What is it about the cool and easy-on-the-eye Social Democrats that voters are finding increasingly attractive? They only contested their first national election 10 years ago and, already, they are the second-biggest Opposition party, the second-biggest party on Dublin City Council, have their first elected senator, hold half the Dáil seats in Dublin Central, won more first-preference votes than Sinn Féin in the Galway West byelection, and the latest poll shows their leader is the most popular in the country. New kids on the block syndrome, some might pooh-pooh, but there are newer kids – chronologically if not age-wise – who would eat their Tricolours for some of that appeal.
“Knock on people’s doors, don’t generate hate and be ideas-focused,” Gary Gannon listed as the ingredients for their success after last weekend’s byelections. But their soul mates – if not their mates, exactly – in the Labour Party could say the same.
It was John Stephens, Fianna Fáil’s “Mr 4 per cent” in Dublin Central, who exposed the Soc Dems’ allure, albeit inadvertently.
“Twelve-and-a-half thousand steps daily,” is how he summarised his own valiant, footslogging canvass, which culminated in his elimination after the second count. “Three new pairs of shoes.”
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The contrast was stark. Gannon and his new Dáil colleague in the constituency, towering ex-League of Ireland footballer Daniel Ennis, probably walk that before breakfast – in their bare feet.
Winston Churchill is said to have believed it is a little thing that makes a big difference, and it’s the Soc Dems’ attitude that is proving the difference for many of their voters.
Why did you give them your first preference, I asked a byelection voter.
“Because they’re moderate and the country needs moderation right now,” he replied. “And it needs people who’re serious about fixing things.”
Anti-abortion voters might dispute that the Soc Dems, who want quicker access to pregnancy-termination services, are moderates. Let them, the party would say. It’s not looking for their votes. It’s not trying to be all things to all men; only to men and women who, like it, were conceived in the age of no more shameful secrets, no more stuffed shirts, no houses, trains, trees or public-spending sense.
Holly Cairns resonates with voters of her generation. In show business they call what she has relatability. A west Cork farmer with the elocution of a city stockbroker and the first party leader to take maternity leave from the Dáil, she has spoken openly about two miscarriages she suffered and the death of her stepbrother Sam from a drug overdose. When founding joint leaders Catherine Murphy and Róisín Shortall stepped down in 2023, the party risked withering without them and when Cairns took their place in the Dáil, reading her prepared scripts without raising her voice, observers thought: Danger here. Politics without the theatre can lose the audience. Melodrama, however, can be just as off-putting.
So take a bow Sinn Féin. The more it ratchets up the decibels and the drama, the more the Soc Dems gain. While Sinn Féin would blame the Government for everything from erecting a bike shed to making spinach wilt rather than risk alienating voters with a few home truths, their newbie rivals prefer nuance. They supported the fuel protests but denounced the blockades. They want prices lowered but not by sacrificing the carbon tax. They espouse Ireland’s reunification but by “advancing” the groundwork; not with an immediate referendum. They are attuned to a generation of cycling, recycling young Gaelscoil parents with just a passing architectural interest in church buildings and second-hand knowledge of the Troubles. They’re not so much lefty as modern.
“Why did Míde Nic Fhionnlaoich do so well (almost doubling the party’s vote in her first electoral outing) for the Soc Dems in the Galway West byelection?” I asked a voter there.
“Because the Sinn Féin candidate couldn’t debate in Irish,” she replied, “and that matters; not just to people in Connemara but to a lot of people in the city who are fluent as well.”
Ivana Bacik must be moithered watching them strut around in Labour’s clothes. Her party is only one TD short of the Soc Dems’ tally of 12, has two senators, has 23 more councillors than them and has one MEP to their none but there are voters who will go to their graves without forgiving Labour for its austerity-rule coalition with Fine Gael from 2011 to 2016. The Green Party, still bruised, knows that feeling.
But politics is nothing if it’s not mutable. Fortunes can go down as well as up, as the financial regulator might warn. See the Progressive Democrats. Once upon a time the PDs too were regarded as modern, what with railing against “super-pubs” and wanting to banish God from the Constitution. Then, after more than two decades in existence, the party got virtually wiped out in the 2007 general election after coalescing with Fianna Fáil and headed for the political graveyard.
Labour, the Greens and the Soc Dems are ideological bedfellows. They are ad idem on the environment, social justice and a united Ireland. Joining forces would make sense for them and for voters who want those principles upheld in government but the heirs to Labour Party defectors Murphy and Shortall are having none of it.
[ The Irish Times view on cracks in the left alliance: a new phase in politicsOpens in new window ]
“I’m running out of ways to say no to this question,” Cairns said when Miriam O’Callaghan asked her in a 2024 radio interview if her party would merge with Labour.
She is intent on fielding candidates in every constituency in the next general election. To win a seat in even half of them could catapult them into the next government. And that is where the danger lies. Minnows get eaten alive in a tank of big fish.
It also gets harder to maintain discipline the bigger you grow. The Soc Dems had a taste of that when Eoin Hayes – its TD in Bacik’s Dublin Bay South was temporarily suspended from the parliamentary party for providing wrong information about his disposal of shares in a company doing business with the Israel Defense Forces.
Cairns & Co should swallow old bitterness and take Bacik up on her proposal that they, Labour and the Greens form a negotiating bloc for the next general election. Voters are fickle and, if there’s one thing sure to turn them off, it’s a party that puts its own feelings ahead of theirs.
