#GE2020: And in the final week it starts to get really interesting…

So, Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil are level pegging going into the last week and the government party, Fine Gael, is trailing (if not by that far) behind. Who’d have thought it? Some folks are already counting the “Unity Chickens” barely two months after SF took a hammering in NI.

And of course, the temptation is clear enough:

Could we really be heading for a Govt without FF or FG? Could we finally have a Left led Govt? 7 days to deliver real change. #TheTimeIsNow@businessposthq @REDCResearch

FF 24% (-2)
SF 24% (+4)
FG 21 % (-2)
GP 7% (-1)
Lab 5% (+1)
SD: 3% (-)
S/PBP 1% (-1)
Ind/Otrs 13% (-1)

— Eoin Ó Broin (@EOBroin) February 2, 2020

 

With his party standing just 42 candidates for a Dáil assembly of 160 deputies in total, I’d say Eoin’s optimism is unlikely to come to fruition in this election at least despite the fact that its popularity is spreading upwards through the age groups.

"Quite blatantly, @sinnfeinireland's problem is they don't have enough candidates…" @OdranFly is telling Ivan what we should be taking out of the latest opinion polls.@NewstalkFM

— The Hard Shoulder (@TheHardShoulder) February 3, 2020

But the Sinn Féin rise hasn’t come at the expense of its perennial target Fianna Fáil, whose leader has been laying down a clear anti-Sinn Féin line since 2011. Rather it’s the Fine Gael party that’s been suffering aggregate setbacks, roughly proportionate to SF’s rise.

I’ve been exploring the seeming paradox of this situation privately with friends for the last two weeks, suggesting that the irresistible conclusion is that people must be moving to SF directly from FG. It suggests there’s a rag order fracturing going on. Voters are fluid.

However, Colin Murphy, writing in yesterday’s SBP, lays out what I suspect has given rise to this oddly novel factor in this election: ie Fine Gael’s cavalier and offhand treatment of the unionist interest in finding an equitable and fair island-wide outcome to the Brexit process.

In Leo, a biography of Leo Varadkar by Phillip Ryan and Niall O’Connor, the authors quote a source who told them the Taoiseach held “secret discussions” with Simon Coveney during which he and Coveney decided “to take a different tack to their predecessors” and “play hardball on the border” realising this would antagonise the DUP.

The consequence of this new nationalist turn by the Fine Gael leadership was not only a hardening of relations with the DUP but a deterioration of relations with unionism as a whole, and the forsaking of any claim the Irish Government could lay to the position of honest broker.

In taking this step, Varadkar and Coveney undermined a key Fine Gael legacy. As historian Paul Bew said, Brexit “re-opened a Cold War between North and South”, a Cold War which Fine Gael leader John Bruton had been instrumental in helping to thaw in the early 1990s.

This estrangement was cemented by Varadkar’s and Coveney’s excitable reaction to their success in influencing the EU-British proposals of December 2017 which gave us the backstop, the default commitment that the border would never harden. Varadkar’s boast that the backstop was bulletproof severely restricted his room for manoeuvre later on.

This “new nationalist turn” (encouraged no doubt by some crude jeering of Brexiteers from prominent voices within the Dublin press) may prove to be a dangerous (or at least a premature) break with Fine Gael’s traditional sharp antipathy towards Sinn Féin.

One of the outcomes of all this is a resurgence of 32 county nationalism in the South, with Sinn Féin in the vanguard, something Fine Gael will struggle to contain, and which threatens to entrench unionist alienation from the South.

Brexit (alongside an obvious domestic appetite for change) seems to be further loosening long set cultural affinities to two parties which as lately as 2007 was able to command 65% of the total vote cast. In 2016 between them, they barely managed to get to 50%.

Sinn Fein, to borrow Brian’s analogy, is the stealthy fox who has been trying to get into the FF/FG chicken coop (although only seriously from the run-in for the 2009 local government elections) for years now. But it is clear they hadn’t planned for this boost in the polls.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have spent most of their time trying to lay gloves on each other for the very rational reason that in most of the 39 the seats will slide between them. That’s why the gap between them is most likely the defining feature of the outcome of this election.

24% for Sinn Féin is clearly way ahead of the party’s own estimate, but there are two emerging bumps in the road to be navigated between now and polling day next Saturday, and that’s the perennial legacy of its IRA past; and a budget that has yet to face any real scrutiny.

Yesterday for the first time, the question of Sinn Féin’s record on IRA atrocities emerged for the first time in any serious way. In the Sunday Independent Mairia Cahill broke the relative silence by asking who sets the policy for the party’s serial mistreatment of IRA victims.

She cited the troubling case of Paul Quinn:

Paul was murdered nine years after the Good Friday Agreement by shadowy figures who have never been prosecuted for the crime. Shadowy figures protected those killers. Life in Northern Ireland has never been normal, but the memory of Breege Quinn, Paul’s mother, sobbing as she told me her son was beaten so badly that she couldn’t even put rosary beads on his hands will haunt me forever. Such a simple ritual that couldn’t be observed because the animals who battered Paul left, as a doctor told his family, “nothing to fix”.

And the politics of it being, a matter of policy…

For years, the party has had a policy concerning victims of the IRA, or indeed anyone, who has spoken out about the IRA. It is either to deny, or refuse to condemn atrocious actions, or indeed to cast a cloud of doubt on the credibility of those speaking. Where did this policy emanate from? It isn’t an unfair question, as the party is mainly homogenous in the response of its representatives whenever a scandal emerges.

Breege Quinn’s devastation is not historic; it is very much a live issue. She has been begging Sinn Fein to do the right thing for the past 13 years. A simple phone call from McDonald to Conor Murphy – and an instruction from the ard comhairle – could sort the issue out quickly.

Elaine Byrne writing in the Sunday Business Post, and a noted expert on political corruption in the Irish political system took a slightly different tack, by highlighting…

The absence of moral courage undermines Sinn Féin. Indeed, iin 2015 McDonald described Thomas “Slab” Murphy as a ‘good republican’. This, at the same time the alleged former chief of staff of the IRA faced nine charges of tax evasion.

The non-jury Special Criminal Court found Murphy guilty. He was prosecuted on foot of an investigation by the Criminal Assets Bureau.

In this context, Sinn Féin’s calls for the Special Criminal Court to be abolished and now ‘reformed and reviewed’ raises serious concerns. There are justifiable concerns about who influences Sinn Féin decision-making.

That these issues are late breaking-through has much to do with the fact that the campaign is crammed into a very short space of time. They have barely featured in any of the tv and radio debates. In this regard, it has allowed the party to get right out on the front foot.

The other factor yet to play out is the issue of the SF bonanza budget. In Northern Ireland, we have a fairly relaxed view of budgets. A Finance Minister that isn’t responsible for tax-raising can take all the time in the world to set departmental spending rounds.

But in the Republic, it’s a vital role in making everything else happen. This morning, the usually mild-mannered Fianna Fáil finance spokesman Michael McGrath highlighted a €4 Billion post manifesto adjustment in Pearse Doherty’s figures:

The sequence starts at about 8.56 in. He also highlights a point made in yet another article in yesterday’s SBP, which is the unsustainability of Pearse Doherty’s budget proposals, particularly in how it plans to raise money to pay its massively expanded spending plans.

Brian Keegan of Chartered Accountants Ireland:

Let’s set aside any objections on ideological grounds. The problem with the tax proposals in the Sinn Féin manifesto is that they are not sustainable.  They would bring in additional money in year one, but not in years two, three and four.

A meeting of RTÉ’s General Election steering committee today ensured that Mary Lou will be included in what was to be the last leaders’ debate, but which is now to be followed by another minor debate. With just three participants both matters are likely to get an airing.

That’s on tomorrow night. From a tv point of view, it will be the last big roll of the dice for all three. But the real campaigns out in the constituency are notoriously hard to call. If you want a bit of crack, try Ivan Yates and Gavan Reilly’s Calling It podcasts.

And the next poll is out just after nine tonight from the Irish Times…

🚨NEW #GE2020 Poll 🚨

Sinn Féin on top.

Sinn Fein 25%
Fianna Fáil 23%
Fine Gael 20% pic.twitter.com/Ymzbh6bAD0

— Darran Marshall (@DarranMarshall) February 3, 2020