Brendan Hoban: Nothing is more unpredictable than politics   

Western People 22.10.2024

A lot can happen in a very short time. Or as the former British prime minister, Harold Wilson, was reputed to have said during one of the UK’s seemingly never-ending crises in the 1960s, ‘A week is a long time in politics’.

Just a matter of months ago, Sinn Féin was riding high in the polls, with the luxury of choosing extra candidates who were expected to sweep the party to victory in the general election on the back of an undisguised populism and an almost feral loyalty to their leader. Mary Lou, so long the flavour of the month, was the anointed putative Taoiseach in the next government. Everything was going to plan. Steady as she goes. Sinn Féin could rightly justify what Tony Blair once called ‘feeling the hand of history’ on their shoulders.

At the time, Fine Gael under Leo Varadkar was regarded as a busted flush, with half its Dáil deputies deciding one by one to retire from politics, until more were leaving than were staying. It was as if an unaccountably long stint in office had reached a natural conclusion and the prospect of long years of opposition beckoned. And with Varadkar and others taking to the hills, Fine Gael seemed a hopeless case.

Enter a man-child, one Simon Harris, whose day has come and for whom everything was possible, preferably done today or this evening but at the latest tomorrow.

In a matter of days, possibly of hours, Harris became the glittering star in the new political firmament and a freak of nature in a lavishly-gifted, articulate, energetic  character whose day has come. The Stardust debacle was sorted; heads of government departments were knocked together; plans were announced to sort out heretofore intractable problems like housing; a fast talker he started an unannounced campaign to shake hands with everyone in Ireland at least once before the upcoming election and a fast walker he passed everyone in front of him as the sobriquet, the Duracell Bunny, found a pertinent home. Sorting out problems seems to come as easily to Harris as doing a familiar daily crossword. 

Instead of a presumed perception that Fine Gael was too long in office, suddenly there was a new kid on the block promising not the end of an historic 14-year span in government but the start of a new era driven by an inspired and inspiring leader not yet 40 years of age.

The icing on the cake of that sudden transformation was that whereas heretofore Sinn Féin seemed to be on the cusp of almost certain victory while Fine Gael was shedding TDs by the day, imperceptibly the great tide of politics turned. Fine Gael with an exceptional leader just out of his teens became an unlikely saviour of the old party while Sinn Féin began shedding candidates by the day with not just one or two but even four candidates falling away in little more than a week. To paraphrase Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s, The Importance of Being Ernest, losing one Dáil Deputy or even two ‘may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose four (in the same week) looks like carelessness’.

Worse still as Sinn Féin’s reputation as the presumed great green hope of Irish politics found its credibility slipping through its fingers, it was dragged (or dragged itself) into the messy business of defending its reputation in the matter of child abuse. A political graveyard that damages the brand.

Now Sinn Féin in free-fall seems to be stepping away from power as Fine Gael seems to be going in the opposite direction in the merry dance of Irish politics as predictably when ‘one stepped out, one stepped in again’. Within a few months, both Sinn Féin and Fine Gael have discovered both ends of the bouncy castle of Irish politics and the extreme ends of the wisdom of Harold Wilson’s famous maxim that a week can be a short time in politics.

But Harris will know too that the tide of politics can change suddenly and great stars in the political firmament can suddenly fizzle out. Few politicians are blessed with the ability to see around corners and sudden banana skins are everywhere. Another British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, reading the future through the lens of past experience, discovered that even though the people ‘never had it so good’ he knew too that the hidden torpedoes of politics were ‘events, dear boy, events’, unexpected and unpredictable occurrences that compromise the future. There is, as many have discovered, no such thing as a ‘Teflon Taoiseach’.

No doubt Sinn Féin’s day will come again after they dust themselves down and divest themselves of an unworthy arrogance that has developed over the years since the polls  smiled on them. They will learn that their recent rash of intolerance as expressed in their present fetish for litigation is now coming home to haunt them as the media hang them out to dry. It was, as was clear to everyone but themselves, that it was a failed strategy for a party that had more skeletons than most in their cupboards.

Meanwhile, as I write, even though Simon Harris and Micheál Martin seem remarkably coy about taking the present prevailing tide of support, estimated by the astute Stephen Collins of The Irish Times at a possible round figure of 90 deputies for a combined coalition of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, it seems to most commentators irrational not to call an election soon – with so many ducks now in a row.

But they know too as everyone knows that in politics as in life things are not always as they seem. And ‘the best laid plans of mice and men can often go awry’ as the poet, Robert Burns, has pointed out. Nothing in Irish politics is often as it seems. And looking forward knowing so much we may soon, in retrospect, be reminded of how little we do know.