Independents will fly – but not as high as they’d hoped

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Trying to analyse politics is trying to shoot a moving target, with a blindfold on, while standing on one leg….and possibly being in a different country to the target.

I sometimes trawl through political analysis pieces I wrote 20 years ago and say – by the hokey, you were a bright young fellow then. But far more often I end up saying stuff like – how wrong you were when you said Brian Cowen had the making of a fine Taoiseach, or that Fine Gael would put it up to Fianna Fáil in the 2002 election.

Politicians and those who commentate on the action for a living tend to make one grievous error: they take the facts of the moment as permanent when, of course, they are not.

Take for example when Fine Gael was on its uppers in 2002 and it was widely predicted the party was a goner. Ditto Fianna Fáil in 2011. Although like the advertisement for the homeware store, it was slightly different for the Progressive Democrats – when they are gone they are gone.

But now you kind of think…are they? There have been a few big trends in politics over the past year or so. We have seen the evidence in opinion polls. And we have also seen some turns-up for the book in second tier elections such as local elections, European elections and bye-elections.

These trends are inchoate. In other words don’t take them for Gospel even though many people do. It is true that Sinn Féin is on the rise and will do better in 2016 than it did in 2011 and in previous elections. Significantly better I have no doubt.

But I can sense a bit of hubris creeping into the party – the kind of talk that says…Adams for Taoiseach. For Sinn Féin in 2015 think Labour in 2009, when the party was riding high in the polls and we began to see the Gilmore for Taoiseach posters.

I think that Sinn Féin’s support has peaked and it will find it difficult to garner the same kind of support in next year’s election that it was getting in opinion polls all last year. Look, there’s no doubt the party will make substantial gains.

But it won’t put them anywhere near where they clearly want to be – and that’s the dominant party in a Syriza or Podeomos (of Spain) type anti-austerity government.

What I’m saying is that it’s not static, that things will change in the next year.

And of course, brand independent is also very strong at the moment. But again I would argue that the picture there is not as clear-cut or as permanent as it seems.

I was chatting with a Fine Gael Minister not too long ago who said that that kind of volatility was the new normal. I believe that he is half right.

If you look at the support levels for the two main parties, they have fallen precipitously in the past 40 years to such an extent that neither can hope to be as dominant as once was the case.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.