How Ireland Voted 2020 Michael Gallagher Michael Marsh • Theresa Reidy Editors How Ireland Voted 2020 The End of an Era Editors Michael Gallagher Michael Marsh Department of Political Science Department of Political Science Trinity College Dublin Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland Dublin, Ireland Theresa Reidy Department of Government and Politics University College Cork Cork, Ireland ISBN 978-3-030-66404-6 ISBN 978-3-030-66405-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66405-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations. Cover image © Irish Independent (photo by Frank McGrath) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland PREFACE Elections in Ireland used to be rather predictable affairs. Either the coun- try’s perennial largest party, Fianna Fáil, would win, going on to form a government on its own or—from 1989 onwards—with a junior coalition partner; or Fine Gael and Labour would win and take the reins of power. These two blocs—one led by Fianna Fáil, the other by Fine Gael—had roughly equal support levels, and whichever could persuade the swing vot- ers to its side in any particular election would come out on top. The party system was defned and structured by the integrity of the quarrel between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, even if its origins lay in events of the early 1920s and policy differences between the two parties were increasingly harder to discern. These parties’ strengths went up or down a little, new parties came and went, but all change took place within the context of the party system that was created in 1922 and was frmly established by 1932. It was the economic crash of 2008 that set in motion what seems to be the end of this system. First, at the 2011 election, Fianna Fáil, which had been the strongest party in the country continuously for almost 80 years, suffered a collapse in support and dropped to third position. The ensuing Fine Gael–Labour coalition, at the end of its fve-year term in 2016, fared little better, and a stable government could be formed only by an eyebrow- raising arrangement between the largest two parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, under which the latter sustained in offce, through a confdence and supply arrangement (described in Chap. 1), a Fine Gael-dominated gov- ernment that had the support of barely a third of the Dáil. There were times during the lifetime of this 2016–20 administration when opinion polls suggested that the ‘dreary steeples’ of the two poles of the pre-2011 v vi PREFACE party system were re-asserting themselves, but when the election arrived in February 2020 this illusion was shattered by the success of Sinn Féin in winning a plurality of the votes, and the willingness of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to form a coalition government four months later seemed to confrm that the structure of the 1932–2008 party system has gone forever. This government, making the two parties comrades in arms for the frst time, came into existence 97 years after the ending of Ireland’s bitter civil war between two combatants from which Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael claimed descent and so, not surprisingly, was widely hailed as marking ‘the end of civil war politics’. The idea of such a government had occasionally been foated in the past, though there were concerns that a ‘grand coali- tion’ would be able to evade parliamentary scrutiny due to its huge size. By 2020, though, this was a decidedly not-so-grand coalition, as the two parties came together because of their joint decline rather than out of a desire to dominate. With the government having a predominantly centre- right complexion and the opposition overwhelmingly left of centre, the scene seems set for the long-predicted emergence of a left versus right party system, though most predictions made after each of Ireland’s previ- ous three elections have proved wide of the mark. This volume in the How Ireland Voted series, the ninth, analyses this apparently era-ending election. Chapter 1 provides an account of the term of the incumbent government and assesses its record, while Chap. 2 foren- sically analyses the degree to which the government fulflled its pledges. Chapter 3 explores the internal processes within each party, sometimes marked by confict out of the public eye, through which the parties selected their candidates for the election, and profles the backgrounds of the 531 contestants. Chapter 4, which is based on extensive interviews with party strategists and other insiders, recounts the story of the campaign, while Chap. 5 explores the impact, or lack of impact, of Brexit on the election. Social media play an increasing role in elections, and Chap. 6 analyses the parties’ activity here, with a focus on Sinn Féin given that party’s particular strength among young voters. In Chap. 7 fve Dáil candidates give their personal accounts of what it was like to face the voters on doorsteps across the country, and a senator explains the complexities of campaigning in a Seanad election, especially during a pandemic-driven lockdown. The next three chapters analyse different aspects of the results them- selves. Chapter 8 assesses the performances of the parties and analyses the composition of the new parliament, while Chap. 9 illustrates graphically, PREFACE vii through detailed maps, the geographical base of candidates’ support within constituencies. Chapter 10 analyses survey data to investigate the reasons why people voted as they did, identifying the issues that were most salient to voters and analysing voters’ evaluations of the parties on these issues. Chapter 11 is based on a survey of election candidates and explores similarities and differences of views of the nominees of the various parties to present a novel analysis of the Irish policy space as of February 2020. The upper house, the Seanad, often appears on the verge of fundamen- tal reform, but the 2020 election followed exactly the same form as its predecessors and this is examined in Chap. 12. Chapter 13 analyses the construction of the new government; putting together the 2016 govern- ment had taken ten weeks, a then record, but the process in 2020 took exactly twice as long and, as noted above, delivered an unexpected out- come. Finally, Chap. 14 places Ireland’s 2020 election outcome in the context of both the country’s own political history and the broader European picture. Appendices to the book contain the detailed election results, information on all 160 Teachtaí Dála (TDs) and on government ministers, and other relevant background information. At the front of the book we have included a chronology of the election campaign, and the book is illustrated by a selection of photographs and campaign literature that capture the spirit of election 2020. We thank a number of Ireland’s major media organisations for permission to sample their stock of photographs and reproduce some of them here. The Irish Times again gave us access to their rich photo-library, and at the Irish Independent we thank Owen Breslin, Kevin Doyle and Fionnán Sheahan for selecting the photos and giving us permission to use them. At the national broadcaster RTÉ, we thank Patricia O’Callaghan for her help in pointing us in the right direction and Vincent Kearney and Fran McNulty for permission to use photos that they took. And our thanks to Áras an Uachtaráin/Maxwell Photography and to Hans Zomer for allowing us to use the photograph of the President of Ireland with the newly appointed government standing suitably socially distanced from each other. We are pleased that this volume, like its four predecessors, is being pub- lished by the major international publisher Springer under the Palgrave Macmillan imprint, and in particular we would like to thank Ambra Finotello for her support for our initial proposal and Rebecca Roberts for her work on taking it through the production process. And as always, we thank our cooperative and patient contributors, who were put under great pressure by the demands of a book being produced on a very tight viii PREFACE schedule, exacerbated by the disruptions to their personal and working lives by the Covid-19 lockdown. Coronavirus hardly featured in the Irish media on election day, 8 February, but within a month had become the dominant story on the news agenda with routine political activity virtually suppressed.