Fergus Finlay: The smaller political parties are behaving like the adults in the room
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If I’m being honest, I’ve found my stomach being turned a bit by the sham carry-on of the two largest parties in the government. Happy enough to work together for the last four years, and we all know they’d be delighted to be back together after the election. But they’ve spent the first week of the election campaign involved in makey-up rows about nothing, pretending to be wildly different from each other.
They’ve been behaving like kids fighting over whose ball it is to present an utterly fake façade of difference. I don’t know who they think they’re fooling, but they need to stop it and start acting like grownups.
Let me tell you why. My wife woke up the other morning and said, “sometimes I dream in black and white”. It stopped me in my tracks, because the colour of my dreams had never occurred to me. I’ve thought about it, and I still don’t know what colour I dream in. But all my childhood memories are grey.
No matter how hard I try, I can only remember two things that had colour. When I was about 10, the house we lived in in Bray was painted a light blue. I drive past it occasionally, and it’s still, comfortingly, that way. When I was thirteen, my parents gave me a bike with racing handles. It was a bright gold colour, and I loved it. Years passed before I realised that my dad had painted over rust, because a second-hand bike was all he could afford. That never mattered to me.
But everything else was grey. Classrooms, school uniforms, school buildings, the road to school, everyone you met on the way. All grey. Food was grey, what passed for television was grey, every view out every window. So were our attitudes — grey, inward-looking, hidebound.
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That was the kind of place Ireland was then and for many years after. We often think of the 1960s — The Beatles and Mary Quant, the Kennedys and the Civil Rights movement, massive student protests throughout Europe — as times of extraordinary change. They largely passed Ireland by. When Martin Luther King said “I have a dream” to a quarter of a million people in Washington DC, Éamon de Valera, then in his 80s, was the President of Ireland — and he still had 10 years to serve.
But we’re not that way any more. We’ve not only confronted a lot about our past, we’ve changed it. Ireland is technicolour now.
They just aren’t capable of it, and they could do enormous damage as a result.
There’s a thing about us that is growing in importance every day. Not our economy or our wealth, our people or our landscape, as vital as they all are. A couple of weeks ago, I came across a statistic that really alarmed me — the sort of thing I should know but didn’t. One in eight — no more than that — of the world’s population live in a functioning democracy. After the election of Trump, and likely bending of the knee to Putin and Netanyahu, it may soon enough be a lot less than that.
(I haven’t had a chance to write in detail about the outcome of the American elections, and I hope to eventually. I know I got it totally wrong this time. Unlike some of my revered colleagues on this very page, Kamala Harris failed not because she was a failure, but because Joe Biden made a fundamental mistake in trying to hang on for a second term. But the outcome was the election of a man who has less commitment to the core value of American democracy than any American leader in history. The medium-term consequence may well be the end of democracy in Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe.)
If (when) all that happens, we are looking at a near future where less than one in ten people in the world live within democratic structures and forms of government.
I could write forever about how far we’ve come, and how proud I am of the people of this country and their wisdom and courage when it’s needed. But the really important thing is where we are now. We’re a strong, healthy, vibrant, democracy. And that makes us a precious metal, the rarer the more valuable. And that’s why this election that we’re a week or so into is critically important.
I’ll write about the issues next week. For now, I have this really strong feeling that our commitment to democracy is the most important statement we can make. And, eventually, it might make us a real leader in the free world.
Elections are serious matters, and this one is especially so. Ever since the financial collapse in 2008, alienation has been growing throughout the democratic world. Bad actors — the Trumps and others — have used that alienation to create a vicious circle of “them and us”, particularly around the issue of immigration.
We’re not immune from that. There is an entire generation of younger people in Ireland effectively locked out of the housing market. That’s because of a spectacular failure of public policy, based on reluctance to trust the public sector and therefore an unwillingness to lead and drive local authorities to do what they used to be able to do effectively.
When you think about it, it’s actually mind-boggling that throughout the second half of the twentieth century (when Ireland was much poorer), local authorities were the great housebuilders. In the last 25 years, when Ireland was at its richest, local authorities have been able to contribute little or nothing.
It’s no wonder there is an entire generation at risk of becoming increasingly alienated from ordinary democratic politics. And we know there are elements working away at trying to turn that alienation into hatred of others.
The smaller parties are behaving like the adults in the room. I’ve been a member of the Labour Party all my adult life, and one of my reasons is its deep and unswerving commitment to a democratic future. Its fighting for its life in this election, and that doesn’t prevent it from highlighting the real issues. And the same is true of the other smaller parties like the Social Democrats and other left-wing groups.
We desperately need to see this election focus on real issues. There are rights at stake — including the right of an entire generation to at least aspire to a home of their own. The more we see the people who should be leaders, instead behaving like pub bores arguing with each other, the more in danger we are of an angry and incoherent outcome to this election. And we deserve way better than that.