What, if anything, will come from the annual political party “think-ins” that herald the beginning of the new Dáil term? These gatherings, supposedly to reset and focus the parliamentary troops, have long been a part of the political calendar, but participants and leaders are frequently dragged in to focus, not on policy, but on other matters – in this year’s case, the presidential election.
It is striking how frayed the social contract appears as the parties gather this year. A report this week from the ESRI has highlighted alarming levels of child poverty. In the 12 months to April 2025, 65,600 people emigrated from the State. The number of Irish-born Australian residents reached a record high of 103,080 in 2024, a number that has almost doubled in the last 20 years.
Almost seven in 10 (69.9 per cent) of Irish 25-year-olds are living at home with their parents, according to the CSO’s Growing up in Ireland survey. More than 16,000 people are homeless, 5,000 of them children. The first question many college lecturers must ask their students is how long their commute to college is because of the accommodation crisis. Meanwhile, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council has this week warned in its pre-budget statement of spending overruns that a €9.4 billion package planned for next month’s budget will put additional financial resources “into an economy that doesn’t need it”.
Finding the right social contract balance has been highlighted as a problem for almost quarter of a century. One of the most famous political “think-ins” was at the Inchydoney hotel in west Cork in 2004, where then taoiseach Bertie Ahern assembled his Fianna Fáil party for two days. The party had been battered in that year’s local elections and, the script went, was bringing its mission back to its founding aims; a party that had been established to secure “the development of a social system in which, as far as possible, equal opportunity will be afforded to every Irish citizen to live a noble and useful Christian life” and to “make the resources and wealth of the country subservient to the needs and welfare of the Irish people”.
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Ahern made much of the reframing: “Having achieved what we wanted to do in the last two years it is now time to move ourselves on to the next phase and that phase is improving services and making sure we have value for money ... We are going to continue with sound, sensible fiscal policies and share the fruits of that with the less well off.” His party members, it was reported, were given a mandate by the leadership to “listen”.
Micheál Martin, who was then minister for health, insisted a strong social conscience had always been a hallmark of FF and that had now been “reiterated and reasserted”. He was unworried about the rise of Sinn Féin, whose economic model was “outdated”, and in any case, “when competition develops, we sharpen up”.
But a politician did not deliver the keynote speech. Instead, Fr Seán Healy of the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI) spoke about the need to look after the socially excluded. Yet by the time he retired in 2023, Healy, who had gone on to establish Social Justice Ireland in 2014, noted that he could only conclude the government was “not too interested in listening”. He acknowledged the difference increased social welfare payments had made but that the priority continued to be “trickle-down” economics: “always the first thing, says Government, is the thriving economy ... Everything else will follow, is what they tell you ... We always crash when we do that. Until such time as the issue of the social contract is taken seriously, we are going to see the persistence of the poverty, the homelessness, the exclusion ... In fact, it is going to get worse.”
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In September 2005, at his party’s think-in in Cavan, Ahern reiterated that “prosperity is not enough” and this time drew on the services of Harvard University’s public policy sage Robert Putnam, famous for his extolling of “social capital”, born of community involvement and civic engagement to underpin “the brave society”. Community, Ahern said, would complete “the great unfinished business of the social agenda.”
This was a particularly trite assertion, given that such an agenda requires commitment to devolvement of decision making to those communities, something that has always been resisted in this markedly centralised state. It is one thing for those in power to insist there are no short-term solutions to the pressing problems, but it is also apparent that the fault lines and paralysis associated with those problems – and the failures of the centralised systems to tackle them – have been apparent for decades. The presidential election campaign will only provide a short-term diversion from the long-standing and ongoing social contract dilemma that will make for a sour Dáil term.
