Now that the dust has well and truly settled on the general election it is worth asking why the big issues facing the country in the coming years received such scant attention during the campaign, with much of the media focus being on minor gaffes and the attempt by a gangster to get elected to the Dáil.
The general consensus is that it was a dull and boring election until Simon Harris lost his cool with a voter in Kanturk after a long day’s campaigning. That incident dominated the coverage in the final week before polling. The only issue to rival Harris’s impatient response to the Kanturk voter was the audacious attempt by gangland boss Gerry Hutch to become a TD.
It is not as if the major, and minor, parties did not attempt to focus attention on the big issues facing the country. They all produced detailed manifestos, of varying quality, but were unable to generate much interest in them.
A critical analysis of the manifestos of the three big political parties who had ambitions of leading the government was certainly warranted. Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin were not put under sufficient pressure to explain why they were ignoring the potential for tough times ahead and instead offering massive and potentially unsustainable giveaways.
Martin and Harris must now jettison the frothy promises and focus on the essentials
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In broad terms, Fine Gael made spending commitments of more than €28 billion for the next five years in tandem with tax reductions of €6 billion. Fianna Fáil made spending commitments of more than €36 billion with smaller tax reductions in the region of €3 billion and Sinn Féin made the biggest offering by far with extra spending of €46 billion and tax reductions of €3 billion.
How this largesse was to be funded, given the potential for international trade chaos during the second coming of Donald Trump and serious strains in the euro zone with political uncertainty in France and Germany, was never addressed.
On top of the international factors, the pressures on the incoming government to do far more to solve the housing crisis and remedy other infrastructural deficits will probably rule out many of the silly election promises, but our political leaders were too rarely asked to explain the rationale for their manifestos.
One unintended positive consequence of the media focus on personalities rather than policies is that it gives the incoming government the excuse to ditch all the empty promises and focus on the real problems facing the country
Instead we got a focus on personalities, with two leaders’ television debates which provided no insights into the real choices facing the voters, and an obsession in some sections of the media with the crime boss Gerry Hutch and his electoral prospects. It is arguable that the scale of the coverage given to Hutch played a significant part in putting him into contention for a seat.
The media circus at the Dublin count centre on the arrival of Hutch on the second day of the count was symptomatic of what was wrong with the coverage. The only thing to rival it was Mary Lou McDonald’s beaming entrance the day before, claiming a great result when her party had in fact failed dismally to win its expected breakthrough.
The party leader who attracted most negative media attention was Simon Harris, initially because one of the Fine Gael candidates, John McGahon in Louth, was involved in an affray some years ago and ultimately had to pay damages to the victim.
Then came the incident in Kanturk which dominated the news for the last week of the campaign. Fine Gael’s failure to win the share of the vote the polls were predicting at the start has been attributed to this incident but in fact the slide had occurred before it, as demonstrated by the final Irish Times poll of the election.
Whether either of these episodes had anything to do with the decline of Fine Gael support in the polls is debatable. A more plausible explanation was scepticism among its target audience about the scale of the party’s election promises. It was only in the last week of the campaign that Paschal Donohoe and his message of prudent management of the public finances and economic stability came to the fore.
Something that was always going to be a weakness for Fine Gael was the fact that half its outgoing TDs were not standing. The incumbency factor was clearly going to be the Achilles heel for the party, whether or not it ran a good campaign, and the fact that it failed to achieve the same seat bonus as Fianna Fáil can be put down to the departure of so many outgoing TDs.
One unintended positive consequence of the media focus on personalities rather than policies is that it gives the incoming government the excuse to ditch all the empty promises and focus on the real problems facing the country.
In his recent book On Leadership, Tony Blair spelled out the political reality facing any new government. “The campaign and its manifesto are a guide to winning but they’re an unsuitable guide to governing, except in describing what you hope will happen and they rarely prioritise with the rigour that, once you assume power, is absolutely vital.”
Martin and Harris now have an opportunity to define their priorities and have enough experience of government to give them the confidence to jettison the frothy promises and focus on the essentials.