This is a seat that needed a big name to get the UUs over the win line this time out… Handing it back to a pair of old hands would certainly give the DUP something to run at, given how last time Jimmy Spratt picked up 29.6% to McGimpsey’s 22.2%. Indeed Spratt used a piece in the South Belfast News today to remind the UUs they could do a deal over the seat, just like they used to do in the past…

But Spratt himself is unlikely to be good enough this time out either. Whilst he was only just short of the mark the last time, the TUV effect (however weak or strong it proves) will likely tip the seat even further away from him. But the DUP still have time to contemplate their precise response to the Ulster Unionist/Conservaitve choice here. Could they choose a game changing candidate?

McDonnell got 30.1% last time, marginally ahead of Spratt. But he has had the opportunity to dig in to the constituency which may help him in turn dig further into Sinn Fein and Alliance votes than he did in 05. Last time out he got little public sympathy from Sinn Fein’s leadership, and in the case of the Alliance they now have a sitting MLA in the constituency whose vote they will be very keen to preserve. So even for McDonnell it will be a matter of squeezing out votes from wherever he find get them.

Even if McDonnell is a notional favourite, I would not like to call the overall winner… Still without a deal with the DUP neither the Minister for Health nor councillor Stoker will take the seat back for the Ulster Unionists, which may be just as well, since the Conservatives began the day with this little number on the evils of double-jobbing:

“The Conservatives were the first party in Northern Ireland to call for an end to double-jobbing in Northern Ireland. Voters want full-time MLAs, MPs and MEPs and rightly believe they currently get a raw deal when some of their elected politicians split their time between Stormont and Westminster.
“We have introduced amendments to legislation that are aimed at ending double-jobbing by Northern Ireland politicians at Stormont and Westminster. They are also intended to ensure that all decisions on MLAs’ salaries, allowances and pensions are made by a third party, as at Westminster. We believe the current situation is wrong and should end.”

So if the seat is unlikely to change hands this time round, if the UCU-NF are planning a two phase play then neither Stoker nor McGimpsey make sense. The one new party player that had been in the frame, Paula Bradshaw, is now believed out of the running. But as the Tories’ battleground director Marion Little told Slugger earlier this year:

“This is not about one election. We need candidates who will speak to all parts of society. We’ve seen success in England come over two election cycles from candidates who were prepared to get down and connect with people outside traditional Conservative voting communities”

That leaves us with the possibility that McCann is the unlikely dark horse that breaks through the middle. It would be a risky strategy… One, because by backing an unknown it risks the DUP gaining incumbency first, ie before McCann has had time to get his feet under some of the more prosperous tables of south Belfast.

And two, it would be predicated on the far from proven assumption that the legendary Garden Centre Prod (those 150k who came out to vote yes in the referendum, but whom appear to have given up on politics ever since) will respond positively to the opportunity to vote for a post sectarian choice in a seat with a significant slice of wealthy Catholic middle class residents…

And yet, stranger things have happened at sea… At the very least, McCann would be a credible fulfillment of the Conservative party’s promise to desectarianise its offering in Northern Ireland… And a decent litmus test for any other party foolish enough to want to try and break the bonds of our tribal past…

I strongly suspect that Noreen Ryan has had her interview and picked up a definite vibe that she is not likely to be reselected. I particularly think her GE performance where she got barely 200 more votes than in the locals and she canvassed wearing sunglasses (was it the British Army that did the ad about the importance of making eye contact? Perhaps that is why she didn’t see it). That she should shoot her mouth off isn’t surprising, that the minister would retort by referring to her “as a person, utterly without credibility.” and continuing to say that “This is a grab for cheap publicity to conceal her utter inactivity and lack of performance as a councillor,”. Hmm….I can’t quite see how FF could have her on a ticket come next summer.

Fianna Fail ran 6 candidates, including cllr Ryam, in the 7 seat Castleconnell ward and they picked up 3 of the seats which was not a bad performance at all against the backdrop of the national picture. In fact it represented no change on the 1999 results. This time Labour and the Greens are making a really big push to gain a seat and with the demise of the PDs the future direction for cllr Brigid Teefy remains unclear. Might she now be looking for a home in the government party? And then we have to add in the likes of bright young lad Brian Stokes (who works with/for Peter Power TD and junior minster) who is bucking to get on the ticket in Castleconnell.

It is hard to see FF holding 4 out of 7 seats with the mood as it is now. This is moreover the case if they run too many candidates who fail to transfer amongst each other. The plain fact is FF as a party aren’t going to hold their seats by nominating imperious lads and ladies who lunch. They want them hungry and eager, and they want to have a tightly controlled panel of candidates. People who have a proven record of going off message and spending their time engaged in solo runs might well save their own seat but cost the party its other seats. While the national mood could change between now and election day, it is more likely that the government will choose to concentrate on the larger national picture and ensuring that they get things right so they can be returned to power in a few years rather than the immediate needs of cllrs. Of course, extrapolating too much from one ward is not without its dangers.

That said it may well be that this sort of radical surgery is needed if FF are to stave off the prospect that FG might pass them on. The story of the 2004 local and European was regarded at the time as being primarily about the increase in the SF vote. Yet in the longer term the vote retention and piecemeal seat gains by FG on what they had won in 1999 was of more significance. The 1999 results for FG were thought of at the time as a high water mark and later as something of a false dawn for the party in that those local successes didn’t prevent the tide going out in 2002. So sometimes it is not about the numbers of seats won but the overall context of the result.

It now seems that the FF brand and logo may even be more toxic than it was five years ago. I could tell from my own canvassing in the lead up to Christmas ’03 that many people were annoyed, disillusioned with the then FF/PD government and that they would take a hit come the summer but it was very unclear where the votes would go. In the end the votes spread out amongst the opposition parties in such a pattern as to please all concerned. The same could happen again, or any one of the opposition parties could take the lion’s share of the spoils. Only the campaigns and time will tell.

As for Cllr Ryan herself it is perhaps better for her to leave the party in a dramatic huff because she was standing up for ‘de local peeple’, run as an independent and if elected to return to the fold triumphant. With the FF logo more toxic than a tax demand on a poster it could be the only winning strategy for her and many others. No one ever said FFers were thick when it came to looking after themselves; it’s only when it comes to looking out for the rest of us that the brain tends to fail to engage.

By Eoin O’Broin

Last weeks Irish Times/TNS MBRI opinion poll was bad news for Sinn Féin. The numbers were troublesome from a number of perspectives.

Of course polls should be treated with caution. However they should never be ignored. The trick is in the reading. They offer a rough snapshot of public opinion at a given moment while mapping out the longer-term trends. Though not always right, they are rarely wrong.

There value is that they help us gauge how the public is responding to our message. They are another piece of political intelligence to throw into the mix.

Whatever way you look at the most recent poll Sinn Féin is not doing well.

We are sitting steady at 8%. In the three other TNS MRBI polls this year we held a similar position, with 8% in June, 6% in May and 8% in January.

More worrying is the drop in Gerry Adams satisfaction rate, down 12 points to 33%. Some comfort can be taken from the fact that he is more popular than Brian Cowan and John Gormley. However the drop is a sharp decline after several years in the high 40s and low 50s.

However the most troubling of the numbers is the party’s performance in Dublin. While at first glance our 9% in the city looks promising it is significantly behind Fine Gaels 20%, Labour’s 16%, Fianna Fails 15%. With seven months to go till next years European Parliamentary election these figures should make us very nervous.

The bottom line in all of this is that the party is stagnating. While we have managed to regain some of the ground lost in the 2007 general election, there is no indication that we are returning to the February 2004 high of 12%.

Of course the polls don’t tell you the reasons behind the numbers. That bit we have to work out for ourselves.

Sinn Féin had massive media exposure during the Lisbon Treaty campaign. Our position was distinct from all the other major parties. Our message was coherent, well presented and well received. Yet the Irish Times polls suggest that we gained only 2%.

Since then Fianna Fáil have fallen to an all time polling low of 27%, with Cowan’s personal approval rating down to 26%. Unemployment is at an all time high, the economy is in recession, and Fianna Fáil’s economic Midas touch has been exposed as the sham it always was.

Yet despite all of these shocks, Sinn Féin is not gaining ground. You would think that that section of Fianna Fáil’s base, who are suffering most from the current economic crisis, would find Sinn Féin the most attractive alternative. After all, these are the people who ensured the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. Yet the polls suggest otherwise.

Next years local and European elections can be good news for Sinn Féin, but only if we understand the causes of our current stagnation and respond accordingly.

First published in An Phoblacht 20th November, 2008

Worldbystorm:

I have no doubt SF has - in it’s less grounded moments - pondered the idea that Adams might be elected President. But there’s many a slip between cup and lip. To get to that point would need a lot more than 12 TDs. Would in fact need… why 20 TDs and Senators. A figure that quite frankly is unbelievable as a realistic number today and was equally unbelievable in May of this year. And for all the talk of long term plans, which having come from a party with fairly utopian visions of its future, I don’t find quite as unbelievable I suspect that they might not have been quite as precise.

He argues strongly that there had always been a pro settlement line of thinking inside the Republican movement. He refers to a speech he made at Bodenstown back in 1977 arguing that his party’s fight with the British was a political problem and that it could not be solved by military means…

To connote the success of the process he described Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as Siamese twins, although I suspect the real point he was driving at was the joint character of the two offices McGuinness is not a Deputy in the usual sense of that term…

Much of the rest of the programme focused on Sinn Fein’s poor showing in the May elections in the Republic… Although interestingly Adams admits that Irish unity is not inevitable, and that his party is engaged on more of a journey: “come back and talk to me in a decade or two and we’ll talk about it then…”

Sackur: “Face reality in Europe you are part of a tiny far left rump block with 7 national communist parties. There are 750 examples of Foreign Direct Investment, growth rates of 5%, some of the lowest taxes in Europe… SF policies do not match the reality of the Celtic Tiger… Ireland has changed unbelievably, SF has not…”

Adams: “SF has. What we have to do is to find a way to communicate our message.”

Sackur: “Do you think that the Irish people find attractive a party that affiliates itself with communist parties across Europe?”

Given the southern electorate’s abandonment of anyone but it’s historically strong parties, it’s an important question. Sackur then went on to quote (16.50 in) my own analysis from the Guardian’s Comment is Free…

Paradoxically for a party founded with the explicit purpose of getting rid of “foreign” political influence on the island, in this election at least, it came across as foreign.

It did not go down well. Although Adams went on, correctly as it happens, to point out that a lot of pundits got the election campaign wrong (including me: just scan this thread at Irishelection.com, in which I rated Adams best performer in the minor debate).

...he more resembled a luminary of the 1850s American Know Nothing Movement than a serious modern European political leader. His awareness of the issues in the Republic has improved little since attention was first drawn to this handicap by Paul Bew and Henry Patterson two decades ago.  His is an intellectual embodiment of the success of partition rather than its failure. His knowledge of the island is restricted to its northern territory.

He then reprises a long term aspect of his own analysis, the party simply got the timing wrong. Footdragging in Northern Ireland possibly brought them an extra Ministerial seat, but according to McIntyre it cost them political viability in the Republic:

It will be very difficult to endow the peace process with the appeal it currently lacks to make it a serious electoral asset in the Republic. Sinn Fein failed to weave the threads between North and South at the appropriate juncture. Now it is left to sport a green shirt in the North but is naked in the South, where its dangly bits are dangerously exposed to anyone fancying a kick at them. By the time of the next election, who in the Republic will be even faintly interested in the North and its incessant demand for attention?  Blair will have gone in Britain so access to No 10 will be rare. Ahern intends to step out of politics within the next four years. The US without prompting from Dublin and London will have other fish to fry. The media will plough different furrows.

Although it may not simply have been about timing, there were also, as Harold MacMillan once famously said, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’

Long before the emergence of the Ahern-Kenny squeeze phenomenon astute observers like Harry McGee and Noel Whelan were calling time on the march of Sinn Fein.  They sensed that something else was at play. They were right. The end of Sinn Fein as a serious electoral force in the Republic was the cumulative effect of its associates’ involvement in the Northern Bank robbery and the murder of Robert McCartney.

Too much of the media assessment of the deal made by the Green Party has focused on the text of the joint programme for government, rather than the significance of the ministries which the party secured.

Although the speculation was that it might get one full ministry and a super junior, it achieved two full ministries. John Gormley and Eamon Ryan will hold real power in two substantial departments for five years. Day in and day out they will decide where effort and money should be prioritised, which legislation to fast-track and what Ireland’s position at European ministerial councils will be. It may be that much of the programme’s environmental and energy commitments had been promised by Fianna Fáil anyway, but the fact that two able Green politicians will sit at ministerial desks in these departments means that the proposals will happen, and sooner. Once they settle in, they will also be able to identify additional mechanisms and funding lines to move their agenda forward.

Many of the most significant policy changes introduced in this State never appeared in a programme for government or an election manifesto. Instead, they emerged from a decision by a minister to take a dramatic initiative. Micheál Martin’s decision on the smoking ban is the most significant recent example. Dramatic things can also be expected from each of the two new Green Party Ministers.

Protesting on the outside is easy politics. Getting involved in exercising executive power is more demanding but also more effective.

It’s not a million miles away from Smithy’s retrospective thoughts on an earlier occasion over at the Cedar Tree:

I keep thinking about a brief conversation I had with a friend of mine at the back of the conference room in the Gresham, after the decision had been taken. I was disappointed, but unsurprised at the result, and was lamenting the future of the party, the Left … the usual kind of thing. His response was short, but to the point: “Better us in there than the fucking PDs”.

Even though I didn’t agree with him at the time, it was a very hard point to argue against and it’s something which has stuck with me ever since. While it’s easy to stand back and make the argument that parties of the left should stay out of government until they can present a truly left-wing alternative in Irish politics, those who adopt such a position (and it’s a valid one) need to face up to the fact that, in the short-term at least and possibly for longer, it condemns the most vulnerable in society to a worse government than might otherwise have been the case. And it’s for that reason that I’ll try and defend the decision of the Greens to go into government, even if I’m not entirely sure that it’s the right one.

As Splintered Sunrise notes the irony of such seemingly incongruous combinations has a single root:

This is one of the joys of the PRSTV system, that it throws up these seeming coalitions of opposites, while those closest to you on paper are your most bitter rivals. Hence Clann na Poblachta coalescing in 1948 with a pretty much unreconstructed Fine Gael. Hence Dessie saying that FF, and in particular Charlie, were unfit to be in office, and then putting them back into office. Hence today’s FF-Green-PD combo. And why not a Blueshirt-Provo coalition in five years’ time?

If the DUP can do it, why not Fine Gael? The truth is that for a party which once prided itself in relying on no one else in government, Fianna Fail under Ahern have become masters of coalition, whilst everyone else of any size or capacity is still lingering on the starting line. Small, meaty, policy led parties like the Greens and the PDs will always find themselves in hock to one of the bigger less ideological, constituency rooted parties.

What Ahern possibly knows that his opposition seem to be discounting, is that if this coalition does genuinely dish up new Green policy directions his party stands a decent chance of hitting 2017 without drawing breath. In the meantime, although the pressure will remain on the Greens to stand up their end of the bargain, this a moment it was always going to meet, if it was serious about citing its credentials as a political party, not just, as Jenny points out, a pressure group.

That Ahern chose the Greens and not Labour to dance with comes down to a large extent to what each was prepared to bring to ‘the party’, and not simply the electoral mathematics that consumed most mainstream commentators.

In that respect, there is much for Labour to think on before 2012, in between their parliamentary bashing of what they presume to be the weak end of the government combo.

Update:

Most stay the same: Brian Cowan now Tainiste, stays at Finance
John Gormley - Environment,
Noel Dempsey gets new Department of Transport and Marine
Eammon Ryan - Energy
Brian Lenihan - Justice

By Steven King

The negotiations aimed at agreeing a new coalition government have now gone on nearly as long as the election campaign itself. By European standards this might not be unusual. Following their (much closer) 2006 elections, it took the Czechs 230 days to agree an ideologically comparable centre-right/Green deal.

Nevertheless, it is in everyone’s interest that a Taoiseach be elected tomorrow, a government formed, and a start made to tackling the not-insurmountable economic challenges.

Over the course of the last week, evidence has emerged of understandable irritation at the Fianna Fail grassroots that so much time and energy has been devoted to talks about the formation of a FF/Green government. Did a single voter go into the polling booth hoping that would be the election’s outcome? Hadn’t both parties made it abundantly clear during the campaign that they didn’t see each other as potential partners? Wasn’t the electorate presented with two competing coalitions, two competing visions and didn’t it, by a small margin, endorse the FF/PD option?

Furthermore, it has been speculated that Brian Cowen, almost certainly Bertie Ahern’s successor, hasn’t taken too kindly to Green attempts to insert themselves into areas of policy far beyond the environmental agenda. As Finance Minister, he knows better than most how hard it would be to square falling tax revenues, a housing market downturn, and rising interest rates and inflation with Green demands that amount to cooling the economy and simultaneously increasing spending.

In the post-Good Friday Ireland, when perhaps Fianna Fail’s only remaining core value is the priority it gives to economic growth, the odds on a FF/Green coalition were never put that high. The talks had an air of unreality about them.

Why then did Bertie Ahern allow negotiations with the Greens to go on far beyond what was supposed to be their weekend cut-off point? Have we been witnessing a typically cynical attempt by Fianna Fail to hold on to office at any cost? Or was there method in the Taoiseach’s madness?

Perhaps, though, the question should be posed the other way around: why have the Greens been negotiating with Fianna Fail in the first place? After all, it’s not as though we have a hung Dail and a government cannot be formed.

What makes the Greens’ keenness all the more remarkable is that the evidence from other countries is that Green parties in government tend to punch below their weight. Their policy impact tends to be small and they are rarely able to broaden their constituency of support to compensate for the loss of those voters who plump for them precisely because they are radical outsiders. If the deal is endorsed today, the Greens might find the next election even more challenging than usual.

Conversely, that’s what makes Greens quite attractive to large parties. The policy concessions actually required on a day-to-day basis are fewer than those required for parties - like the PDs - which represent identifiable (and powerful) social interests. But Green politicians are politicians all the same: opposition can be a frustrating business with few perks.

Assuming the deal is on, many lazy parallels will be drawn with the best-known government involving Greens, namely the Socialist-led one that ran Germany from 1998-2005. But the comparison doesn’t work.

First, Greens and socialists tend to have more in common than Greens and free-marketeers and, for all Bertie’s claims to be a “socialist”, no-one believes Fianna Fail is anything of the sort.

Second, Gerhard Schroeder’s governments depended on the Greens’ votes for their survival. This FF-led ‘technicolour’ coalition will not. In that sense, the parallels to be drawn are with countries like Finland and Belgium where Greens were invited into government but were actually surplus to requirements. Green Party members today will have to ask themselves how much influence they can hope to exert when Bertie Ahern can invite them to walk the plank any day of the week. More influence than in opposition, the party’s TDs will counter.

Yet, whether or not the Green deal ever came off, Bertie’s tactics were sound. He wanted to see the whites of their eyes. Would they want substance or could they actually be satisfied with gestures? The truth will only be known if and when the programme for government is published but, at the weekend, there were hints the Greens only needed something “symbolic” as proof of Fianna Fail’s earnestness.

Possibly aware of their own strategic weakness – and mindful of the idealism of their party’s governing council – the Greens initially bid very high. When talks broke down, the supposedly unbridgeable gaps were in the areas of local government reform, the health service, education spending and planning. As if that weren’t a long enough list, it’s probably worth adding the Shannon military flights controversy, campaign finance reform, carbon emissions, roads policy and the top rate of tax. In other words, pretty much the whole shebang. No wonder Seamus Brennan spoke last Friday of “enormous financial implications”.

I understand that early on in the negotiations some of the sums being demanded for Green pet projects were in the 10-figure league i.e. billions, not millions, of Euro. If today’s convention rejects the deal, expect Fianna Fail “sources” to reveal much more of the Green wish-list.

Meanwhile, everyone else has been dancing to Bertie’s tune. He probably wanted Mary Harney as much as she needed back into government. Out of office, without a platoon of senators and advisors, the party’s future would be very uncertain indeed. But she still has immense stature. She doesn’t flap – not something you could say about your average Green. At the same time, with only two TDs, the PD grassroots know they are in no position currently to start waxing their ‘watchdog’ credentials. Further revelations from the Mahon Tribunal about the Taoiseach’s finances are, at least, one of Donald Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns”.

An even the clearer message has been sent to the other odds and sods – and some are very odd sods. Beverly Flynn has a precarious political existence anyway but Michael Lowry and Jackie Healy-Rae will have had to scale down the number of barrels of pork they could hope to bring home to Tipperary and Kerry respectively. As for Finian McGrath, having named about a dizzying list of priorities immediately after the election – from foreign policy downwards – he began confining himself to more modest territory such as disability rights. Tony Gregory probably knew all along that he is ideologically beyond the Pale and Dublin Central gets only what Bertie wants.

Assuming he is confirmed again as Taoiseach tomorrow - and it would be playing politics with the election result if he were not – the days since the election should be viewed as time well spent.

Bertie has added ‘environmentalist’ to his list of credentials, exposed the Greens to some serious scrutiny, taken some of the wind out of the Independents, made Enda Kenny’s own attempts to form a government seem fanciful, and even elicited a tap on his door – if not quite a knock – from the Labour Party. As an added bonus, Sinn Fein said they wouldn’t vote for him as Taoiseach so long as Mary Harney was back in government. All in all, not a bad fortnight’s work!

First published in the Examiner today

Fianna Fáil have learned a thing or two from their developer friends. For sure, build it and they will come. Better again, target a suitable property, demolish, rebuild and reap the profit.

Nearly a week of painstaking tinkering with the Greens. Then everything collapses.

Nothing to do with us, pleaded Fianna Fáil last night. It’s not like the Greens are a listed building or anything.

Although naturally, the party is very saddened at the turn of events. They say the situation is not beyond repair, and will seek to rebuild if possible.

Séamus Brennan is always rolled out to deal with these sensitive situations. In the manner of a property speculator who discovers that the protected structure he purchased on prime building land has inexplicably burned to the ground during the night, Séamus Brennan said he was “somewhat surprised” when negotiations with the Greens collapsed.

“We are still available to see if there are still gaps to be bridged,” he said, oozing good faith. “We are available to try to continue to close those gaps,” continued Mr Sincerity.

There was “common ground” between the two parties. They had built up a “fine relationship” during their talks on forming a government. The atmosphere was “great” and the “goodwill” was bouncing off the walls.

However, he said sadly, there were five main sticking points. (He had them written down on a little slip of paper in his hand.) Climate change, transport, education, local government, health. And that was even before any talk of divvying up jobs or considering the PDs.

Between now and Thursday, even President McAleese, Ireland’s answer to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, would have difficulty crafting a structure to span those particular gaps.

“We remain committed to forming a government and will continue to explore all avenues with this in mind. However the current deal on offer is not sufficient and will not best serve the interests of our country”