The dust has settled on the general election and a new Irish Government looks set to be established in the coming days.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael return to power once again and the composition of their coalition appears relatively unchanged from the last Government.
What has changed most substantially is the third wheel: gone are the Greens, almost entirely annihilated with the exception of hapless Roderic O’Gorman, and in with the “Regional Independents.”
But who are these Regional Independents really?
If the reports are to be believed, they will include two Super Junior Ministers, Noel Grealish and Sean Canney, and another two Junior Ministers Marian Harkin and Kevin ‘Boxer’ Moran. An interesting pattern emerges—Noel Grealish was in the Progressive Democrats and formed part of a coalition with Fianna Fáil, Seán Canney was a government minister at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform under the Fine Gael-Independent coalition of 2016, to be succeeded by Mr. Kevin ‘Boxer’ Moran.
Of these four independent ministers, three have already been part of government coalitions with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. As for Marian Harkin, who served as an MEP in the European Parliament for fifteen years, she was part of the same ALDE political grouping as Fianna Fáil that has now merged into Renew Europe.
Then we have the Healy-Raes. Immediately after the results of the general election, Michael Healy-Rae went to Twitter and proclaimed that he had just three items to discuss before he would consider entering government: Kerry, Kerry, Kerry.
Well, we say to Mr. Healy Rae that the sole item that we would consider if we were in his shoes is Ireland and a government that serves the Irish people and acts for the Irish people. There is little hope that we will get this bare minimum from any of these chancers.
All we will get from this government is a partial amelioration of our present crisis without the fundamentals changing. Immigration will continue at a steadier rate, and the asylum crisis will grow a tad slower, but people will continue to emigrate at ever-increasing rates, perhaps the only thing that will match rising house prices for wages.
We have heard arguments often that Sinn Féin is the greatest block to a nationalist right-wing in Ireland, but it is these Independents who are far worse. Sinn Féin drew its support from varied interests with a common goal of deposing the Government. It could not hold onto all its eggs in the one basket and when it diverged on immigration, its coalition crumbled.
Independents by their parochial nature enjoy an ideological flexibility that allows them to reposition accordingly to suit public opinion. Sinn Féin, as a national movement, could not immediately change its rhetoric on immigration to suit a geographical, social section of its base in working-class Dublin.
At the end of the day, these people will uphold the status quo. To achieve our objectives, we require radical change and this is a political class naturally resistant to it. The next five years will clear the way once more for a radical alternative. These Regional Independents may not even survive the next five years if we put our minds to it.
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