The Irish political landscape post-Lisbon. All changed, changed utterly? Apparently not…

I was cycling past Liberty Hall last week and what should I see but a Socialist Party poster advertising a meeting to be held by Joe Higgins suggesting that after the rout of the establishment post-Lisbon it was time to throw the bums out… or words to that effect. While admiring the sentiment I doubted that our overall political structures, bases or institutions would be particularly touched by the vote. Indeed I mentioned as much over on the Irish Left Review. Not because of any special insight on my part but simply due to fighting the good fight across decades and seeing the remarkable ability of liberal capitalist democracy to appropriate pretty much everything that is thrown against it, whether militant or not.

And the results of the latest poll in the Sunday Business Post (which I hope to return to during the week) underscore this and provide a domestic backdrop to Wu Ming’s piece from this weekend.

The government?

the result of the Lisbon referendum seems to have had little impact on the level of satisfaction with the government.

Consider that party support in the wake of the Referendum is as follows, as noted by Pat Leahy in the SBP:

Fianna Fáil retains the support of 40 per cent of the electorate, reflecting no change from last month and demonstrating that the electorate appears to have compartmentalised its attitudes towards the treaty. This is almost the level of support Fianna Fáil secured when winning last year’s general election.

Isn’t this telling? Far from Lisbon reflecting a political earthquake, it is instead effectively a single issue. As Leahy suggests, the attitude to Lisbon was ‘compartmentalised’. And consequently, despite the clear problems for the political classes in this state in terms of credibility, particularly after the ludicrous Ahern machinations, on a broader level public satisfaction or disatisfaction is essentially static. This has some interesting outcomes…

Support for Sinn Féin, the only Dáil party to oppose the treaty, rises marginally to 10 per cent, but shows no big payoff for the party after its Lisbon victory.

That may indeed change as time moves on, but a possible interpretation is that just as the electorate could compartmentalise their attitudes to Lisbon and to the government/parties respectively, SF simply offered a sort of proxy to vocalise discontents. None of which is bad for SF, indeed Mary Lou McDonald must have improved her odds of retaining the European Parliament seat for the party next year substantially, even in a more competitive constituency.

But for others the news is far from good.

However, support for Fine Gael drops sharply, by three points to 25 per cent. This is t h e fourth consecutive monthly decline in support for Enda Kenny’s party and, though the first three drops were each only one point, the party’s standing with voters has now fallen substantially since the start of this year.

This is poor stuff. But hardly a surprise. I argued before that FG appeared in the campaign to be attempting to convey an all things to all voters message rather than being clearly in favour, without equivocation, of the Lisbon Treaty. And add to that the inevitable sense of fatigue at the prospect of another four year stint up to the next General Election and one might imagine that people are testy and keen to do something, anything, to shake things up. And here the problem becomes quite severe for Enda Kenny, because while an affable and decent individual who without question managed by dint of hard work and organisational skills to pull together the FG party prior to 2007, there are problems to his leadership, not least a desperately unschooled outing on Questions and Answers in the week of the vote, which as one Labour party member suggested to me might well lose whole swathes of the Yes side due to an inability to convey a clearly defined message.

And the rest?

There is a slight recovery for the Green Party, which recovers two points since last month and now stands at 7 per cent. The PDs (2 per cent), Labour (10 per cent) and independents (6 per cent) are al l unchanged from lastmonth.

I can’t help but think the Green Party will be happy. Perhaps a case of the issue being explained to the base, or perhaps a sign that they don’t much care either way about it… difficult to know which, but I hope to return to the former thought as well during the week. Labour may have been moving against their support base, but at least they remained essentially consistent throughout. And despite the coverage no great boon for the Independents.

Incidentally, the nonsense we hear today from one of the FG Young Turks about the SF campaign is quite a sight to behold. For, in the Sunday Business Post we read that:

Dublin West TD Leo Varadkar claimed that ‘‘a lot of leftwing campaigns stirred the immigration pot – some deliberately and some unwittingly. He said Sinn Fein used it deliberately.

‘‘If there is anything to be learned about this large working-class vote, it’ s that it’s a right-wing reaction – anti-immigration, protect my job – and not a left-wing vote as Sinn Fein pretends to believe.”

I disagreed with the SF stance during the Referendum, indeed still do on a number of issues, and think that their approach has been one that has sought to massage their vastly more euro-sceptic view of the EU than their literature proposed over the last number of months (indeed a look at their website and the press releases is instructive, not least due to a certain North/South split in terms of language from their MEPs about the EU… check it out). But… that is one thing, Vardkers allegations quite another. It is simply incorrect to say that they pushed any anti-immigration line in that literature or, from what I hear from those who met them, at doorsteps. But then Fine Gael has yet to determine a clear line after the Referendum, for Alan Shatter has said that:

…taking a bi-partisan approach did not do his party any favours.

Oh dear. More of the indecision. This sort of language is only going to feed into a sense that they don’t know where they’re going, and worse, that they’ll trim if it is to their advantage. Not a thought I’d want to slip out into the public arena just now, if I were them.