Sinn Féin
Ireland’s
shock poll result was a vote against the success of globalisation
Fintan
O’Toole
The economy
is booming at last but an angry electorate showed Leo Varadker’s government
that the good times are not rolling for all
Sun 16 Feb
2020 07.00 GMTLast modified on Sun 16 Feb 2020 11.32 GMT
In 2011, in
what seemed like a laying to rest of the mad ghosts of Anglo-Irish history, the
Queen was cheered to the rafters in Dublin.
But the
building in which this celebration of amity took place had its own rather
haunting presence. It was the spanking new Convention Centre, a glamorous,
ultra-modern monument to the optimism of the Celtic Tiger years. By the time of
the Queen’s visit, it looked out on a landscape of shattered dreams. From the
top floor, you had a panoramic view of abandoned building sites on the other
side of the Liffey, testaments to the folly that created a spectacular banking
crisis, vicious austerity and deep disillusion with the political system that
had brought such pain.
If you
stand there now, what is most striking is not what you see but what you don’t
see: those jagged gaps that less than a decade ago made Dublin’s docklands look
like a mouthful of broken teeth. Nearly all the holes have been filled in by
headquarters of multinational companies and the lawyers and bankers who serve
them.
The Irish
economy is overflowing again, this time on a wave of outside investment. In
2018 alone, foreign direct investment into Ireland rose by 52%. (It fell by 13%
in the UK and these two figures are probably not unrelated either to each other
or to Brexit.)
One can
question how much of this is sustainable and about how much of it is just vast
multinationals moving money around to take advantage of Ireland’s 12.5%
corporation tax rate. But right now a lot of it is real and visible and not
just in Dublin. Employment has risen for 29 consecutive quarters since 2013 and
is now higher than it was before the crash. Ireland again looks like a big winner
in the game of economic globalisation. Which prompts the obvious question: how
come an angry electorate has just thrown out the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and
given the largest single share of a very fragmented popular vote to a party
that was once a pariah, Sinn Féin? To get to grips with this seeming
contradiction is not just to comprehend contemporary Ireland, it is to grasp
something important about globalisation itself.
When we
think about the rise of nationalism and populism from the US and Britain to
Brazil and India, we usually talk about the people who are losing out: the rage
of those “left behind” by the globalising forces. And if you were looking from
the outside at what has just happened, you would quite reasonably assume that
Ireland, which has seemed relatively immune, has just succumbed to the same
virus. Sinn Féin, after all, is rooted in the extreme, violent nationalism of
the IRA and one of its jubilant election winners even celebrated by shouting
“Up the ’Ra”.
Nobody expected it – including Sinn Féin
itself, which failed to stand enough candidates to take advantage of its vote
But this
perception is wrong, for two big reasons. First, nationalism had relatively
little to do with the Sinn Féin surge. Second, and more intriguingly, the
anti-establishment rage that drove voters towards Sinn Féin, the Greens, the
Social Democrats and almost anyone except the parties that have run the state
for almost a century, is not a reaction against the failure of globalisation.
It is a
reaction against the success of globalisation. Ireland has not been left behind
– it is, on the contrary, at the forefront of this vast process. But what the
election tells us is that, even for the winners, the existing model of “free
market” globalisation is deeply flawed: it cannot produce, even in a rich
society, the public goods that citizens expect.
That the
Sinn Féin surge is not an embrace of militant nationalism is obvious from the
very fact that it was indeed a surge. Nobody expected it, including Sinn Féin
itself, which failed to stand enough candidates to take advantage of its vote.
People were right not to expect it. Sinn Féin has had a string of woeful
outings: in the Irish presidential election in 2018; in the local and European
parliament elections last May; and in the Westminster elections in Northern
Ireland in December.
Its core
vote in the Republic is the 9.5% it got last May. Most of the 15 percentage
points it has added in eight months come from people who never previously voted
for the party. They did not do so because they are not interested in Sinn
Féin’s nationalist brand. They did so now because they were very interested
indeed in its policies on housing and healthcare. A united Ireland was nowhere
in the list of reasons given in an exit poll by voters for their choice –
Brexit, which might be taken as a surrogate for the issue in an Irish context –
was cited by 0% of Sinn Féin voters.
But those
issues that did matter – housing and health – tell us a great deal about what
it feels like to live in a society that is winning the globalisation game.
People have jobs – often well-paid ones. But they can’t afford to pay the rent.
Over the period since the Irish economy started to recover in 2013, real
disposable incomes in Dublin have risen by 13%. Which sounds great – except
that house prices have risen by 62%, pushing rents up with them. And while the
young worry about having a place to live, for older people the biggest election
issue was Ireland’s increasingly privatised health system that treats people
according not to their needs, but to their wealth.
Voters are
now asking their next government to conduct a fascinating experiment: can Ireland
retain the global investment that makes its economy look so successful, while
providing the public goods without which its society is not sustainable?
• Fintan
O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times
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