Ireland’s existing governing coalition is on track to hold onto power, following last week’s general election. The parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, will need a new partner as a result of a drop off in support for the Greens.
The success of this centrist duo rides a wave of promises of spending and tax cuts thanks to the country’s significant budget surplus. That puts Ireland in a luckier position than many other members of the European Union, which are facing fiscal constraints.
Still, the next government will have to address similar issues — among them, a housing crisis and immigration policy.
For what’s next, The Parliament Magazine spoke to Lisa Keenan, a political science professor at Trinity College Dublin.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
All indications point towards another centrist coalition government. If this is the case, who do you see as the major power players?
The big winner from this election is Micheál Martin, the leader of Fianna Fáil. He was trailing Fine Gael and Sinn Fein in the polls and it was expected that he perhaps wasn't going to be able to take all that many seats, particularly when Fine Gael had a 26% rating in the polls. At the moment, his party is well ahead on seats and he's in pole position to become Taoiseach [prime minister].
It has been a less good election for Simon Harris, although given his poll ratings for his party during the last week of the campaign, they're likely to be quite pleased.
For Sinn Fein, this will be a mixed picture. It's a bit of a relief after their abysmal poll ratings towards the end of the summer and their poor performance in the local elections, but compared to 2020, it's really a big drop in support. They've gone down by 5.5 percentage points.
How long do you expect coalition negotiations to go on for?
We would be very surprised to have an outcome before Christmas. Certainly the Dáil [Irish Parliament] will reconvene and there will be a vote for Taoiseach, but the two parties together are not going to have majorities.
They will need to have some type of agreement, whether that's a party going into coalition with them or a party that has agreed to support them from opposition, but it will take time to iron out those details.
At the moment, it looks like the outcome would be Fianna Fail and Fine Gael probably with some like-minded independents agreeing to go into government with them.
In the previous legislature, we saw the premiership swapped halfway through the parliament’s five-year term. Do you think we’ll see a repeat of this?
I would expect that we would see it this time because Simon Harris has already been talking about parity of esteem and really what they mean by that is that they will be treated as an equal partner in any coalition, and having a rotating Taoiseach is a fairly big concession.
Ireland’s surplus was at the forefront of many debates around the election. How do you expect the new coalition to approach this?
This is a little bit of a tricky one for the government. Both parties that we fully expect are going to go into government have made these very high spending commitments.
Some of those commitments are in roughly the same areas. There's a different degree of emphasis right across the different parties in certain areas, but these are things that could be ironed out.
I think the real issue, though, is the extent to which they are going to be able to rely on that surplus going forward. I think that it's likely that whichever government is formed, they may have a very different picture in one or two years’ time, and that may end up sort of throwing their promises out of the window.
This result seems to break from a far-right pattern we have seen elsewhere in the EU. Why do you think this is?
One of the interesting features about the Irish system, apart from the weakness of the left, has been the absence of a far-right party.
Looking at the profile of the type of voter that votes for far-right parties, those were the kind of voters that were voting for Sinn Fein. With the popularity of the party having grown, they really have been able to kind of hoover up that kind of voter, but without them having an anti-immigrant sentiment at all. They are not a party that adopts those kinds of policies.
What we've seen then with the drop in support for Sinn Fein has actually been on this issue whereby some people have not been satisfied with the immigration stance of Sinn Fein. And the reason why that's emerged is because immigration has only recently, in the Irish system, emerged as an issue.
We have had some newer parties with anti-immigrant views field candidates. There are a few anti-immigration candidates who won seats in the local elections, but not so far the general election. So there was an offering for them this time and at the local election and certainly, there was someone there that they could vote for.
The left wing seems to have fallen away in this election. Why do you think that is?
The left in Ireland has been weak since the free state was established so this is not anything new. What was new actually, in the last elections where we were saying: Are we seeing the emergence of left-right competition in Ireland because, in contrast with our European neighbours, we have not seen parties fighting along those lines.
There's several reasons for this. The Labour Party was organisationally weak and it wasn't really able to garner a lot of support. Typically also Fianna Fail fulfilled that role of expanding the welfare state and attracting working-class voters.
If you look at the votes for the Labour Party, there really were, even in its heyday, quite low. The election that they had a very good result in, the 2011 election, was just an aberration as a result of Fianna Fail's collapse, and deep dissatisfaction with the political system as a result of the financial crisis and the recession.
What we saw in 2020 was an interesting rise in support for Sinn Fein, but a reasonable chunk of that support now has fallen away. The support for the Greens that we had seen in the last election, that's fallen away. But then we see the rise of the Social Democrats, and Labour appears to have been forgiven for having gone into government and that party is now picking up seats. So the electorate is just more volatile than it has been previously.
We have a lot of parties on the left, smaller ones, and they're not really able to cooperate with one another. They're fighting over the same seats and that's a challenge for the left in terms of being able to present a coherent offering as an alternative government.
What does the result mean for Ireland’s role in the EU?
In Ireland, we are very pro-European. We have benefited from our membership of the European Union to a great extent and certainly there is no drive to, for example, leave the European Union or indeed start renegotiating our relationship with the European Union.
That said, Sinn Fein is more on the Europe-critical end. It's not anti-EU, but it would have some reservations about some aspects of membership. But what we do have is two parties in Fianna Fail and Fine Gael that are extremely pro-EU. At the margins, there are some things that they're not satisfied with.
For example, we still have this nitrates derogation and that is going to be an issue next year when we're expected to have improved our water quality in order to retain that. They've all promised essentially that the derogation is going to remain, but obviously that's not within their gift.
So there are these smaller issues that crop up that are related to the EU, but there is no appetite for changing the position at all within the EU. This is a continuity of relations and there's no expectation that anything will change.