Post-election deals damaging our democratic process for years

● Voters used to have a decisive impact on who would end up as taoiseach. That has changed

Sometimes things go so badly wrong that even the strongest hearted cannot conceal their dismay. It was thus with Rishi Sunak as his gamble with the Downing Street weather failed dismally.

As the rain cascaded off his expensive suit, his smile faded. When the ironic cacophony of Labour’s 1997 anthem Things Can Only Get Better began to drown out his words, it became a grimace.

He could have chosen to make his shock announcement from behind those polished doors and no one would have batted an eyelid. But he made the wrong call and he knew it. Worse still, he knew the call itself had split his cabinet, and his party.

It all highlights how choices, and ultimately campaigns, matter in politics. Rishi Sunak’s is plucky, foolhardy or suicidal for Tory prospects depending on your perspective, but he and he alone has made that call.

His appeal centres on his record in steadying Britain after the psychodrama of the Brexit years and the chaos of Boris Johnson’s and Liz Truss’s administrations. It also centres on having a plan to deal with illegal immigration in contrast to an untried Labour government under Keir Starmer which has yet to outline any detailed policies.

But after 14 years under Tory governments that have become increasingly flaky and arguably corrupt, the appeal that Starmer offers is a seductive one of simple change — no more no less than a change that offers reassurance.

Is it not the same equation that we will face here when our own time comes in late autumn or early spring? Does it not come down to a tired Coalition ruled by either

Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil since early 2011 facing a fresh Sinn Féinled alternative, untried yes but undoubtedly offering change and new faces?

Well, up to a point. Again, choices matter. Fine Gael has chosen an energetic new leader with vigour to take the fight to the opposition. Simon Harris’s eye-catching move on recognising Palestine may grate with some, but it has stolen a march on Mary Lou McDonald and seems to have resonated with voters.

His government continues to struggle with housing, immigration and health. But it is already clear that a fightback has begun.

Sinn Féin is struggling with immigration in particular. Polls show support for the party has fallen most sharply among younger, urban, working-class voters, a cohort likely to be most concerned about immigration.

There may be a wider unease. Sinn Féin has trimmed many of its policies as the election approaches, cosying up to big business, reassuring multinationals about its tax plans and drawing accolades from blue chip advisers Davy that the party is now more Tony Blair than Jeremy Corbyn.

This is all well and good, but it is muddying the message of uncompromising change.

And in contrast to the UK, that change was already far from reassuring for many voters happy with a booming and confident economy here and, for those with longer memories, deep unease about Sinn Féin’s evasion and double-talk about the national shame of the Troubles.

But campaigns matter and Mary Lou and her party won the last one four years ago.

Sinn Féin made good choices, with the advantage of having absorbed the lessons of a disastrous outing in the European and local elections earlier. The party won the popular vote.

This time the change message offered by the party may not seem as clear due to some of those radical tweaks made by Ms McDonald and her team to more clearly position themselves as a potential party of government and it remains to be seen if they will be as successful as they were four years ago.

But in one important and fundamental sense, the ability of Irish voters to effect political change has been diminished over the last decade and will probably stand in contrast to the impact of voter choices in the UK in six weeks’ time.

Here, the other parties spent the lengthy Covid-driven hiatus after the 2020 poll in negotiations effectively aimed at frustrating that result and preventing Sinn

Féin from enjoying the spoils of its election victory.

That is how PR works, but it remains an awkward reality.

Sinn Féin’s protests then that the “establishment” parties engaged in an anti-democratic set of talks aimed at excluding the party from power may have been populist and naive but illustrated a key change in how elections work here.

Up to the watershed of 2011, voters might have had fewer parties to vote for but they voted in the knowledge that their decisions could have a decisive impact on who would be taoiseach. The wheeling and dealing that followed the last two elections has weakened that link so that nearly as much depends on those talks as on the popular vote.

One does not have to be a cardcarrying Shinner to acknowledge one academic’s observation four years ago that Irish “elections no longer allow the electorate to choose its government and Irish democracy seems the poorer for it”.

One has to hope a third bout of post-election wrangling does not damage the popular appeal of the democratic process itself.