Poor old Keir Starmer might not agree, but as far as this writer is concerned you can’t beat a good byelection. A tightly focused contest, a manageable field of candidates, confined geography – and the eyes of the political world upon it. Throw in a bit of good weather for canvassing and it’s a political correspondent’s ideal holiday.
Take a rattle through byelections of the last 40 years and you’ll see the start of more than a few significant political careers as well as a turning points that signified substantial shifts in politics.
In the last half century, the Dáil careers of Enda Kenny, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Brian Cowen, Michael Ring, Brian Lenihan jnr, Simon Coveney, Pearse Doherty, Helen McEntee, Paul Murphy and Ivana Bacik were all started at byelections.
Sure, many of them were replacing their dads. And a fair few duds were elected, too. But winning a byelection is a big start for anyone.
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The significance of byelections sometimes goes beyond their own constituency. Back in 1979, it was the loss of two byelections that pushed Jack Lynch’s leadership of Fianna Fáil over the edge, ushering in the era of Charles Haughey’s imperium. That would have enduring consequences for the party and the country.
Had Lynch not lost the byelections – both in his native Cork, amplifying the severity of the blow – there wouldn’t have been the air of panic around that prompted him to retire suddenly.
Chance favours the prepared mind, and Haughey was prepared. George Colley, despite his desire for a quick contest (as Gary Murphy relates in his biography of Haughey), was not. He might have benefited from a later contest.
Certainly, we know that the banks were closing in on Haughey in late 1979, threatening to close down his gargantuan overdraft (their concerns miraculously disappeared when he became taoiseach). That would have finished him.
Anyway, a different outcome would have made for a different 1980s and, therefore, a different Ireland today.
Four byelections in 1994 saw Fianna Fáil lose two seats, while Fine Gael and Democratic Left added two seats each. This transformed the Dáil arithmetic, making a coalition between Fine Gael, Democratic Left and Labour (then in government with Fianna Fáil) possible.
So when the Fianna Fáil-Labour Coalition hit the buffers, Labour bailed out and the “Rainbow” government, headed by John Bruton, was born – without a general election.
What’s the counterfactual? Without the byelections, or with different outcomes to them, then the Fianna Fáil-Labour government would have continued, probably under the leadership of Bertie Ahern, once Albert Reynolds had departed.
There’s a fair chance, too, then that the subsequent Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat coalitions would never have happened and that the Celtic Tiger years would have seen Ireland governed by a centre-left FF-Labour administration, rather than a centre-right FF-PD combination.
Again, that would give us a different country today.
Sometimes byelections just show a change in the political weather. In 2009, in the depths of the financial crisis, RTÉ’s George Lee stood for Fine Gael and romped home – with more than 50 per cent of the first count vote – in the Dublin South constituency.
It was a signal not just of rejection of Fianna Fáil, but also that middle-class Ireland was now looking to Fine Gael. It didn’t work out for Lee, who – feeling frozen out by Fine Gael – scampered back to RTÉ after eight months as a TD. But it was a sign of things to come.
The following year, the national mood had darkened. The Cowen administration was in effect forced by the High Court to hold an overdue byelection in Donegal South West, and Pearse Doherty made his entry on to the national stage – beginning a new stage in the rise of Sinn Féin that would bring the party to the brink, if not across the threshold, of government.
By 2014, after years of austerity, the political appetite for radical solutions had grown and resistance to water charges was at the forefront of opposition to the Fine Gael-Labour Government.
In the face of expectations of a Sinn Féin victory, Paul Murphy of the Anti-Austerity Alliance won a byelection in Dublin South West. After that, any party seeking working-class votes knew it could not promote water charges.
But byelections can mislead, too. In 2021, Fianna Fáil’s disastrous showing in the Dublin Bay South byelection was touted as signifying the beginning of the end for Micheál Martin’s leadership.
Labour, on the other hand, was cock-a-hoop, having at last got Ivana Bacik into the Dáil and having retaken a seat in one of its urban liberal heartlands.
Martin, as we know, survived; it was Labour who subsequently saw a change of leadership, with Alan Kelly replaced less than a year later by Bacik.
Sometimes byelection results do not mean what they seem to; but then, often in politics, things are not what they seem. That’s one of the reasons why it is so intriguing.
Like poor Keir Starmer, the leaders of the Government will not be relishing the contests to come in Dublin Central and Galway West. Expect to hear the phrase “Governments don’t win byelections” a lot in the coming months as they seek to manage expectations.
But if Micheál Martin and Simon Harris are not looking forward to May, political nerds and the media will beg to differ.
Martin has scheduled his party’s centenary ardfheis for around that time in the hope that FFers will be too busy singing “happy birthday to us” to worry about byelections. Harris must be more than a little concerned, too, while failure to win in Dublin Central would prompt questions about Mary Lou McDonald.
As ever, the political context in which all this takes place will matter a lot. But politics is a results business. Sure, byelections can often be over-interpreted. That only adds to their importance.
