Gary Murphy, Professor of Politics at Dublin City University, on the how the Opposition voted itself back into the also rans yet again
The story of 2025 will be how that centre holds itself together as it settles in for another full term in office. The centre knows that it survived because its opposition, particularly Sinn Fein, stumbled when it came down the final electoral stretch. But it also knows that sooner or later the electorate will get sick of it, and if the global economy weakens then that could be very soon indeed.
For now, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael just about retain the respect of the electorate, but it would not have taken very much of a political shift over the past year for one of the two parties that has dominated the politics of this state to drift towards irrelevance.
Instead, the crucial political shift came when the vast phalanx of undecided voters, who had been telling pollsters for three years that they were going to vote for Sinn Fein, moved decisively away from Mary Lou McDonald in 2024. The first inkling of this shift came from polling in the aftermath of the Dublin riots when Sinn Fein dropped below what was once thought to be its impregnable 30 per cent mark.
Calling for the heads of the minister for justice and the garda commissioner the day after the worst riots in Dublin since the foundation of the state was a serious miscalculation by Sinn Fein. This error was compounded by its insistence in advance of the referendums on family and care in March that it would rerun the vote in the case of a defeat. It was only the scale of the rejection of these referendums that made Sinn Fein change its mind. Such flip-flopping on the issue sat uneasily with voters and its poll numbers continued to dip.
Sinn Fein’s abysmal local and European election results, where it polled a barely believable 11 per cent, less than half of what Fianna Fail and Fine Gael individually achieved, have been blamed on the loss of its working-class support in areas disproportionately affected by immigration. There is truth in this, but the reality is that those who decided not to vote for the party, having indicated that they would in poll after poll for month and after month, moved in all sorts of directions. The shift was away from Sinn Fein but there was no decisive move to any other party.
The far right, despite some slight gains, made no breakthrough, and the mainstream parties were pretty much where they were after the 2020 general election. The European election vote for Fianna Fail and Fine Gael was just lower than their general election result of 2020, while that of the local elections was only slightly higher.
Perhaps the most significant point of the summer elections was that half of all voters decided on a party or candidate in the final week of the campaign. In that context it is clear that Sinn Fein’s self-inflicted mistakes cost it dearly but there is no love for the duopoly of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael that has run the state since its foundation.
Yet 2024 was marked by one of the most unusual events in the history of Irish politics: the voluntary resignation of a taoiseach when no one was seeking a head. There was no precedent for Leo Varadkar’s shock resignation in March. Enda Kenny was basically forced out in 2017 by Fine Gael’s men in a hurry, Varadkar and Simon Coveney. Brian Cowen’s government collapsed in 2011 in farcical circumstances. Three years earlier Bertie Ahern was nudged aside by Fianna Fail’s man in a hurry — Cowen.
John Bruton and Garret FitzGerald lost office after an election. Albert Reynolds imploded after ousting Charlie Haughey, who himself was desperate to see Jack Lynch gone. So, over the past 45 years, not one taoiseach left office at a time of his choosing. Varadkar was always a little different, and stated that his reasons for resigning were both personal and political but that he was no longer the best person to lead Fine Gael in the local, European and general elections to come.
Fianna Fail, with its 48 seats, won the general election in that it finished nine seats ahead of Sinn Fein and ten ahead of Fine Gael, but its 22 per cent of the vote was down 0.3 points since 2020. Its leader, Micheál Martin, remains far more popular than his party. Fianna Fail is a low 20 per cent party at best, and could go lower when Martin eventually leaves the leadership.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fail basically stood still in 2024 but Sinn Fein self-immolated and essentially let the civil war parties off the hook. These once-were-behemoths will begin 2025 by cementing a new loveless relationship to administer the state for another five years, in conjunction with the Regional Independent Group.
