For further reference, here’s the shift in standing from the last poll in December:
🚨 #GE2020 POLL 🚨
Sunday Times/Behaviour & Attitudes
(January 2-14, MoE 3.3%)Fianna Fáil 32 (+5 in four weeks)
Fine Gael 20 (-7)
Sinn Féin 19 (-1)
Greens 7 (+1)
Labour 4 (-2)
Independent Alliance 3 (+1)
Solidarity-PBP 2 (-1)
Social Democrats 1
Renua 1 (+1)
Inds and others 10— Gavan Reilly (@gavreilly) January 19, 2020
Not good news for Fine Gael. Even if this proves to be an outlier it sets a sour tone at the start of the campaign: 20% is the lowest rating it’s ever had. The Sinn Féin figure just three days before the local elections in this poll was 18% but they came in at just 9.48% of the actual vote.
The Green figure looks like an underestimation. Not sure about the Labour or independent figures either. Indeed with the volatility within the company’s SF figure, it is hard to figure where any of the smaller parties and independents actually are if we are only going on this poll.
Accurate or not, the result is good news for Micheál Martin’s Fianna Fáil on a number of levels. One, from early it casts him a Taoiseach in waiting. Two, rather than fielding questions about ‘what if‘ he fails to return to Government, he may message voters to end past uncertainty by maximising FF seats.
During the week, Fergus Finlay warned the Taoiseach in his column in the Irish Examiner:
The thing is, there was barely a word about what Leo and his government were going to do if elected. All the signs were of a Taoiseach so impressed by his own record that he hadn’t given a moment’s thought to unfinished business.
This election will be fought against the backdrop of an unequal society. We’re a rich country with terrible childcare policies, with 4,000 homeless children, with an entire generation of young people for whom the property ladder is a pipe-dream. We’re a rich country, where the only sector of society that endures record unemployment is people with disabilities.
The Taoiseach cannot go into, and through, an election campaign without answers to those issues. If he does, he will end up wondering how a government that managed Brexit brilliantly and restored a power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland still ended up being rejected by the people.
Stephen O’Brien puts the blame for this apparent collapse on the RIC controversy, I’m not so sure. There’s a cocktail of issues Fine Gael has struggled to get a hold of, not least a deep unease with them in rural Ireland, over falling prices in farming (and the abiding threat of Brexit to Irish agriculture).
There’s also housing and health, but some southern observers also suggest that Leo’s close association with many liberal causes hasn’t gone down well with a lot of the conservative Catholic vote outside Dublin either. Causes that, in many ways, Martin has been just as associated with as the Taoiseach.
The difference being overall positioning, tone, better playing of the many small margins you have to win to be successful in the south and a fair amount of luck. He has another week before the Sunday Business Post brings out its Red C and we get a better idea of how the land lies.
It is far from in the bag, mostly because for most of the last ten years no one party or party leader has been able to capture the larger narrative. With this poll likely to be fairly soft, Martin’s next challenge will be to outline a moral tale that connects with a much broader swathe of Irish opinion.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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