Lessons learned from a lifetime covering politics

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

This much I know about politics – make predictions at your peril. There are many times when I have felt like the BBC weather forecaster, Michael Fish, who, back in 1987, dismissed on air the notion that the tail of a hurricane would cause devastation in Britain and Ireland. And what happened? You guessed it.

I’ve got it right a few times, but I’ve got it wrong many more. My most spectacular faux pas was last year when I just could not see Sinn Féin making big gains. The party had a lousy local election in 2019 and just did not seem to be going anywhere.

It looked like Fianna Fáil was well placed to replace Fine Gael in government but with relatively modest gains. The party had done comparatively well in the local elections, winning seats in blue collar areas of Dublin.

I read too much into that. Fianna Fáil had done only so-so in rural Ireland. It had also had a very mediocre European election, scraping home in Dublin and South and failing to win a seat in Midlands North-West. Plus it was a local election. That was, at best, a weather vane, not a compass needle.

I predicted gains for Fianna Fail, losses for Sinn Féin. In the event, it went the other way.

The campaign matters.

This is another lesson from 2020. The election was primarily won and lost in the three weeks it was conducted. What had happened in the previous four years was not forgotten about.

Fine Gael was not popular. It had failed to tackle housing and health. They rather than the economy became the big issues.

Fianna Fáil should have been poised. But the party had a lousy campaign and its leader Micheál Martin was particularly awful.

In contrast Sinn Féin just captured a jet-stream like tail-wind and never looked back. It identified itself with all the early issues including the pension age and Charlie Flanagan’s disastrous decision to commemorate the RIC.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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