Stephen Collins: Government parties looking for a bounce

So far it has been the most curious election campaign anybody in politics can remember. The parties are locked in trench warfare with no sign of anybody generating the momentum to make a decisive breakthrough.

The question now is whether the second half of the campaign will be as static as the first with all of the parties staggering over the line with roughly the same level of support they had at the beginning.

That very prospect of an indecisive result with the likelihood of political and economic uncertainty that it would generate could prove the catalyst for a decisive shift in the final days of the campaign but so far there is no sign of that happening. If anything the marginal shift to date has been in the direction of instability, with increased support for Independents and small parties presaging a badly hung Dáil with all the implications that outcome contains.

Even the politicians are scratching their heads and wondering why the campaign has been so dull to date but there is one obvious answer. In the public mind it has been going on since last autumn.

The frenzied speculation about a November election that swept the Dáil when it resumed in late September means people have been living in the shadow of an election ever since then.

No element of surprise

Once tentative moves towards a November contest were abandoned an election at the end of February became a certainty. So, when Taoiseach

Enda Kenny

finally dissolved the Dáil on February 3rd there was no element of surprise left and no reason for the voters to get excited. Since the campaign began formally there have been few fireworks or cock-ups to ignite public interest, with the focus being on the ground campaign as the parties and candidates scour the country for votes.

The lack of a dramatic game-changer probably suits the Coalition parties rather than the Opposition. The absence of an overwhelming argument for change should give those campaigning for continuity the advantage in the final days.

If anything the biggest game-changer since the start of the campaign has been the controversy about the Special Criminal Court. Unexpected events usually work to upset the plans of those in power but the outbreak of gangland warfare has put the focus on Sinn Féin because of the way Gerry Adams has hitched his star to the abolition of the court and the repeal of the Offences Against the State Act.

The party has always had this position and it will hardly do Sinn Féin much damage with its core voters but for the wider electorate it is a reminder of the bloody republican past that has been widely forgotten.

Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin hit Adams with one of the best lines in the leaders' debate on TV3 and Newstalk on Thursday night when he contrasted the Special Criminal Court with the kangaroo courts of the IRA.

At the very least the controversy has put Sinn Féin on the defensive at a time when it was planning to put the Coalition under the cosh. The court appearances of Thomas “Slab” Murphy have combined the past and present in an even more unwelcome way. For all of Sinn Féin’s claims about “golden circles” in Irish society here is one of their own, “a good republican” in Gerry Adams’s terms, exposed for engaging in a multimillion- euro tax fraud.

If Sinn Féin is on the defensive the other party of Opposition, Fianna Fáil, has had a bit of pep in its step since the beginning of the campaign. Martin has performed well and has begun to put the toxic political memory of the financial crash behind him.

He has managed to focus his campaign on the issue of fairness and in the process has avoided getting bogged down by hypothetical questions about coalition which are a distraction at this stage. His objective is to get as many seats as possible so that Fianna Fáil can start looking like a party of power again, if not after this election then after the next one.

Fine Gael clearly sees a revival of Fianna Fáil as a bigger threat in this election than the growth of Sinn Féin; hence Kenny's swipes at Martin in Thursday's debate. Kenny neatly summed up his party's strategy by labelling Fianna Fáil as the party who wrecked the economy in the past and Sinn Féin as the party that will wreck it in the future.

Kenny has stuck rigidly to his message about “keeping the recovery going” and while this has provoked the usual share of snide comments from the media it makes perfect sense for him to try to keep the debate focused on the issue where he has the strongest argument.

His challenge is to persuade a sufficient proportion of the electorate that keeping the recovery going is more important than venting anger at what has gone wrong.

Complementary messages

Tánaiste Joan Burton has adopted the same tack and it was noticeable in the television debate that she and Kenny performed like a team with complementary messages.

She faces an even more difficult challenge than the Taoiseach. Labour has taken the brunt of the criticism over the past five years and, as the opinion polls make clear, its traditional working-class base has been decimated by the experience of being in government in difficult times.

The party will be reliant on middle-class support for its survival and it will require more than good Fine Gael transfers; it will also need to persuade potential Fine Gael voters to give Labour candidates their number one on this occasion as the best way of ensuring that the Coalition remains in office.

For that to happen both Government parties will need a bounce in the final days of the campaign.