Traditional political landscape morphs into Independent’s day

World of Politics with Harry McGee

The late Irish Times political journalist Dick Walsh wrote a book in the early eighties about Fianna Fáil that wasn’t great – but it had one amazing anecdote of Walsh recalling meeting a man in his native Clare who said his clan had followed Fianna Fáil going right back to the Rising.

To the 1916 Rising? ventured Walsh. No, 1798 replied the man.

It gave you a sense of the venal loyalty people had to the two big parties that dominated Irish politics for most of the first century after independence.

That’s all gone now. It’s probably been gone since the turn of the century, but the Celtic Tiger artificially propped up Fianna Fáil’s standing for a few years. When that bubble burst the party’s true standing was brutally exposed.

Nowadays, people’s loyalty to a party can be measured in months, not years, or even centuries. There used to be about a fifth of the electorate who were ‘none of the above’.

Floating voters. But with a twist. They resented whoever was in government. There was a constant quality to their negativity. They voted for the anti-establishment or the anti-government candidate or party. And if that TD or party ‘betrayed’ by going into government, that floating voter switched allegiance.

There was a rule of thumb In Irish politics right up to the 2000s that volatility could be measured by the number of Independents there were.

In 1997, there were only six – and most of those were so-called gene pool independents who had fallen out with Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil for one reason or another. In 2002 it rose to 13 amid but fell again to a paltry five in 2007, at a time when the country seemed stable, and the economy seemed strong.

How wrong that all was.

Since the economy collapsed in 2008 and 2009 the most consistent thing about Irish politics has been its sense of volatility. The economy bounced back from its lows but somehow politics as usual never rebounded.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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