Ireland: ‘apathy bordering on anger’ – what the elections really show

The Irish general election has returned the two main capitalist parties to the Dáil with enough seats to form the core of a new coalition. The establishment is forcing a weak smile and trying to celebrate. “The choice of the Irish people is clear,” The Irish Times attempted to convince itself, “they want more of the same”.

[Originally published at communism.ie]

On the face of it, what is there not to be pleased about for their part? The establishment parties part-vanquished Sinn Féin, which received an anemic 19 percent of the vote, far down on the projections of a few years ago. And FF-FG can take their pick of a number of pliant smaller parties and independents to prop up a new coalition.

But something’s not right. Turnout, which would once top 70 percent, is now at a historic low point, below 60 percent. In working-class Jobstown, South-West Dublin, it stands at 39 percent. Canvassers described the mood on the doorstep as “apathetic bordering on angry”.

The palpable sentiment among broad layers of the masses is one of utter alienation from the whole political system. The story of one candidate, who narrowly failed to win a seat, sums it up.

Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch was a late entry to the hotly-contested Dublin Central constituency, but despite this, he took over 3,000 first preference votes. The first line of his Wikipedia entry reads as follows: “Gerard Hutch is an Irish criminal. He was the prime suspect for two of the biggest armed robberies in Irish history.”

With a long string of assaults, bank robberies and allegations of murder to his name, The Monk is not a politician, he’s a crime lord. And he entered this election for one reason: a former Sinn Féin councillor recently stood witness against him, and The Monk wasn’t happy. So, with no politics and no policies, he stood in Dublin Central against Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, just to get revenge.

One could twist and turn the policies of the many independent candidates who stood in this election to try and understand why they collectively received a record 14.3 percent of the vote. There’s no such difficulty with Hutch. Every single vote for him was intended to send a simple message to the Dáil, to the whole establishment. That message can be summed up in two words: “fuck you”.

Sinn Féin reaps what it sows

In 2020, the Irish ruling class was shell-shocked by a result that it regarded as a catastrophic upset. Sinn Féin topped the popular vote with 24 percent. With that, the lie that there is anything fundamental separating Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil came tumbling down. They were forced to enter an open coalition with one another.

Support for Sinn Féin was driven by seething anger at the conditions of life / Image: Sinn Féin, Flickr

Five years later, they emerged with more-or-less the same vote share, on an even lower turnout. And this is being celebrated as a victory! Like a drunk driver emerging from a car crash with only a few scratches, they are celebrating because they know it could have been a lot worse.

Between 2020 and 2022, driven by the hope and enthusiasm of hundreds of thousands of angry working-class and young voters, an insurgent Sinn Féin rose to 37 percent in the polls. They seemed to be the government-in-waiting. Then it all unravelled. That decline saved Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. However, this ‘victory’ comes at a big cost.

Support for Sinn Féin was driven by seething anger at the conditions of life: anger at the cost of housing, rising prices, crumbling infrastructure, worsening healthcare and education systems. Sinn Féin seemed different and promised change. They seemed anti-establishment. And they tapped into this anger by leaning to the left.

But they had no conception of challenging capitalism which is at the root of the crisis. In fact, their whole perspective is one of managing capitalism better than the capitalist class’ own parties. The more they felt themselves to be a government-in-waiting, the more strenuously they sought to reassure the capitalist class and the imperialists that they are a reliable pair of hands.

They revised their once hostile stance towards NATO. They wavered on expelling the Israeli ambassador. They bent over backwards to put a pro-business message. On the question of migration, they tied themselves in knots. And, most damning of all, they refused to rule out forming a coalition with the ruling class’ main parties.

But the ruling class was not to be mollified. They were determined to put the knife into the party precisely because it had aroused such hopes among the working class and youth. With each attack Sinn Féin only retreated further. Their anti-establishment credentials wore right off.

A pyrrhic victory

The ruling class got what it wanted. But in doing so, they closed off the only channel that thousands had to politically express their anger. To rule effectively through a ‘democratic’ two-party system, the capitalist class requires a tame, reliable opposition to mop up discontent with the incumbent government and to maintain the legitimacy of their system as a whole.

The FF-FG duopoly served the ruling class well for a century in this regard. That is over and this election confirmed that. Until now, the illusion that Sinn Féin could bring change has maintained interest in the Dáil and the established political set up.

The ruling class could have opted to increasingly tame Sinn Féin, who have shown their perfect willingness to be tamed, preparing them to take over when FF-FG inevitably becomes an utterly exhausted force. But fearful of the masses that had once swung behind the party with enthusiasm, they opted to attempt to destroy it.

While Sinn Féin isn’t completely finished to be sure, disappointment in the party and its performance underlines for millions that the whole system is useless for achieving change and must be thrown out. As anger continues to accumulate, it will increasingly be directed not at this or that party, but at the Dáil as a whole. That alienation with the whole political circus, already palpable before the election, will grow enormously with this result.

In the short term, this result will lead to a certain disappointment among a layer of workers and young people. But the main result of the working class having been blocked, for now, on the political front, will be a turn of workers to other avenues of struggle, on the streets and in workplaces.

The storm approaching Irish shores

The new FF-FG coalition was re-elected with just 24 percent of the eligible vote going their way. Over 40 percent abstained. They enjoy scant legitimacy in the eyes of millions. Yet the period ahead will be among the stormiest in decades. This is a recipe for class struggle and a government of crisis from start to finish.

The ruling class presently consoles itself by pointing to the fact that, superficially, the economy seems to be in a good state of health.

Such are the super-profits being made here by US corporations, that even on the basis of a low tax regime, the Irish government is in a unique position in Europe. It had an enormous budgetary surplus of €25 billion, bolstered by an EU ruling forcing Apple to pay it €13 billion in back taxes.

The secret to the success of the Irish economy has been the way it straddles the US and European markets / Image: Eric Jones, Wikimedia Commons

The Irish Times has described how the country has stumbled into a “fiscal garden of Eden”. What a turnaround since 2008, when the Irish government came to the brink of bankruptcy. Indeed, there is much in this boom that feels uncannily similar to the days that led up to 2008.

The ruling class ought to be elated, right? You will struggle to find an optimist among them. As the aforementioned Irish Times article put it:

“The problem with being in the fiscal Garden of Eden is that we know how that story ends – you get expelled naked into the harsh world and have to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow.”

Ireland has been here before. Before 2008, GDP was galloping ahead. The treasury was registering healthy surpluses. Within a few months, the country was at the brink of bankruptcy. The social and political fallouts of that crisis are felt today: a scarred and crumbling infrastructure, palpable anger, the enfeeblement of the main parties, the discrediting of the church, gardaí, the media, a gulf of distrust separating the masses from all the institutions of the establishment.

Now the storm clouds of a new crisis are gathering. The secret to the success of the Irish economy has been the way it straddles the US and European markets like a jockey straddling two horses. Almost all of the aforementioned tax receipts were paid by about ten giant US multinationals that use Ireland as a jumping off point for the EU market.

All is well and good so long as trade relations between the US and Europe remain stable and the world economy is booming. But as the Financial Times put it:

“When both horses are moving in tandem, the jockey can manage. If the horses start moving in opposite directions, the jockey’s nether regions become quite uncomfortable.”

But Trump is coming. He has promised to export the deep problems faced by US capitalism abroad. He has promised a 10 to 20 percent tariff on all imports. All this could set off trade wars, not just with China, but with Europe. Irish capitalism will be ground between two millstones.

Furthermore, he has promised to reduce corporation tax to levels that would rival Ireland’s. Indeed, the boss of Apple has had a word in Trump’s ear about the recent tax ruling, and Trump wasn’t happy about it.

In short, a new crisis is looming. The ruling class is alarmed at the similarities with the dying days of the Celtic Tiger. The Business Post warns its readers:

“[In] the middle and final years of the bubble period up to 2008, finance ministers felt able to announce that they were raising expenditure and dishing out tax breaks, taking comfort from what they believed to be a sustainable state balance sheet flattered by a recent run of strong tax revenues. Sound familiar?”

This is the voice of a section of the ruling class that is urging the government to build up all the padding it can before Irish capitalism crashes into a wall. In other words, just because the government is rolling in money, workers can forget it if they think any of this will be spent on them.

There is this difference with the last crisis, however. In 2008, the establishment was in a reasonable state of health to navigate the crisis when it came. It approaches a new crisis with a political system that is despised.

The first reaction on the part of the working class when the crisis came was shock. Will the working class accept new bailouts? Will the reaction to the next crisis be shock, or something more akin to rage?