna Fail seats in Dublin, this implies that Fine Gael may win ‘second’ seats ahead of Labour in Dublin constituencies, and that Labour may be further squeezed by Sinn Fein in the battle for final seats that might otherwise have fallen to them. The Greens hold 5% of the Dublin vote which may hold out some hope for them of keeping a seat or two alive in the capital. But out in the rest of the country, the spoils may be shared differently, with a huge swing to FG dwarfing the prospects of their main rivals.
 The numbers for the Rest of Leinster are FG 41%, Labour 18%, FF 15%, SF 10%, Greens 2%, Others 15%. Munster : FG 43%, Labour 16%, FF 18%; SF 8%, Greens 2% and others 13%. Connaught/Ulster: FG 45%, Labour 9%, FF 18%, Sinn Fein 14%, Others 13% and Greens 2.
 What’s most significant in this regional breakdown is the yawning gap opening up between FG and its nearest rivals, all of whom are clumped together beneath a 20% mark. So the ‘Spring Tide’ phenomenon of 19% for Labour in 1992 delivering 33 seats will not be replicated on a 2011 20% national poll,even if that is maintained when the votes are cast on Friday. Labour are too far behind their main rival and putative coalition partner, to whom they are now belatedly cuddling up like cats before the fire after all the mauling and scratching of the previous week. Labour are also far too close to the rest of the bunch. Further, in 1992 Independents/Others at 14% in national polling intentions was unheard of. Independents will be a real factor in determining the destination of final seats in rural constituencies to the likely detriment of both Labour and Fianna Fail hopes.
 For Fianna Fail, the election amounts to a wipeout whatever way they choose to look at it, with the prospect of further humiliation if they return to the Dail in third place. If Fine Gael win an overall majority on these figures, or as close to it as makes no difference, then Fianna Fail may find itself conceding the position of leader of the Opposition to the Labour Party.
 Writing to a friend this morning about this election, it occurred to me that Ireland wasn’t always beset with an insular xenophobic mindset, bound to rigorous political and religious orthodoxy. The only part of us that really escaped being trapped in the nationalist net of the past eighty years was our culture, notably in literature and music. So in a way, I think of the history of this state as an aberration; a blip in our history that lasts for eighty odd years within a much broader frame of reference of culture and idealism and innovation that characterised what it meant to be Irish down through many previous centuries. In the state we fashioned out of the 1916 rebellion, we aligned much of our heritage, including our beautiful native language, within a long narrow box; the coffin of nineteenth century nationalism.
 If FF get reduced to a rump in this election, then I think there’s a chance to start breaking out of that at last. It may take time, because Labour needs to be dismantled and reformed as well; Fine Gael is just the other side of the FF coin and Sinn Fein are like a throwback to 19th century nationalist values. But with political reform and the experience of what we’ve come through and the worst of it that may yet lie ahead of us, perhaps then we can aspire to political maturity and the creation of truly modern, forward- looking state.

As citizens, if we allow the impetus for reform to fade once the election is over and the new government ensconced, then it will all have been for nothing. I’d hate to think that we’d have eviscerated Fianna Fail’s pernicious power over everything that happens in this state, only to pass the baton to Fine Gael and Labour to set up their cronies in jobs and positions of influence in every nook and cranny of Irish life. And that’s what they will do too, given half a chance, irrespective of their protestations, or even genuine intentions, to the contrary. There’s no point in voting out one shower, if we’re simply going to vote in another shower and give them licence to carry on the business of politics in the same old way as always.