Build it and they will come (and look around, and maybe leave again)
Build it and they will come (and look around, and maybe leave again)
There’s probably never been a better time to start a political party in Ireland. But there’s probably never been a harder time either.
There’s probably never been a better time to start a political party in Ireland. But there’s probably never been a harder time either.
And so a new party is born… ish. Lucinda Creighton is to take the plunge and will use the help of 100 volunteers — including Eddie Hobbs — to found a new political party in the next eight weeks. The venture is so young that there are only a handful of policies, and no name — the rest, we are told, will come after a series of nationwide meetings in the next few weeks.
It’s difficult to appraise any political movement’s chances of success until we know what it stands for, and at present we don’t know a whole lot about the policies of this new party (known only by its #rebootireland hashtag).
But let’s take a look at what we already know. There are four public ‘pillars’ of its manifesto, the first of which is ‘Giving Politics back to the People’ — and given that Lucinda Creighton’s career within Fine Gael ended as a direct result of a rigid and unforgiving whip system, it’s hardly any surprise that political reform would be top of the agenda.
At the Reform Alliance’s ‘monster rally’ a year ago, many discussions about matters like public finance and health ultimately devolved back into a broader chat about political failings — reform of which was clearly among the biggest desires of the assembled masses.
Strikingly though, the reform ideas being put forward for consideration did not appear all too radical: yes, they were different to the status quo, but there was nothing that hadn’t already been floated in advance of the ‘democratic revolution’ of February 2012. I took a list at the time:
The right to recall underperforming TDs
An expanded role for the Seanad
Making it easier for smaller firms to tender for public contracts
No political patronage
Decentralised decision-making processes
A more powerful Freedom of Information system
An accountable civil service
Helping TDs to hold the government to account
All were, on the face of it, good ideas — but none of them hadn’t been heard before. All had been cited as factors in Ireland’s economic collapse and anyone with an ear to the ground had heard these rumblings from miles away.
Reform, reform everywhere (and not a drop to drink)
Some of those principles have bled into other ‘pillars’ of the new party’s agenda. The idea of an accountable civil service (something Brendan Howlin is already committed to, at least nominally) has manifested in the pillar of ‘Making the Public Sector Public’ — in what seems a bid to blur the lines between politicians and their civil servant underlings, to the point where everyone on the public payroll becomes publicly and transparently responsible for their actions.
Another pillar is the ambition of ‘Building an Economy for Entrepreneurs across the social, private and public sectors’ — which seems to overlap quite a bit with the monster rally’s notion of helping smaller Irish firms to compete for public contracts. The idea of enterpreneuralism in the public sector is broadly untapped and, perhaps, needs to be defined better before it can win people over. Everyone (including public and civil servants) has their gripes with the public service; anyone can curry favour by promising to change things. But if the lines between a public servant and an entrepreneur are to be blurred, we’ll probably need to see how.
As regards the private sector, Lucinda Creighton insisted on Friday that the party would “ensure that it is more fruitful to invest in a small business than in property”. It will be interesting to see whether this extends to an outright policy intervention in the housing market, and how many voters will be happy to support a government that stops their main asset from rising in value.
The last pillar is perhaps the most intriguing. The new party wants to measure Government ‘with a clear social target’, defined by Eddie Hobbs as a Minimum Lifestyle Standard. On Newstalk on Friday evening Hobbs explained this as an income to guarantee a “decent” standard of living within the Republic of Ireland — coming in at “somewhere between €400 and €600 a week, depending on the sort of family that you’ve got”. He added: “We have a left-wing target using, you could argue, right-wing economics.” (Joan Burton has a similar idea of a ‘living wage’, usually calculated at €11.45 an hour — or €458 over a 40-hour working week.)
The Sunday papers have added another few grapes to the Reboot Ireland policy vine, which I’ll come back to later.
But the other clear aspect of the party which doesn’t translate into a pillar is the ambition of reflecting rural Ireland. Alongside the south Dublin barrister-turned-TD and the Corkonian financial commentator sat a professional GAA coach from Ferbane, independent county councillor John Leahy. A games development officer for 13 years who polled eighth in first preferences in Laois-Offaly in 2011, Leahy cited the GAA as a model for how a volunteer ethos could successfully foster and promote a particular set of beliefs.
The party literature might be festooned with landmark photos of Dublin’s financial district, but the heart of the party seems to lie well beyond the Pale.
It’s that sort of tone which seems to be the predominant difference between the new party and the remains of the departed Progressive Democrats. But that aside, the cocktail of marrying rural identity, small enterprise and social outreach looks sort of familiar.
Indeed: a party founded by one ex-Fine Gael TD, and which is likely to include at least four other ex-FG members as its flagship candidates, seems to be treading directly on the toes of Fianna Fáil’s historical bid to marry economic progress with social gain for all.
The market in the gap
The timing of Creighton’s new venture is hardly a surprise. There is an obvious public appetite to vote for someone beyond the four major parties currently represented in the Dáil. In the three main polls before Christmas, supporters of ‘independents and others’ accounted for between 30 and 32 per cent of the electorate — and in spite of assumptions to the contrary, the polling data shows that smaller left-leaning parties don’t account for a huge amount of that remainder. The public clearly wants something new — though it hasn’t yet articulated, or even decided, exactly what that something is.
But it’s one thing to identify a gap in the market — and quite another to determine whether, in fact, there is a market within that gap. The field catering to this dissatisfied chunk of voters is at its most crowded ever — the list of contenders almost sounds like a forgotten verse of ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’.
Alongside Lucinda Creighton’s new endeavour, across the political spectrum, there’s the independent movement being planned by Shane Ross and Finian McGrath; a similar-sounding alliance being put together by Michael FitzMaurice; a separate Independents’ Network of councillors organised by Catherine Murphy, John Halligan and Thomas Pringle; and Mick Wallace’s officially registered party, the Independents for Equality Movement. Beyond those, there are five different parties emerging (or re-emerging) from the dissolution of the United Left Alliance: the Socialist Party and the heavily overlapping Anti-Austerity Alliance; People Before Profit, which itself incorporates most of the Socialist Workers’ Party, the United Left Party of Clare Daly and Joan Collins; and Seamus Healy’s Workers and Unemployed Action Group which mostly limits its operations to the southern parts of County Tipperary.
And that’s before you look to the groups who aren’t already represented in the Oireachtas — the Workers Party, the Communists, the Greens, the Catholic Democrats, Eirígí, Fís Nua, Direct Democracy Ireland and the Irish Democratic Party. (And that’s not including the smaller, region-specific parties like the South Kerry Independents Alliance, the Letterkenny Residents’ Party, and the Senior Solidarity Party in Dublin.)
Ireland already has 21 officially registered political parties — and one could argue that if the 17 smallest ones haven’t already catered to the disaffected crowd, there’s something wrong with not just Irish politics, but Irish people. It will be a genuine accomplishment if the new party manages to find coherent ground in the ether and becomes a permanent part of the political landscape.
And therein lines the rub
Hobbs spoke at some length on Friday about how impressed he was by the infrastructure of the emerging party — revealing a cellular (corporate-sounding) structure which allows everyone to focus on their own tasks and not be distracted by the startup problems of another wing.
There are 100 volunteers already involved, and many more will be needed after the formal launch in eight weeks’ time. The party has ambitions to field candidates in every Dáil constituency at the next election; those 40 candidates will each need a few dozen volunteers if they are to stand any chance of meaningful success. (They might also need a raft of incumbent TDs to sign up as candidates — but it’s not clear whether an ‘established’ TD might actually be all that welcome.)
But therein lies perhaps the biggest challenge it will face — and one in which the ‘newer’ parts of the party policy are curious. On Friday, journalists’ questions about abortion and gay marriage were largely deflected: we were told that no whip would apply to members in either case, but the party hadn’t yet sought to flesh out its policies and its only commitment was to cater to a wide spectrum of opinions.
But in the Sunday Independent, Creighton declared that the party would be in favour of water charges — having voted against the Water Services Bill, apparently because it still opposes Irish Water as an entity. She also decided that the party would abolish the Universal Social Charge — but quite how it proposes to do so is unknown, given that it will not “prop up” either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael in government, and instead expects those two parties to coalesce in power after the next election.
This is part of the danger in setting up a new party — especially at a time when so many people seem keen to see one.
The biggest single round of applause at the Reform Alliance meeting was when Lucinda Creighton name-checked the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill as the reason she and six others had been forced out of Fine Gael. If abortion was the lightning rod that got nearly a thousand curious observers into the room, any failure to adopt a stern pro-life policy won’t do much to stop those people from looking elsewhere.
Likewise, before the 2011 election, Creighton attracted some ire on Twitter after telling a voter she considered marriage to be a means of facilitating procreation — and that she therefore didn’t believe in marital rights for gay couples. Seemingly this position is now somehow diluted: Creighton says she is in favour of holding the referendum and appears (personally) happy to vote Yes when it arrives.
But has the opposition to USC been agreed at some sort of party level, or has Creighton (or Hobbs) simply decided this will be a red-line issue? Has the support for Irish Water been similarly agreed — or has it been foisted upon the party’s newcomers, to the point where John Leahy deleted a criticism of Irish Water from his website?
But tax and water charges are just two issues — a full manifesto before a general election needs to deal with a couple of dozen. As yet we have no hint of the party’s policies on finances, health, education, or the EU to name but a few.
And what happens when a thousand voices express a range of different views on the EU? What happens if some of the room wants better EU integration as a means of ensuring a deal on Ireland’s banking debts, while the others advocate an immediate default to eliminate our other debts? What happens if some of the room want to leave the Eurozone and revalue an Irish punt, and the rest scream bloody murder?
And what happens if those who ‘win’ the internal debate on EU policy then lose the debate on the party’s preferred healthcare model? Or those who ‘win’ on both health and EU are unhappy with the final policy on education? Or public funding for the arts? Or the state’s role in subsiding agriculture? Or for its tax policy?
If someone wins in half of the policy debates, and loses in the other half, will they remain involved in the party? If someone’s attended foundation meetings for a new political party, and then object to half of its manifesto, will they even vote for it? Or will the party end up only agreeing a set of policies so narrow that it won’t have a mandate to govern on any other matters?
With 21 political parties in the field (not to mention the other alliances lying in the long grass) setting up a 22nd will be a monumental challenge. Yes, there is an unprecedented appetite for something new — but the field has never been more crowded. Even if the party manages to overcome the legal hurdles for fundraising and builds a robust infrastructure to withstand the inevitable rainy days, it then runs up against a fundamental problem with a fragmented market: unless an aspiring supporter is on board for all of the new party’s policy, they could well find themselves looking elsewhere.
If Creighton can pull together a political party to overcome all that, she’ll be doing very well indeed.