The general election campaign demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to match the exceptional endurance of our democratic culture with maturity and honesty about contemporary realities. At the outset, the publicity around Michael O’Leary’s crass comments about teachers was nothing new; he has frequently derided public servants and feeds off the associated controversies. More invidious was his real purpose in supporting Fine Gael; to, in his own offensive words, “weed out the Greens”. There has never been anything nuanced about O’Leary’s approach to his business life; revealingly, he recalled of his time at TCD how business students “just wanted to go out and rape the world”.
That world is now facing the calamitous consequences of climate change, but the aggressive proponents of evermore air travel and expansion of the very practices ruining the planet instead focus their ire on those who call them out on the consequences of their rapaciousness.
Self-serving impulses remained constant during the campaign, from both within and outside the political establishment. Former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams asserted that SF is “the only relevant all-Ireland party”. It was a deeply ironic declaration, suggesting even the iconic republican and united Irelander, boasting of 60 years of political activism, has his own version of partitionist thinking. The Green Party is also an all-Ireland party.
But the Green Party is deemed irrelevant when it comes to the shallowness of our political campaigns, a world of magic money, hand-shaking marathons, social media stunts and petty put-downs, where those talking of hard choices and wider responsibilities are convenient whipping boys, and where tax cuts and spending increases are deemed to be easily compatible.
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It is clear from the exit poll and tallies that there was substance to talk of the centre holding, given the balance in support for the three main parties and our overall coolness towards the extremes apparent elsewhere. But we need much more than that a century after the founding of this State. We are still offered too little of substance when it comes to what a 21st century republic should value and how its protectors see their role.
Political leaders are apt during election campaigns to insist their country is at a crossroads or experiencing a unique set of circumstances. Taoiseach Simon Harris’s version of this during the campaign was that “we genuinely do have both resources and plans and it’s rare in politics to have both”.
But what about the compromising of that situation to the point of ridicule by indulging in fantasy manifestos? Shortly before the election, the Department of Finance highlighted that more than half of all corporation tax is paid by just 10 companies. Did the main political parties miss that bulletin? Tánaiste Micheál Martin dutifully referred to the potential for “external shocks” given international volatility and the return of Trump, but these are not in the realm of “shocks”; they are obvious, clear and urgent dangers.
The renowned political scientist Tom Garvin, who died last month, wrote much about the evolution of our democratic tradition and the nature of Irish republicanism. He noted that the very real achievements of our century of democratic government can be underplayed or taken for granted, yet interrogating what we mean by a republic remains largely academic. Irish republicanism has remained, Garvin averred, a “secular religion” rather than a meaningful political theory with little future orientation attached to it. For too long, those loudest as champions of the republic demonstrated a “determined refusal to give priorities to the needs of the present”.
In the process, as witnessed during this election campaign, the electorate is infantilised with promises of treats while the practicalities of financing the pressing needs of now and the future, including in relation to climate, are deliberately shrouded in woolliness. What Garvin referred to as the “redistributive scales” are skewed in ways that leave too many marginalised. Airline chiefs are courted, disability workers are left feeling dismissed and those on the left fail to match talk of change with a coherent and united platform to achieve it.
It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that we have ended up with the main parties so closely bunched, little sense of alternative routes and an abundance of Independent TDs. Some of those insisting they guard the soul of rural Ireland engage in a climate change denial that is both self-serving and self-defeating. But the sense, long ago identified by historian KT Hoppen, that the parish pump endures as the true symbol of the “hidden Ireland”, a description made famous a century ago by writer Daniel Corkery, is a measure of the continued range of rural angst, despair about housing and resentment at the failure to devise and implement a cohesive and balanced national strategy fit for our times.
Too few during the election campaign provided a clear path or honest appraisal, and the much vaunted “new energy” was squeezed out of an old bottle.
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