By Harry Hutchinson, member, Labour Party Northern Ireland
Holding the general election on a Saturday, for the first time since 1918, may have played a part in ending the century-long dominance of the two major parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. With students and youth more free to vote, the highest youth population in Europe played a significant part in what is seen as a major shift to the left and away from the neo-liberal establishment parties.
The governing party Fine Gael, led by the first gay Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, came third, losing 12 seats in the 160 seat Dail. Fine Gail’s ‘confidence and supply’ partners in government (another term used for coalition), Fianna Fail, became the largest party, despite losing 7 seats, ending with 38 seats overall. Unquestionably the surprise of the election was the huge surge of support for Sinn Fein, coming within one seat of Fianna Fail and getting the highest number of first-preference votes in this proportional representation election.
The Green party increased its seats by nine, to 12, with the Irish Labour party losing one seat ending with 6, an equal number with the Social Democrats a party formed only in 2015, mostly from a split from the Labour Party. The left-wing People before Profit dropped one seat to 5. We also saw the emergence of 30 far right candidates, one being the Irish Freedom Party, but they only received a paltry number of votes, the highest receiving just over 2%.
Health, homelessness and poverty the main issues
The outgoing government had hoped that Brexit would have been the main issue in the election. However with Britain now leaving the EU from January, social issues came to the forefront. A survey carried out during the election showed health, homelessness and poverty were the main issues in the election. Ireland has fewer hospital beds than 10 years ago, despite an increased population. Trolley waits in January were the highest on record.
Ten thousand people are reckoned to be homeless in Ireland, most in the capital Dublin, a 20% increase since 2017. This is despite thousands of homes standing empty. The government’s market approach to the housing crisis is to use emergency accommodation, such as Airbnb, who have evicted long term tenants in order to rent their properties for the much higher paying emergency accommodation. Rents in Dublin are now as high as €1,900 a month.
A survey in 2019 showed one in ten households lived in food poverty, measured as at least one third of the total income going towards essential food. One in five children are in poverty, especially families with single parents. Poverty has doubled in this latter category in the last years, totalling 15% of the population.
Ireland operating like a tax haven
Despite significant growth in the Irish economy of 8.2% in the last year and unemployment of less than 5%, none of this growth has filtered through to working class people. Ireland, with the lowest Corporation Tax in Europe, at 12.5%, is home to some of the top 100 Corporations. Companies like Facebook, TripAdvisor, Twitter, Google, E-bay, LinkedIn, all base their headquarters in Dublin, taking advantage of what is regarded as a tax haven. US multinationals contributed €28.3bn in 2017. Fourteen of the top 20 Irish firms are foreign multinationals, contributing to 23% of all private sector jobs and 80% of all corporate tax collected.
The onus on multinationals has dominated the Irish economy since the 2007 property crash, which has left Ireland with the second-highest gross public debt of OECD countries after Japan.
Addressing these social issues will be the task of whichever coalition government that emerges. The surge in the Sinn Fein vote was offset by the party standing only 42 candidates, in an over-cautious move on their part, after two previous disastrous council and EU elections.
An outcome might be a Fianna Fail, Labour, SD and Independent coalition, as all are needed to reach 80 seats, which would constitute a majority in the Dail. Whichever government emerges will be an unstable one.
Sinn Fein poses as a ‘left’ party
Sinn Fein posed itself as a ‘left’ party in the election, promising to build homes and invest in the health service. However, as witnessed in the North of Ireland, their approach to all of these social issues will be a ‘market’ approach. Since the election result, Sinn Fein has repeated the issue of a unified Ireland. Their aim is to hide behind the popular mantra of Irish unity to cover a centre-right economic programme.
There has been a failure of the left to build a proper alternative of socialists, Trade Unionists and political activists. Socialists remain fragmented, and have lost at the expense of some Independent candidates. People before Profit, the main left group, received overwhelming support in the televised debates, showing that a socialist programme remains popular amongst people.
Ireland is a radically changing country, recently overturning laws on the banning of same sex marriages and abortion. Mass protests in Dublin for decent housing has shown that the young population are not intent on playing a latent role in the fight for a changed society.
February 13, 2020
