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Coalition talks begin for new Irish government

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UPDATE 2:

“… the real story of this election is the hardening of the center-right bloc, hegemonic even with its historically much-reduced vote. It is still able to win enough seats, on low enough turnout, to continue flying the flag for the world of chambers of commerce, landlords, and big farmers who have so long dictated the pace of Irish politics, added to a more recent cast of tech giants. Today playing with anti-immigration rhetoric, they still hope that young Irish people doubting their prospects at home will continue to find a better future in emigration, rather than change Ireland itself.”–David Broder in Jacobin

UPDATE 1:

All 174 Dáil Éireann seats have been determined in Ireland’s general election. Fianna Fáil won 48 seats. Fine Gael, another traditional center right party, won 38 seats, one fewer than the 39 secured by left-leaning Sinn Féin. Independent candidates claimed 23 seats. Labour and Social Democrats each won 11 seats. People Before Profit-Solidarity won three seats; Aontú secured two; and the Green Party retained only one of the 12 seats it held in the previous government.

Micheál Martin

Negotiations to secure a majority coalition of at least 88 members–and most leaders would want some padding, too–have begun in private meetings and in media reports. FF’s Micheál Martin, likely to emerge as the next taoiseach, has said Donald Trump’s return to the White House on Jan. 20 is “an effective deadline” for Ireland’s government formation, Politico.eu reports.

Wired notes that Ireland’s election result bucks the global trend this year of far-right and populist parties and leaders making significant gains in Europe and the US. The losers are claiming the election was rigged and spewing other conspiracy theories on social media.

ORIGINAL POST:

Voters in the Republic of Ireland have signaled a desire for stability instead of change. They have returned center-right Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael party candidates who will need a third partner–likely Labour or the Social Democrats–to complete the next coalition government majority. Ireland’s Green party, smallest partner in the 2020-through October 2024 FF-FG coalition, faded in the Nov. 29 polling.

Ballots are still being counted in the country’s proportional representation/single transferable vote system. Voters can choose as many, or as few, candidates as they like in order of preference within each multi-seat constituency. See a detailed explanation.

A total of 174 representatives are being chosen to Dáil Éireann, an increase of 14 seats from the previous parliament. The number of constituencies has grown from 39 to 43, with each constituency having from three to five members. The expansion is based on the Republic’s growing population, now over 5 million.

Some highlights:

  • Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin; Fine Gale‘s Simon Harris, and Sinn Féin‘s Mary Lou McDonald have been re-elected to their seats in the Dáil. Martin seems best positioned to become the next taoiseach, or prime minister, with FF apparently heading toward the most seats.
  • Sinn Féin likely will be among the top three finishers, a better outcome than expected after taking losses in local and European Union elections this summer, then being roughed up this fall by several internal scandals. But the left-leaning united Ireland party will not be in position to form a coalition.
  • Gangland boss Gerry “The Monk” Hutch nearly secured the fourth and final seat in the Dublin Central constituency.
  • Voters in Limerick noticed that Maurice Quinlivan of Sinn Féin and Dean Quinn of The Irish People party were listed ahead of Willie O’Dea of Fianna Fail and the Social Democrats’ Elisa O’Donovan on their ballots. The deviation from alphabetical order could result in challenges to the result.
  • Two groups monitoring anti-social behavior and misinformation claim to have documented more than four dozen episodes of politically motivated violence, threats, or harassment against candidates or their canvassers in the weeks before the election.
  • The national turnout was just shy of 60 percent.

mage from An Coimisiún Toghcháin, The Electoral Commission.

Pre-Irish & post-U.S. election letter from Dublin

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DUBLIN–I arrived here days after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election and as Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris declared a general election date for later this month. The Irish Times headlines above prompted two quick thoughts:

  • Irish campaigns are mercifully shorter than the U.S election calendar.
  • Trump’s win not not only thrusts America into the unknown, but also Ireland and the rest of Europe and the world.

Both elections are main topics of conversation in the once low-slung capital, where church steeples, the 17-floor Liberty Hall (opened in 1965), and the decommissioned power-generating Poolbeg “Stacks” (taller than the office tower), once dominated the skyline. Today, the city is filled with construction cranes and scaffolding-wrapped buildings. At least a dozen residential and commercial towers with floor counts in the teens or low 20s are rising in the city, most on the south side of the River Liffey. That’s no match for the 58-floor Trump Tower and other U.S. skyscrapers, but a noticeable change from my first visit here 25 years ago.

Trump’s election is raising concerns in Ireland. A post-election Irish Times/Ipsos B&A poll found 58 percent of respondents are “more worried about the future”, an 8 point increase from September. Just 28 percent said Trump’s return to the While House will make “no difference” in Ireland, while fewer then 20 percent answered “less worried” or “don’t know.”

Simon Harris, bottom poster.

My Irish family and friends, plus a random mix of taxi drivers, UCD library and archives staff, and political observers in the media, suggested the electorate is adverse to radical change. That seems to favor the two main center right political parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which have been coalition partners since 2000. Harris, the Fine Gael leader, is favored to remain taoiseach, or prime minister.

Like the U.S., lack of affordable housing is a major domestic issue in Ireland. The biggest concern about Trump is related to his economic policies, especially trade tariffs. Irish Times columnist Cliff Taylor detailed how Irish exports to the U.S. in the first nine months of this year increased by 28 percent to €52.5 billion. He continued:

“From the U.S. point of view, the trade deficit with Ireland so far this year is more than €35 billion. The vast bulk of Irish sales to the US — 80 percent so far this year — are chemicals and pharmaceuticals, where Irish exports to the US surged by no less than one-third compared to the same period last year. To say the least, it was not a good time for this to happen. And the pharma sector — a big employer and taxpayer — looks exposed as the new administration examines why the U.S. has a big trade deficit with Ireland. Unlike most other big US companies here, it targets much of its exports back to the American market.”

While the Irish campaign season is shorter, it is not exempt from the daily rough-and-tumble of national politics. Michael O’Leary, the flamboyant and longstanding chief executive of Ryanair, made headlines for a swipe at the high number of teachers in Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Irish legislature. “I wouldn’t generally employ a lot of teachers to go out and get things done,” he said in remarks endorsing the re-election of a candidate with private sector business experience. Let’s remember here the teacher backgrounds of Pádraic Pearse, Éamon de Valera, and other figures of Irish history and politics. For good measure, O’Leary also said the Green party needed to be “weeded out” of Irish politics.

Housing is a key domestic issue.

In another campaign flare up with historical overtones, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said it is unfair to demonize and force her party members to defend the actions of the Provisional IRA during the Troubles. “You don’t ask someone who was a baby in the 1970s about things that happened in the 1970s. That’s not a reasonable proposition, it wouldn’t be reasonably done with somebody from Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil or the Labour Party,” McDonald said. She criticized the “Free State establishment,” a reference to the Irish Free State that emerged in 1922 and split republican separatists into civil war.

That’s rather tame stuff compared to calling your opponent “scum”, “fascist,” and the other insults slung between Trump and K. Harris during the too long U.S. campaign. But there are still a few weeks to go. I’ll write about the Irish election outcome at the end of the month.

Ireland will hold general election; plus other news & data

After months of speculation, the three leaders of Ireland’s coalition government have agreed to hold a general election. Taoiseach Simon Harris has set Nov. 29 for polling. (This paragraph was revised from the original, written before the date was set.)

Voters will select 174 representatives to Dáil Éireann, an increase of 14 seats from the current parliament as the number of constituencies grows from 39 to 43. Each constituency has from three to five members. The expansion is based on the growing population, now over 5 million.

The new Dáil will select the next  taoiseach, or prime minister, with Harris aiming to keep the job. It seems likely the next leader also will lead a coalition government, as has been the case since the last election, in February 2020, just before the COVID pandemic. Polling indicates none of the major parties are poised to win a majority.

The snap election comes as Sinn Féin, the Irish republican opposition party, is plagued by several scandals. “It’s been a nightmare October for Sinn Féin,” Politico.eu reports, “… raising serious questions about the political survival of Mary Lou McDonald, the Dubliner handpicked by Sinn Féin’s previous leader, Gerry Adams, to take the Northern Ireland-rooted party from the political fringe into power for the first time in the Republic of Ireland.”

The election will be the fourth this year on the island of Ireland. In June, voters in the Republic cast ballots in local government and European Union constituencies. The following month, voters in Northern Ireland decided United Kingdom parliamentary races. In March the Republic also held a referendum on its 1937 constitution. A proposal to include “other durable relationships” beyond marriage and another to eliminate language about women’s “life within the home” were each defeated by nearly 3-1 margins.

Image from An Coimisiún Toghcháin, The Electoral Commission.

Catching up with modern Ireland. Some other contemporary news and data:

  • Ireland’s environmental health is rated “poor” in the latest assessment by the country’s Environmental Protection Agency. The New York Times describes how a Cork sculptor is trying to restore a patch of native rainforest in the Beara Peninsula.
  • The UK government plans to appeal a Belfast court ruling that the 2023 Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act was incompatible with human-rights protections secured in a post-Brexit agreement, Reuters reports.
  • Ireland won’t wait for the rest of the EU to restrict trade with Israel over the occupation of the Palestinian territories and expects to receive legal advice soon on whether it can impose its own curbs.

Data for the 28-county Republic of Ireland. CSO graphic.

United Ireland in 2024? Fiction and fact

Happy New Year! The arrival of 2024 means it is time for the reunification of Ireland, at least according to a 1990 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Declan McVeigh described the television fiction and its historical context in The National UAE:

During the brief discussion, Data gives Cpt Picard a list of successful armed rebellions in ages past, including “the Irish unification of 2024”. This prospect – debated between an entirely fictitious robot and a spaceship captain – was deemed by the BBC to be so objectionable that the episode was not broadcast unedited on U.K. television until September 2007, nearly a decade after the signing of the Good Friday peace agreement that largely ended the 30-year conflict known as the Northern Ireland Troubles.

This 1937 map shows the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland 16 years after partition.

The 34-year-old episode has been reported before but seems to be getting fresh attention now that the designated year has arrived. In fact, future documentaries about Irish politics are unlikely to cite 2024 as the year of the island’s reunification. Just over half – 51 percent – of northern voters would reject a unity referendum, according to an Irish Times/ARINS poll published in early December, while 64 percent of the Republic of Ireland electorate favors eliminating the 103-year-old partition.

Nevertheless, talk of a (re)united Ireland has grown since the 2016 Brexit vote removed Northern Ireland from the European Union. The Republic remains part of the E.U. The economic advantages of that membership have become as much of a driving force toward Irish reunification as the north’s shift to a Catholic majority, or the island’s geographic and historical integrity. Such economic factors were foreseen in a 1923 U.S. press dispatch from Belfast:

The war will continue until Ulster (Northern Ireland) joins the Irish Free State (now the Republic), or until the Free State relinquishes its insistence on a united Ireland. … Ulstermen declare they are not ready to give up their connection to England and never will be, unless it is shown that a united Ireland would be of benefit to them. … There is much speculation but little information in Ireland as to whether and when there will be a united Ireland. … Continued peace in the south, combined with loss of business or reduction of profits to Ulster industry, might shorten the separation.[1]United Press correspondent Charles McCann in a story widely published in U.S. newspapers two years after partition.

Talk of a united Ireland continued in 1924 as the Irish Boundary Commission began its deliberations through 1925. Ultimately, the 1921 partition lines remained unchanged. Newly released Irish state papers show officials discussed the possibility of redrawing the border in 1975 as a way of reducing Troubles-related violence. It didn’t happen.

The reunification issue has ebbed from time to time, but it has never ceased.

Below the Sinn Féin t-shirt logo are two quotes from Irish politicians that caught my attention late last year. They are followed by a passage from a New York Times op-ed about partition. We’ll have to see what really happens with Irish reunification in 2024 … and beyond.

Logo on the front of t-shirts being sold in Sinn Féin’s online gift shop. The marketing chatter says, “In every phase of struggle Irish America has stood with the cause of Irish Independence and Unity. Lets celebrate the link between Ireland and ‘our exiled children’,” a reference to language in the 1916 proclamation.  .

“Irish Unity is the very best opportunity for the future. In the words of Rita O’Hare, ‘We must keep going. A United Ireland lies ahead.’ ”

—Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald, Nov. 11, 2023. O’Hare died in March 2023. She was the party’s general secretary and representative to the United States.

“They (Sinn Féin) think in their minds that they would get the United States behind a united Ireland. They wouldn’t. They would actually turn our friends into enemies.”

–Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Nov. 18, 2023. In September, Varadkar said, “I believe we are on the path to unification. I believe that there will be a united Ireland in my lifetime.”

“It’s the unionists — the largely Protestant faction clinging fiercely to British citizenship and Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom — who question the terms of the peace they live under and struggle to articulate their future. And it’s the Irish nationalists — those, largely Catholic, who regard the partition of Ireland as an untenable injustice — who are brimming with confidence.”

–Contributing writer Megan K. Stack, “A United Ireland May Be More Than a Dream“, in The New York Times, Nov. 21, 2023.

References

References
↑1 United Press correspondent Charles McCann in a story widely published in U.S. newspapers two years after partition.