The transfers are still the thing, Sinn Féin’s inability to date to attract them sufficiently to make increased first preferences translate into extra Dáil seats.
All the same, late polling has had ‘the Shinners’ doing so well that Tweedles Dum and Dee of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil plus fretful media voices are all of a twitter.
Sinn Féin hopes Brexit furthers their demands to prepare for a border poll, since the UK vote side-swiped northern nationalists. Brexit, it turns out, has given Leo Varadkar no bounce, reviving Stormont even less. How much anything here affects southern elections has always been hard to judge; except in 2011. When Martin McGuinness ran for president, unification, now at least arguably on the horizon, never really came up. His past did though, and not in the way that SF hoped and planned.
As is happening now off-stage from formal political debate, northerners talked about the south’s election in families, pubs, between workmates. Notes from 2011 post-mortems recovered by this writer centred round McGuinness. The consensus was that McGuinness the peacemaker and Martin the power-sharer in Stormont cut no ice. ‘In some ways he was the standout candidate, but he couldn’t overcome the noise from his past’ said a thoughtful being (also no longer here.) Three years into the crash, the Tiger a limping creature long-gone over the horizon, peacemaking had little to do with the harsh realities of southern life. What television audiences saw was the son of an IRA victim confronting the SF candidate.
‘Why would anyone who never knew there was a war give a damn about the peace? Given he played a considerable part in that war, which he continually refused to admit, it was dodgy to claim credit for the peace. If SF thought he could absorb the anti-IRA stuff and move on – it didn’t happen. Irish unity stayed on the long, long finger.’
The party’s promises now on rents, housing, pensions please the hard-pressed and stack up well against what has sounded like Fine Gael lack of cop-on and right-wing complacency. Simon Coveney may have won some northern hearts on Brexit. But his own chilling version of Varadkar’s allegiance to ‘early-risers’ emerged in a canvas with Business Post political editor Michael Brennan, of his and Micheál Martin’s Cork South Central.
Coveney told a couple in a comfortable district Fine Gael wanted to ‘give some tax back.’ A family on €40,000 – €50,000 could save €2,000-€3,000 a year. The man seemed impressed, the reporter said. The woman asked wouldn’t it be better to put it back into the health service.
‘Middle Ireland are paying for everything,’ said Coveney. ‘The average earner is on €47,000 and is paying 40 per cent tax on €10,000 of that. We have to encourage people to work.’
The south’s political mainstream has no doubt that unionists should share power with Sinn Féin, even though some still prominent SF figures and associates were in the IRA which killed unionists, and others. Micheál Martin has cited Sam McBride, with horror, on minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir consulting former IRA convicts.
Can’t have SF anywhere near the Republic’s institutions, say FG and FF, because they refuse to condemn their own past and take orders from an unelected Ard Comhairle, possibly including IRA figures. Can’t have them in government. But Stormont is not a proper government. You might agree with that and still think it a cheeky distinction.
A care for the institutions of the state may trouble voters next Saturday. They might recall balaclavas and cudgels in vans, bully boys on the border. It may come down to a toss-up between nervousness of the unknown and a yearning for what at least sound like radical measures.
Humane and sensible SF proposals may produce a bigger haul of first preferences. But lack of enthusiasm for planning constitutional upheaval and a past that some cannot get over may still kibosh those vital transfers.
