AS there were no by elections for almost a decade after 1984 there has been no recent experience of the relationship between the pattern of votes cast in by elections and the results for the same constituencies in the following general election. But in the past byins have proved poor of general election results.
Not too much should be read, therefore into the outcome of last Tuesday's two by elections. Nevertheless the Dail political parties would be unwise to ignore the fall their total share of the vote in both constituencies and the substantial support given to independent candidates.
Not alone did Harry Blaney Joe Higgins come close to winning the two seats in Dublin est the increase in the Higgins vote by comparison with the last election alone absorbed of the total votes cast in addition to which a further one tenth of the electorate voted for five other independents.
That the Fianna Fail vote actually fell in both constituencies showed that a high proportion of people were not so much voting against the Government as protesting against the whole political party system.
It must also be a matter for concern that in Donegal North East admittedly part of a border county with a somewhat idiosyncratic voting record so far as the Northern Ireland problem is concerned the total republican vote (Blaneyite plus Sinn Fein) almost doubled to three eighths of the total. In itself, however, the increase in the Sinn Fein vote to 5.5 per cent in Dublin West and 7.5 per cent in Donegal is not particularly surprising or disturbing.
These percentages, although higher than in the past, remain in absolute terms quite low in the light of the amount of publicity this party has been securing for the past couple of years.
Moreover, increases of this magnitude in the Sinn Fein vote in this part of Ireland, relatively remote from the horrific violence of the IRA, carry no particular implications for that party's performance in next month's election in the area where this violence has had its main impact.
No, it is rather the evident disillusionment about our own party political system which should worry us, and our politicians.
One factor influencing this disillusionment may, I believe, be the diminution of the traditional adversarial relationship between some of the parties. To many people politics in the past made sense when they were offered a choice between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, or later between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael plus Labour.
If they didn't like what one or other of these political forces did when in government, they could readily give effect to their disapproval at the next election, knowing that their votes could collectively effect a change of government. Alternatively, if they approved of what the government of the day had been doing during the previous few years, they chose to re-elect it to office.
Now, however, as a result of the proliferation of parties, the Dail arithmetic has become so complex that a whole range of alternative coalitions has become possible, and the voters simply have no way of knowing how to give effect to their wishes as to a future government.
Until and unless the electorate is again presented with some reasonably stable adversarial pattern that effectively predetermines the choice of coalitions facing the incoming Dail a choice which could, but equally might not, be the existing party alignment the established political parties will have difficulty in rekindling the kind of quite widespread public commitment that used to be a feature of our political system.
For in its ability to evoke enthusiasm, politics in Ireland, for all its seriousness, used to have some of the characteristics of a spectator engaged sport. But today it seems to many people too much like a game of chance rather than a sport.
Another factor that may be adversely affecting support for established parties is a growing cynicism about party politics. The understandable concern of democratic politicians to secure their own re-election, and the lengths to which they are sometimes driven in pursuit of this objective, have always invited a measure of public cynicism with out, however, in the past destroying respect for politics and its practitioners.
But in recent years cynicism about politics has become increasingly corrosive in other countries with high visibility corruption problems even more so than here, perhaps.
Three factors in particular seem to me to have contributed to this development. The most general affecting much more than politics, of course has been the widespread decline in deference to those seen as powerful, and the far more uninhibited climate of criticism of institutions and public figures generally.
But more specific to politics has been the growing pressure on politics emanating from vested interests. This is particularly evident at election times when single interest pressure groups, often commanding quite marginal numbers of votes, at any rate at national level, often extort important commitments from political parties.
I think politicians are often slow to recognise the disillusioning impact of the proliferation of these kinds of transactions upon the mass of unorganised voters who understandably feel that the political system should be concerned rather for the general good of the community as well as, of course, for the interests and concerns of ordinary voters like themselves.
Another development that has had negative effects on public attitudes to politics has been the growth of suspicions about financial aspects of party politics.
Much of this has centred on the increasing dependence of parties upon funding by business interests. This has developed as election campaigns have become more "professional", and there fore much more costly.
The belief that politicians are personally motivated by financial considerations a belief which in Ireland has never had any basis in so far as the vast majority of politicians are concerned has been given new life in recent years by the emergence of fund raising, not just for national parties or for constituency organisations, but also for individual TDs jockeying for support vis-a-vis party colleagues in multi seat constituencies.
In the United States this process of individual fund raising has seriously weakened the cohesion of political parties and thus their capacity to legislate effectively in the public interest rather than for the benefit of sectional interests.
Even more disillusioning for voters have been persistent reports that a very small number of politicians have taken bribes in relation to planning or other decisions. This has cast an unjust cloud over politicians generally which may persist until and unless these reports are, and are seen to be, fully investigated, if necessary with the help of grants of immunity to implicated witnesses.
Finally, public disillusionment with politics has been generated by the appointment of party activists to the boards of state bodies as a reward for "political services" which, with the proliferation of parties in government, appears to have become more widespread than was the case a decade ago, as well as by other practices such as the employment of larger numbers of civil servants to handle Ministers' constituency correspondence.
Unless the party leaderships recognise the damage all this is doing to democratic politics, and take energetic steps to "clean up their act" in these respects, they are liable to find themselves before long facing the impossible task of forming stable governments in a Dail in which a proliferation of independents and mavericks of one kind or another makes this an almost impossible task.