Does last week’s anti-establishment revolt contain the seeds of a change?
Green Party Minister for Equality Roderic O'Gorman, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of Fine Gael, Tánaiste Micheál Martin of Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald all called for Yes votes. Illustration: Paul Scott“The people have spoken, the bastards.” California politician Dick Tuck’s pithy response to the verdict of the electorate on his 1966 run for the US Senate may have hovered on the lips of Government politicians in private last weekend.
Now that ballot boxes have been put away until the local and European elections on June 8th , did any of those column inches and carefully stopwatched broadcast minutes really matter?political scientist Theresa Reidy says no. “We already knew that there is considerable volatility in the electorate,” she says. “We’ve known that since 2011. So I don’t think this referendum tells us anything extra or new that we didn’t already know.
“Irish people like their referendums,” says Reidy, who advises nevertheless against extrapolating from last weekend’s results into the political party arena. “It happens all the time with these kinds of referendums,” she says. “There isn’t going to be any serious fallout from it.” She defines serious as “the Government falls or a Minister resigns or the Government changes its policy programme in some major area”.
Arrayed against the “blob” were some Independent politicians, along with the two smallest parties in the Oireachtas , and a minority of the country’s campaigning organisations. They were blessed with an inept, tin-eared and arrogant Yes campaign which will serve as a useful handbook for future governments on how not to do it.
One example of voter volatility was the late surge for the Yes/No option, advocating support for the family amendment but opposition to the care wording because it fell short of what was recommended by the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality and the subsequent Oireachtas committee. Yes/No went from the margins two weeks out from the vote to becoming an article of faith among left-leaning and younger urban voters.
Others were more forthright. “A new referendum has exposed the woke cause,” proclaimed columnist Tim Stanley in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. The local elections is the place where we’ll be able to see whether that additional mobilisation that’s come out now since Covid is actually going to manifest in electoral terms
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