After some wild swings in the poll numbers and a good bit of unrest in Fianna Fáil in the wake of the presidential election campaign, today’s poll represents something of a regression towards the mean.
Fianna Fáil recovers a bit, while the gains seen by Sinn Féin last October have fallen away somewhat.
The biggest winner is probably the Fianna Fáil leader, Micheál Martin, who sees his personal ratings bounce back and is once again the most popular party leader. Perhaps more significantly, after the unrest in his party and the talk of a possible leadership challenge, the poll shows that Martin enjoys the overwhelming backing of Fianna Fáil voters, of whom almost four in five (79 per cent) say he should remain as leader.
That is more important to him than the accompanying finding that a majority of all voters who express a view say he should step down. It is hard to see how Fianna Fáil’s rebels could ignore the wishes of the party’s voters.
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Martin confronted – or rather, avoided confronting until tempers had cooled – a moment of political danger after the presidential election, when a cohort of his own party was gunning for him and the polls showed his popularity plummeting.
Today Martin sees Fianna Fáil recover by two points (achieving a psychologically important, if statistically negligible, one-point lead over Fine Gael) to 19 per cent while his own personal rating recovers by four points to 37 per cent. This – along with a four-point drop for both Simon Harris and Mary Lou McDonald – restores his position as the most popular party leader in the country, at least among the large parties, as measured by this poll.
But if that is some relief for Martin, the Government he leads remains unpopular, with little evidence that people think his administration is getting on top of the country’s problems. The Coalition’s satisfaction ratings, at 30 per cent, are the lowest of any government since the dying days of the Fine Gael-Independent minority government of 2016-20.
But if there is no high regard for the Government, there seems little enthusiasm for the alternative either. Sinn Féin has been the clear leader of the Opposition for a year, and while it retains that position, its support – and that of its leader – is going in the wrong direction, according to this poll.
True, the Social Democrats are up and the Greens are up; but Labour is down. Independents – who cover the full breadth of the political spectrum, from left to right and all points in between – remain the fourth largest grouping after the three big parties. And they cannot be counted as a single political force, or anything remotely like it.
Though Sinn Féin remains the most popular party by a clear margin, and would be the largest party in the new Dáil if an election were held tomorrow, it is not much closer to being able to form a government on the basis of these numbers than it was at the time of the last election.
What about the new left alliance so widely touted in the wake of the victory of Catherine Connolly in the presidential election? Mixed news. The parties in the Connolly column have a combined total of 41 per cent of declared voters; Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael together have 37 per cent. Throw the independents of various stripes into the mix and you have something not a million miles away from a tie. So the alternative left government is still very much a work in progress.
It’s early days, though. The poll is conducted on the basis of how people would vote if there was an election tomorrow. It is very unlikely there will be a general election for some years yet. Everyone has plenty of time.
The task facing the Opposition is to convince voters that they can be a viable government, with realistic solutions to the problems the country faces and which voters feel in their daily lives. The Opposition has proved adept at flaying the Government in the Dáil and in the media – it’s just not clear this is convincing voters that they would be any better.
[ Taoiseach recovers as Sinn Féin support falls, Irish Times/Ipsos B&A poll findsOpens in new window ]
Undecideds (not included in the party support figures) are up by four points to 27 per cent. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that voters are not especially impressed with anyone, Government or Opposition.
A public that is grumpy about the state of the country is also likely to be apprehensive. Just because they might think things are bad, doesn’t mean they don’t believe things can get worse. Given the current international situation, they would be foolish to believe anything else.
A year and a bit ago, voters were not exactly in love with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil after five years in power together and nine years collaborating. But enough of them believed that the two old familiars were a safer bet than anything else on offer.
If the Opposition wants to change that outcome, it has to change that judgment. Ultimately, that task is more about themselves in the Opposition than it is about the Government.
