Political World
Low poll would reflect a referendum campaign that just failed to catch fire
World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com
I’m surprised at the lack of engagement with the referendums next Friday. Sure, nobody was ever going to get into a lather of sweat about a referendum on a Court of Criminal Appeal (though it’s not entirely a good thing). But the proposal to demolish one of the pillars of our State, one of the bedrocks of our Constitution, has also left the public underwhelmed… and that’s putting it very mildly.
After all did the idea to hold a referendum on the Seanad not stem from populist sentiment? Wasn’t it Enda Kenny’s response in 2009 to the public mood that politicians and the institutions they had built up around them had fallen into disrepute? So successful was Kenny’s stunt, if it was that, that all the main parties adopted the same position going into the 2011 election.
It’s obvious to anybody who has followed politics in anything more than a cursory way over the past two years that the mood has changed. There may still be anger at the way that the establishment, political and financial, led the country into excess and living beyond our means and then frittered it all away. But that anger has subdued.
What was raw and immediate two years ago is now more resigned, more indifferent. So when politicians now post the question, should we abolish the Seanad, the most coherent response that is coming back is we don’t really care.
The consequence of all that? It looks like the turnout will be low, as low as the mid-twenties, as happened with the children’s referendum and a referendum on bail over a quarter of a century ago. Neither are directly comparable, only to say that the lower the turnout the more unreliable opinion polls are.
So while the polls over the past few months have been suggesting a comfortable gap for the Yes side (the abolitionists) the reality may turn out to be different. A low turnout will mean that only the most committed will vote.
And there are two pieces of conventional wisdom that have been bandied around about those in the past few weeks. The first is that a majority will be middle class. The second is that those middle class voters are strongly veering towards a reformed Seanad, which means a No vote rather than a Yes vote.
The difficulty is they cannot really be tested for accuracy until after the event… in other words, after people have voted.
For many months I have been saying that I think that a No vote would prevail. In recent weeks though, I sense it might be a close run thing. The fact that the gap has not closed in the Red C opinion polls is an important indicator. That surveys all potential voters, not only those who are more or less guaranteed to vote. The very likely voters will include a lot of No’s but lately it seems that the Yes side might shade it.
The other thing that has been slightly disconcerting has been that the debate has rarely been able to go deeper than the superficial.
For most of last week, we witnessed an artificial row with the opposition leaders trying to bait Taoiseach Enda Kenny into a televised debate. RTE even got into the act by extending such an invitation to Mr Kenny and Micheál Martin. But it was clear that once Kenny said No, he couldn’t backslide from that position once he made it.
In a sense it’s a pity that Kenny didn’t consent to the debate. Because a televised verbal duel between the country’s political leader is always an event. That means it is broadcast at primetime with a primetime audience.
The outcome of the poll often turns on them – and parties, therefore, always prep exhaustively, trying to have responses ready for every trick question and issue raised.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
World of Politics with Harry McGee
Academically, politics is described as a science. But in the real world, it’s more of an art – and one of the big decisions a Government has to make is to decide when to call an election.
Will they see out the full term, or will they go early – either to mitigate the damage they will ship, or to secure a victory before things go awry, or the economy takes a dip, or some kind of controversy erupts?
Timing is everything.
And there’s a bit of art to that – not to mention a lot of luck. If you call it early and win big, you’re a genius. If you call it early and lose, you are the political version of the village fool.
Charlie Haughey was a poor judge of the public mood. Twice he called snap elections and on both occasions they backfired. Haughey succeeded Jack Lynch as Taoiseach in late 1979 and did not – technically – have his own mandate. He tried to remedy that by calling an election in 1981. But it recoiled. Ray MacSharry warned him not to hold it during the H Block hunger strikes when republican prisoners were dying each day. He did not listen to the advice and found himself out of office.
After his return to power in 1987, Haughey tired of presiding over a minority government that kept on losing votes in the Oireachtas (the opposition won nine private members motions).
So he called a snap general election and it backfired. Fianna Fáil lost seats and had to broker a coalition deal with the Progressive Democrats and his long-standing political adversary Dessie O’Malley.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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World of Politics with Harry McGee
I was cycling down Mount Street in Dublin on Tuesday. It’s a wide esplanade that links the Grand Canal with Merrion Square. The street is a mixture of fine Georgian buildings and modern office blocks.
About half-way down is the office of the International Protection Office, which deals with asylum seekers who have arrived in the country.
Needless to say, the office has been overwhelmed in the past year. Besides an estimated 80,000 refugees who have arrived from Ukraine, there have been about 20,000 people from other parts of the world who have arrived into Dublin (mostly) claiming asylum.
The numbers peaked around Christmas, but they have been falling a little. In January, more than 1,300 people arrived seeking asylum but the numbers fell back to 831 and 858, in February and March respectively.
They are still huge numbers in a historical context.
So back to my cycle on Tuesday. I knew that some asylum seekers were camping outside the International Protection Office, but I was taken aback by how many. There were six tents lined up on the pavement directly outside. Then on the ramp that led down to the basement carpark on the side of the building, there were about another 20 tents.
It looked like what it was, a refugee camp in the middle of Dublin’s business district. If you pan out from Mount Street, you will find tents here and there in nearby streets and alleys. There were a good few tents in an alleyway off Sandwith Street about 500 metres away.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
World of Politics with Harry McGee
God that was a dramatic and historic weekend in England, wasn’t it? So much excitement, so much change, so much hype, so much out with the old and in with the new, and what looks like the coronation of a new leader. Yes, the local elections in Britain were something else weren’t they!
Apologies for not going on about King Charles III but the contract I signed when I became a lifelong republican forbids me to discuss the topic!
I know the British local elections sound a bit boring by comparison, but the results were stunning.
The Conservatives lost nearly 1,000 seats, the British Labour Party gained almost 500 and both the Lib Dems (with 350 gains) and the Greens (gaining over 200) also had amazing days at the polls.
It was Labour’s best day since 2002 but its victory was only partial. The Greens and the Lib Dems actually made gains at the expense of Labour in more affluent areas, and in parts of Britain where there were high numbers of graduates.
It was in the Red Wall constituencies in the North of England where the Labour recovery was strongest. These are working class constituencies with pockets of deprivation where people voted for the Labour Party forever. But all of those constituencies voted for Brexit and then voted for the Tories in the next general election. Labour is now winning back some of those votes.
Local elections are classified as second-tier elections which essentially means – from a national perspective – they are not life-or-death affairs, and not everything turns on them. Of course, it’s really important to have good local representation. But they are not an amazing weather vane for who rules the country.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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