While all anyone in media and politics wants to talk about is the general election date, this conversation is happening in a bubble. As ever, public engagement starts when a campaign begins. Until then, the mood could be summarised as turned off until it’s ticked off.
There’s one thing that the public is becoming increasingly prickly about, though. In the past, a specific brand of Irish ire was often reserved for anything that gave off an aura of noses-in-the-trough. Now it’s a macro version of this irritant that has purchase: the Government and the State wasting money – the “easy to spend it when it’s not yours” gripe.
In a rare display of unity, commentary and analysis of the budget across Irish media largely characterised it as a reckless splurge, a triumph of the superficial over the fundamental. The Government must feel aghast that their generosity is being met with a mantra we used to have in The Sunday Tribune when it came to offers from public relationships firms: astound them with your ingratitude.
While you can only draw so much from daily interactions and conversations, I find it interesting how apathetic and jaded so many people I’ve spoken to – who exist outside the election-date-obsessed political and media bubbles – are by electoral politics in Ireland right now. Gone is the bristling pre-pandemic “change” energy. I don’t know how many conversations I’ve had about current affairs and politics with people recently who aren’t part of either ecosystem, where these kinds of things are said: I’ve stopped watching the news; I’ve turned off the radio; I can’t be dealing with any of that crowd (politicians). Such sentiments are closely followed by anger about bike sheds, €9 million mobile phone pouches, and the children’s hospital.
Many people are very exercised by this theme of wastefulness. Any story, event or scandal that speaks to this theme instigates a combination of irritability, fury, dejection and cynicism. Much as the recession-era water charge protests were a proxy for anger over austerity, the contemporary waste-allergic reflex feels like a proxy for the cost of living, and the challenges many people face in making their individual and household budgets stretch.
So what’s the note under the note regarding the potential outcome of an election? Are people really satisfied with an overly familiar Government partnership? Has the desire for an alternative coalition Government evaporated? The thing with polling outside of an election context is that it doesn’t capture which party is popular during a moment of public engagement, but where popularity lies in a moment of disengagement.
There are plenty of reasons for Sinn Féin’s slump in the polls, but given how and why their vote grew, the contraction is not necessarily about their base. For all the talk about urban working-class voters defecting, I’d posit they’ve lost a significant number of under 40s who identify as progressive and are suspicious of the authenticity of Sinn Féin’s left-wing credentials.
Meanwhile, Fine Gael is delighted with recent polls. But should it be? Maybe; 2020 is a long time ago now. By the time the next general election comes around, there will be university-going first-time voters who hadn’t even sat their Junior Cert when the Sinn Féin surge happened.
But, danger here. There is a slight throwback Keep The Recovery Going energy orbiting Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil at the moment. That may chime for the I’m-Alright-Jacks (and there are plenty of those), but definitely not with others. The Poverty, Income inequality and Living Standards in Ireland report, published by the ESRI last month, showed that real disposable income is lower than it was two years ago – enough to leave average incomes lower than they were in 2020.
Incomes have stagnated for the under 65s. Rates of material deprivation have risen. One fifth of children experience material deprivation now. Rates of income poverty are “particularly high” in households where the youngest child is between a newborn and five years old. Life satisfaction sharply declined during the pandemic, especially among young people and lone parents.
Selling a happy story about a Government’s achievements to an electorate when many prospective voters are cheesed off and struggling, is not a winning strategy. But demanding Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil not be self-satisfied is sort of like encouraging an ostrich to fly.
Time and time again, the political establishment is caught on the hop when an actual campaign kicks in. Because the floating vote has been floating for a decade, its direction can shift in an instant. This is why the general election campaign itself will matter so much.
The thing about an irritable electorate is that when it’s collectively uninspired and in “best of a bad lot” mode, scandal tends not to catch with much consequence. People aren’t very tuned in. But when they do tune in – come a campaign – the wasteful theme will really matter.
In the short term, there will inevitably be yet another scandal around the waste of taxpayers’ money that will send the electorate into an incensed tailspin. There’s blood in the water on this theme. It is also a proxy for a collective expression of voter irritability. Right now, the polls show that the electorate is in a mode of tentative hibernation. But what happens during an election campaign may just end up poking the bear.