Cóir to become political party?

You may have read this week that:

THE ANTI-LISBON Treaty group Cóir may become a political party, targeting disaffected Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin supporters as members, according to its spokesman Brian Hickey.
Mr Hickey said he believed there was now room for a “patriotic, conservative and socially conscious party” to represent people who did not support existing political parties.
“We are certainly considering forming Cóir into a political party because there’s obviously a gap there in the Irish political spectrum,” he said.

And that:

Mr Hickey said all of the political parties, except for Sinn Féin and the Socialists, supported the Lisbon Treaty but more than 30 per cent of voters had voted No in the referendum.
People who joined Fianna Fáil when it was “a genuinely conservative and republican party” now felt “completely disillusioned”, Mr Hickey claimed.
“So I’d say quite a lot of disaffected members of Fianna Fáil [would be potential supporters]; perhaps members of Sinn Féin who feel uncomfortable with that party’s position on all sorts of social and moral issues would also be potential supporters.”

Well, we’ll come to the FF/SF disaffected members, although isn’t it fascinating that he points at them rather than voters. But it’s his point about the 30% that is most interesting. Interesting because while he might like to think this is something new, it really isn’t.

Even the most cursory glance at polling figures over the past three decades of our engagement with Europe will demonstrate that at each referendum there has been a bloc of those voting against European referendums that has varied between its heighest point at Nice 1, 53.87% and a mere 16.76% at the original 1972 European Communities referendum.

One could argue that this decade has seen the pendulum swing more frequently to the NO side. Both Nice 1 and Lisbon 1 delivered defeats to the Government, again of 53.87% and 53.4% respectively. But, ironically this decade also delivered the highest YES vote in an EU related referendum since the 1992 Maastricht referendum, with the YES sides getting 67.13% at Lisbon 2 and 69.05% at Maastricht. Between those points at Amsterdam the YES side won with 61.74%, Lost at Nice 1 with only 46.13% YES, won at Nice 2 with 62.89%, lost at Lisbon 1 with 46.6% and won again at Lisbon 2 with 67.13%. In a way that suggests that broadly speaking, given the right circumstances it is possible for the YES side to mobilise somewhere above 55%.

But what are the right circumstances? It’s not simply turnout, although turnout is important. At Nice 1 turnout fell to 34%, the lowest of any EU related referendum. At Nice 2 it rose again to 49%. At Lisbon 1 though it rose again to 53%, whereas at Lisbon 2 it rose still further to 59%.

Perhaps we can chart this to a declining enthusiasm for Europe and all its works. There’s no getting away from the fact that the highest vote was in 1972 with 82% voting YES to joining the EEC and only 16% voting no. What’s fascinating though is that at the next available opportunity in 1987 to vote for the Single European Act the YES side gained just under 70% of the vote, and… crucially, the NO side won 30%. So, if the shine had come off it wasn’t by much, whereas the NO side had consolidated considerably. Actually that’s worth noting in itself because you’ll go a fair way reading through material from the left during the 1970 – 1972 period before you come upon a pro-EEC piece.

Five years later almost identifical figures were recorded for Maastricht. And although Amsterdam in 1998 saw the YES side weaken to 61% and the NO side rise to just a shade under 40% at 38% that indicates that whatever momentum existed from 1972 was retained across decades.

Indeed from a pro-European project perspective it is only in the last decade that the situation saw any striking reversals. And yet, that seems to me, given the votes at both Nice 2 and Lisbon 2, that much was down to a political establishment which simply couldn’t countenance losing a referendum, and worse and perhaps ironically so given the trope that the EU now dominates our lives to an irresponsible degree, a concentration on national political issues – one thinks of the manner in which the departure of Bertie Ahern shaped the run-up to Lisbon 1 to the detriment of the impact and import of EU issues (and that, I think, holds true for whatever side one belongs to).

Given the somewhat considerable, but perhaps often uncritical, enthusiasm of the early years of Irish membership of the EEC (and after in some quarters), at least as evidenced by the polling data, it’s hard to believe that the current situation is not a slight improvement. The issues are at least discussed and fought over. Nothing is taken for granted, not least the project itself. But there’s no question that the YES side can, assuming it manages to address the democratic issues raised by re-runs – something that although clearly not a huge problem (for them in political terms) this time out is far from self-evidently not going to be a problem in future referendums, utilise even now the residual pro-EEC sentiment expressed in 1972. And conversely that means that the NO side has an enormous mountain to climb at each and every occasion. Speaking as one who was for many years strongly and enthusiastically pro-EU, and who has moved to a much more agnostic position in recent times, there’s little question that the field of play is tilted a certain way, but… it’s also evident that it was always thus and in part simply because pro-EEC/EC/EU sentiment has been so high from the off. The default position was one of ‘well sure we’ll vote YES, why would we do otherwise?’. No good in 1972 and no good in 2009, at least from the point of view of actually engaging with both the pros and cons of the issue.

And this brings me back to Cóir. Because if they believe that space has now opened up then they’ve clearly not been looking at the history, and not that distant history either. From 1987 the figures indicate that the scope for such formations would be there, if that were the only yardstick one were to use. And granted, that is indeed the time since when the Irish political system can be said to have fractured from the original, but far from best, 2 and a half party structure, to its current more pluralistic mode.

Which begs the question why at this point, given the near terminal decline of the Catholic Church, the extension of what I could term consumerist culture and a shift in mores do Cóir believe it is more propitious to establish a political party than, say in 1987?

And even more intriguingly why is it that they point towards Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin as the parties from which any support would come from and their members rather than just supporters. Does it seem likely that long term members of Sinn Féin or Fianna Fáil would find the temptation to jump to Cóir appealing? FF is no bastion of liberalism, well… perhaps it is given its new affiliation in the European Parliament, but the idea it only recently changed is untenable… while surely any socially conservative SF members sort of kind of got the idea over the past decade or two that the party they’re in isn’t exactly of the social right. Cóir also appears to have conveniently forgotten a much less impressive example in more recent political history, that of Libertas who, while clearly able to mobilise successfully at Lisbon I, were unable to successfully translate that into political leverage at the European elections (I hope to look at a reverse example too in a subsequent piece).

And in the light of this why Cóir believes that something has changed and that that something indicates a shift to the ‘patriotic, conservative and socially conscious’ is a bit beyond me. If anything the local and European elections pointed to an opposite dynamic where both mainstream parties and the further left did better while the further right simply… didn’t.

But that too is something worth considering in greater detail soon, because it raises a central paradox in the result.