OH DEAR, it looks like some discomfort may be in store for the moneyed class south of the border. The latest opinion polls in four different newspapers have Sinn Féin ahead of their nearest rival by margins of up to 15 points.
The first poll in the quartet was the RedC survey in the Business Post on November 28 which had SF on 33 per cent, with Fine Gael trailing behind at 22 points and Fianna Fáil a dismal third on 15 per cent. That won’t have cheered the upper layers of the bourgeoisie.
But things got worse from that perspective last Friday with an Ipsos MRBI poll in The Irish Times which showed Mary Lou McDonald and her friends rising three points, from the last survey in that series, to 35 per cent while Fine Gael went down two points to share the second slot with Fianna Fáil on 20 per cent.
Two days later, an Ireland Thinks survey in the Irish Mail on Sunday had Sinn Féin on 31 per cent, compared with 25 for FG and 17 for FF. A Behaviour & Attitudes poll in the Sunday Times showed SF on 34 per cent with Fianna Fáil in second place at 23 points and Fine Gael third on 20 per cent.
Sinn Féin has taken first place every time in 16 polls carried out by these companies since last July. The average gap between SF and the second party (usually FG) was over eight per cent. The average figure for the last five surveys was above 10 per cent.
The next general election could in theory be staved off until February 2025 but, if the current trend continues, Sinn Féin might be even higher in the polls at that stage. After last year’s general election, a combination of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Greens kept SF out of power, but next time the “Shinners” might well be in a position to spearhead a majority coalition.
In the meantime, those who wish to avoid revenue measures proposed by SF, such as the “Solidarity Tax” of an extra three per cent on individual incomes above €140,000 (approx. Stg£119,400), the gradual removal of tax credits on incomes above €100,000 (Stg£85,300) and a one per cent wealth tax on the portion of riches above €1million (Stg£853,000), just might be considering a move to some foreign tax haven.
The developing political situation inevitably recalls the events of March 9, 1932, when Fianna Fáil formed its first government with the support of the Labour Party and a small number of Independents. A huge crowd of supporters greeted FF leader Eamon de Valera when he arrived at Leinster House, accompanied by his 21-year old son Vivion who was holding a revolver in a coat pocket. David McCullagh's biography of Dev points out that the Fianna Fáil front bench were armed with pistols and that police chief and subsequent Fine Gael leader Eoin O’Duffy had at least toyed with the idea of staging a coup to keep FF out of office.
It's just over a year, in November 2020, since a general election was held in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and three months later in February 2021 a military coup took place which resulted in President Win Myint and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi being given four-year jail terms under the new regime. That would be a highly-unlikely development in a stable democracy such as the Republic of Ireland has become. We’re not going to see Mary Lou being marched off to Mountjoy Gaol/Prison although it would do her reputation among radicals and republicans no harm at all.
The prospect of Sinn Féin holding the reins of power is a bit like the world turned upside down for anyone who remembers when they were banned from the airwaves and treated as pariahs by the establishment who dismissed them as the Provisional IRA’s brass band. If you had suggested in those days that SF would become contenders to lead a government in the south and take the principal political office in the north, you would have been advised to undergo serious counselling. To borrow a phrase from W.B. Yeats: “all changed, changed utterly”. He was of course writing about the Easter Rising and went on to say, “a terrible beauty is born”.
Their opponents would probably describe the prospect of a Sinn Féin-led government simply as “terrible” and, be that as it may, such an administration would for sure be terribly interesting.
Email: Ddebre1@aol.com; Twitter: @DdeBreadun
