The first example was when Conor Gallagher revealed in The Irish Times that a secret agreement between the Irish and British governments, under which RAF jets police Russian intrusions into Irish airspace, has been in operation since the early days of the Cold War. As two examples demonstrated this week, that is a difficult path to walk. My guess is that the only way to manage this challenge is to be clear about what the party would do in Government. The party, of course, realised this long ago, and so began to consciously manage the difficult balancing act of promising change while reassuring people that the things they like – a strong economy, a large welfare state, a stable society – won’t change. Sinn Féin will have to convince enough people that it will be better. The Government’s shortcomings will be not enough on their own to deliver power. One in particular: Sinn Féin still has to win it. If I’m right about this, some important conclusions inevitably present themselves. The shape of the next Government is yet to be settled.
In summary then, with the combined support for the Government parties at about 45 per cent, the combined support of Sinn Féin and other Opposition parties at something similar, and independents picking up the rest, the political and electoral future is up for grabs. So how do things stand? Right now the much-anticipated boundary revisions will be made on a political landscape that is broadly stable, if a bit jumpy. But the broader outcome of elections depends more on the bigger trends in public opinion. But politicians are utterly convinced that the addition or subtraction of a few neighbourhoods can make all the difference to them. How seriously these are taken is debatable. And so TDs and parties have been bombarding the Commission with recommendations, all of which would – coincidentally, of course – be to their electoral benefit. With perhaps 20 new seats in the next Dáil, the stakes are especially high in this revision. But that does not mean that politicians don’t try to influence – legitimately, through open submissions – its conclusions.
It is one of the better long-term decisions by the Irish political elite, to make boundary revisions completely independent of the Government of the day. Around Leinster House, and the Government departments, public bodies and watering holes clustered around it, there is one topic about which TDs, senators and party apparatchiks of all political hues are obsessed right now: the changes to constituency boundaries that will be recommended by the new Electoral Commission this summer.
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