When will the General Election be?
When will the General Election be?
Despite public comments, the furniture is being moved to go soon...
The problem with election speculation is that you can honestly change your mind every day. I’ve been telling people for the last few months that November remained a prospect for an election simply because it makes the most sense for a government seeking re-election to do so at the most favourable time.
Outgoing TDs want certainty about their professional lives before Christmas; the coalition parties are looking good in the polls; Sinn Féin does not (yet) seem to have discovered any new magic ingredient to revive its own poll performance. The Budget was frontloaded so that almost all of the one-off bonus/lump sum payments will arrive in November or December, and eaten bread is soon forgotten. The last two elections were called by governments hoping that they would be rewarded in February for tax cuts delivered in January. Politicians continually forget that most people are broke in January, and any modest bump in take-home pay is swallowed by the black hole of a post-Christmas credit card.
And yet: I surprised my colleagues at work in the last few days by sharing an alternative analysis - that Micheál Martin had been so vocally opposed to a November election, that it would be impossible for Simon Harris to talk him around. The Taoiseach has the legal right to call the election at a time of his choosing, but knows the realpolitik of starting the campaign with a thumb in the eye of his only likely coalition partner.
But: calling an election is not as simple as making an appointment with the President and then shaking hands for three or four weeks. Dissolving the Dáil means any legislation currently before the House is dropped; doing so in the immediate aftermath of a Budget means the Budget might not actually exist in law, which comes with its own complications for (literally) keeping the lights on.
I posted a tweet on Thursday with a summary of the moving parts that would need to be passed before a dissolution, and concluded that an early election now seemed unlikely. Yet, here I am a day later, leaning towards the opposite conclusion. Whichever is the outcome, I will look like a mug somewhere.
One thing to mention is that when the Dáil might be dissolved, the Seanad is not, and remains in existence for 90 days afterwards. Granted, it’s a lame duck Seanad where the vast majority of its members are immediately hitting the road aspiring to join the next Dáil - but in principle, the Seanad continues to exist and can finish off any legislation the Dáil has already finished with.
This means any legislation which has cleared the Dáil, and which the Seanad is unlikely to amend (read: anything the government won’t then try to tinker with), can be left with the Seanad while TDs hit the trail. Legislation that the Government itself amends in the Seanad, must go back to the Dáil so that both Houses have ratified the same draft of the Bill.
Firstly, the bits that are directly related to the Budget:
✔️ The Social Welfare Bill: This gives legal effect to the social welfare changes announced in Budget 2025. It is due to go through all stages in the Dáil next Tuesday and Wednesday. The Oireachtas Committee system, which ordinarily is given a chance to conduct line-by-line scrutiny, is being bypassed. This is not unprecedented, but nonetheless unusual: last year’s Bill went to the Committee. The government has a straightforward rationale for this: the Bill must be on the statute books for the first week of November, so that child benefit recipients can get their double payment.
❌ The Finance Bill: This gives effect to tax changes in the Budget, and therefore doesn’t need to be on the books with the same speed. It’s 188 sections and extends to well over 200 pages. As it stands, debate is to begin in the Dáil next Wednesday, but ‘committee stage’ (the micro-scrutiny I mentioned above) is slated for the first week of November. This could change.
✔️ Energy Credits: The two €125 credits being applied to bills (one in November-December, one in January-February) require a full law to be passed. This has already gone through the Dáil. It’s not on the draft Seanad schedule for the week of October 15-17, but could easily feature the following week and Seanad, where it passed all stages this week, and is on its way to the President.
Then the Budget-Ish stuff
There are two other ancillary budget-esque bits, which are not part of Budget 2025 but which are nonetheless indispensable for the Government or for public governance:
✔️ Supplementary Estimates: This is the biggest departure between my ‘no election’ analysis of Thursday, and my ‘actually yes probably an election’ analysis of Friday. The original draft of the Dáil schedule for October 15-17 did not include these, but it seems they’re happening, and that is a material change of circumstances.
Supplementary Estimates are not widely understood in the public, but they’re an enormously important part of civic administration. They effectively amount to top-ups or tweaks to the original budgets of various State departments. The Health budget, for example, routinely needs topping up before the end of the year; if a supplementary estimate had not been published, this would mean literally running out of cash before December 31. The Social Protection vote, meanwhile, needs topping up before December so that there’s enough cash in the coffers to pay the ‘Christmas bonus’ double payment.
These supplementary estimates are now due to be published next Tuesday, and will be referred to committees for consideration almost immediately. Nine committees (at least, at the time of writing) are to consider the additional estimates next week. This is unusually quick and is, at least, an indication of options being left open.
❌ Appropriations Bill: This is perhaps the nichest part of the whole gig. At the end of the year, after supplementary estimates have been considered/approved by the various Dáil committees, a short template Bill is passed to enshrine in law how much each Government department/agency is allowed to spend for that year. There is no timetable for this, but debate and passage of the Bill is so routine and unremarkable that it has often passed the Dáil, in all stages, on the nod, without a debate at all. It’s therefore plausible that the Bill could be drafted, produced and passed relatively quickly.
❌ Health Insurance (Amendment) Bill: This is template law passed towards the end of every year, involving small changes to the ‘community ratings’ system wherein younger/healthier insurance customers pay higher premiums so as to subsidise the care of those who need it more regularly. This is now a matter of annual routine and almost always bypasses the committee system by being quickly debated in front of the whole house. There’s no timetable for this as yet, but as it’s no longer a contentious piece of business, easily drafted and scheduled at short notice.
The Non-Budget Stuff
Separate to the Budget, there are a few other policy priorities the Government wants to get finished. This isn’t an exhaustive list - and there are dozens of other Bills sitting somewhere in the system, which the Government would contend are important. Nonetheless, the ones below are the ones
✔️ The Regulation of Gambling Bill, which includes radical curtailments of how gambling firms can advertise and sponsor, and some ancillary changes to the rules around smaller lotteries (there’ll be impacts for GAA clubs). This has been in the works a long time, but the Government made changes in the Seanad. It’s due back in the Dáil for final consideration next week, and can then go to the President for signature.
✔️ The Planning and Development Bill, the biggest reform in planning law since the year 2000, has completed a protracted process (including over 130 hours of committee microscrutiny, across ten weeks) and is with the President for signature. That’s the Bill that got Mark Ruffalo upset: only after the microscrutiny of the Dáil committee, did the Government then introduce amendments in the Seanad which could allow for the development of offshore liquified gas terminals.
✔️ Legislation on hate crime (but no longer hate speech - that aspect is being dropped and parked for now) is due for its final debate in the Seanad next Wednesday. The changes will need to be referred back to the Dáil, which already approved the Bill with only minor objection; that could follow the template of the gambling law by going back to the Dáil the week after next.
✔️ The Seanad Electoral (University Members) (Amendment) Bill. UL graduate Tomás Heneghan took a successful Supreme Court challenge against the State’s failure to allow graduates of universities other than Trinity College and the NUI to vote in the Seanad’s university electoral panels, despite a referendum in 1979. A reform to abolish the two TCD and NUI constituencies, replacing them with a single six-member constituency to include all universities, is also due to complete its journey in the Seanad next Wednesday. Given the Supreme Court instruction to fix the problem by next April, Dáil ratification will be routine. Moreover, it’s notable that the remedy (contentious as it is, given the reform is relatively limited) is being rushed through so quickly, when it could always have waited until next springtime.
❌ The Mental Health Bill which tries to consolidate and modernise the regulation of mental health services (including CAMHS for the first time) has passed second stage in the Dáil but does not have a date for committee scrutiny. The Health Committee’s meeting for next week has been refixed to consider the Supplementary Estimate instead. Micheál Martin today cited that as a specific project he wanted to get completed before the election; his own party colleague Mary Butler is responsible for it.
🤷 New housing targets: This is the one other large piece of work that Simon Harris, in particular, has indicated should be finished before a dissolution. Certainly, it would be nonsensical to call a general election in which housing will be a central element, if in fact there is no universal clarity on how many homes Ireland needs. However, this is the one piece of the jigsaw which doesn’t have a parliamentary role: there’s nothing for the Dáil to do as part of this. (Arguably, that’s a card the Government can exploit: the coalition will have advance sight of the targets and can prepare manifestos accordingly…)
So, where do we stand?
The biggest obstacle to a general election being called soon is the passage of the Finance Bill. It is untenable to call the election without that Bill finishing its journey in the Dáil: if the Budget’s tax changes do not exist in law, the election can simply become a re-run of the Budget where opposition parties may outbid the government. If Committee Stage remains parked until November, an early election is off the cards.
Next week’s published schedule includes the opening stages of debate, but no more than that. There’s one more week of sittings then (October 22-24) before a Halloween mid-term recess. Could the committee system be by-passed (as is the case for the Social Welfare Bill), and the ‘remaining stages’ for the Finance Bill be shoved through in short order? Yes. And, if you were the government trying to exploit the element of surprise, this is what you’d do - giving as little notice as possible about your intentions.
The only other crucial policy plank (at least by the coalition’s own metrics) is the Mental Health Bill, which could also bypass the committee system by having committee stage taken in the Dáil as a whole if needed. That, then, could be left with a lame duck Seanad for passage even after the Dáil is dissolved.
When you look at all the various moving parts, and how the schedule is being engineered to accommodate them, it is obvious that the government - despite all its public protestations to the contrary - is giving itself the option of an early election. All of the necessary loose ends can be tied up by the Halloween recess on October 24th, which give Simon Harris the license to propose an election. There will be almost nothing pressing left on the outgoing government’s agenda. That could well fulfil Harris’ definition of going ‘full term’.
Why bring the Dáil back for seven more sitting weeks before Christmas, if the main legislative priorities have been fulfilled? (There is certainly no point reconvening after Christmas: there are at most six sitting weeks before the mandatory dissolution on February 22nd, but sitting beyond January 17th also requires the Government to move writs for Dáil by-elections which will never happen.)
So the election will be…?
Much as I can hear the protestations of ministers and their special advisors, saying there is a whole heap of other overlooked measures I’ve omitted here, the government is almost at the point where it will have achieved all of its publicly stated plans.
In short, there’s a real ‘end of term’ vibe to the legislative workload scheduled for the next two weeks. Ordinarily this is a volume of legislative throughput you’d only see in the weeks coming up to Christmas or some other longer recess. The Government, as I’ve concluded, is clearly doing as much as possible to give itself the option of an early election.
We’ll know more in seven days time, when the agenda for the final week of pre-Halloween sittings emerges, but as it stands there is every possibility of the Taoiseach being able to declare his short-term agenda complete, and seek a dissolution of the Dáil on Thursday 24rd or Friday 25th October.
The general election must be held between 18 and 25 days of this (not including Sundays or public holidays - remember, Monday 28th October is a bank holiday). If the Dáil were dissolved on the evening of Thursday 24th October, the election could be held anytime between Friday 15th and Saturday 23rd November.
There’s an Ireland rugby international on the evening of Friday 15 November (Ireland v Argentina, live on Virgin Media One, cough cough) which might be an inhibition as it distracts affluent, government-minded voters from going to vote. Moreover, we’ve already had two Friday polling dates in 2024, for the March referendums and for the European and local elections in June, so the polling date could be fixed for a Saturday which doesn’t entail losing a third day of school closures this year.
Or, of course, a government going ‘full term’ might genuinely mean working until Christmas, calling the election in mid-January, holding it in mid-February, and finding some other significant business to transact in the meantime.
Like I said: whichever is the outcome, I will look like a mug somewhere.