All I want for Christmas is a government…
A polling station off O'Connell Street in Waterford City.
Even though we were told that we wouldn’t be having an election in November, here we are in the depths of a dark November having an election. After two failed referendums on family and care in March, followed by Local and European elections in June, the Irish electorate will find themselves treading a well-worn path to their local polling place - again.
All over the county, politicians are trying to convince you of how well they have worked for Waterford, how terrible the other crowd are, why you can’t trust others, and that they are the ones that should get your No. 1 vote come Friday, November 29. At least it will be good practice for them when writing their letters to Santa.
The Government was coming towards the end of its mandate. There had to be an election by around the end of February 2025. Yet, the dancing around the date had been going on for months since a decent enough showing for Fine Gael in the Local and European election results in June. Once the budget was delivered the starting gun had already been fired on a general election campaign. We knew what was going to happen, we just needed a date.
What felt like one of the longest talked about elections, is now a campaign of a mere three weeks. Most major parties only released their manifestos with about two weeks to go to the polling date, which meant serious policy debate couldn’t happen. There was only a drip feed of ideas to discuss, one-off measures, which only served to annoy people with the state of the current provision of public services, and not enough structural changes to actually change the direction of the country.
Resulting in some voters finding it easy to know who they won’t vote for but still wondering who to actually vote for.
If you were to listen to any of the parties that have made up the outgoing coalition, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they were never in power at all. The perennial issues of housing and health care are still to be solved. Deciding you know now how to fix everything when you’ve just asked the President to dissolve the Dáil is more likely to annoy voters than inspire them.
The next Dáil will face the complicating factor of an increase in members returned. Due to the increasing population, 174 TDs will be returned to the next Dáil. That means that you will need to get more than 87 TDs to go along with your ideas in order to create the slimmest of majorities.
The days of single-party government are long over in this country. The traditional big beasts of Irish party politics of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will be lucky to get more than 50% combined in the next election.
No party is running enough candidates to even try for a single-party government. Therefore, a coalition of two or more parties is the only workable way to get these numbers across the line.
Traditionally, the smaller the party that forms into a coalition, the more power that it has, but also the bigger the beating it will receive at the following general election. The larger party will essentially eat up the votes of the smaller party and make it take the blame for everything that the public does not like. The Greens have learned this in previous governments and may yet learn again this time around. They can form a support group with Labour and anyone else who is left hanging around from the now defunct Progressive Democrats.
Yet with all these negatives it can work for the smaller parties to step up into government in their own policy interests. For all the pitfalls at the next electoral cycle, they tend to get more cabinet positions than their proportional share of the seats and do get to hold the larger party to ransom when it comes to key issues. No party wants to have a general election that they didn’t plan for.
When it comes to forming the coalition, the ball is in the court of the party with the most seats to start the talks. That’s why it would probably be a bad idea for any small party to start ruling parties in or out until we start getting firm results from the counts rather than before even the postal ballots are returned.
Following the last two general elections, it’s taken months not weeks for the parties to sit down and agree to a programme for government to start the business of running the country. When all the votes are counted in December we might need to ask Santa ourselves for a government that will deliver what we need, never mind what we want.
