Assessing the Irish General Election of 2011: A Roundtable

On February 25, 2011, Irish voters went to the polls to elect the members of the 31st assembly of Dáil Éireann, who would in turn form a new government. Given the devastation of the Irish economy and the controversial bank bailout and subsequent intervention by the International Monetary Fund a few months before, it surprised no one that Fianna Fáil was swept from power. Even so, there was a consensus that the change in the Irish political landscape was one of historic dimensions. Commentators fumbled for comparisons; some likened the results to the 1918 elections, when Sinn Féin demolished the Irish Parliamentary Party, while others compared it to 1932, when Fianna Fáil first assumed power and stayed there for most of the next eighty years. Whatever the eventual ranking of history may be, the February results were unprecedented in modern Irish history. New Hibernia Review has convened a roundtable of historians and political scientists to sift through the contexts, and the possible consequences, of the 2011 election. The four scholars whose remarks appear below conducted their "conversation" by e-mail in June and July 2011.

—The Editors

Sean Farrell:

To an overwhelming degree, post-election commentary has characterized the general election of 2011 as a referendum on Fianna Fáil's poor management of the Irish economy. Writing in the Guardian, for example, the historian Diarmaid Ferriter asserted that the election was the Irish people's revenge against a government that "put banks before the people, and the people will be paying the price for decades." Was this election really "just" about the economy? Were their other critical factors involved?

Gary Murphy:

I think it reasonable to postulate that the February 2011 Irish general election was dominated by the economy. Compare Fianna Fáil's historic low polling numbers of anywhere between 12 and 16 percent in the month leading up to the election with their numbers prior to the historic bank guarantee scheme of September 2008. In the May 2007 election, Fianna Fáil received 42 percent of the vote. A TNS MRBI poll taken in June 2008 showed them at 42 percent while a Red C poll in July 2008 had them at 40 percent. Another Red C poll taken on September 21, a week before the famous bank guarantee scheme, had them at 36 percent—still a full 8 percent ahead of Fine Gael.

However, once the bank guarantee scheme was enacted and the consequences of that decision began to become apparent, support for Fianna Fáil plummeted to a degree never witnessed before. The first TNS MRBI poll after the guarantee had Fianna Fáil at 27 percent—a gargantuan drop of 15 percent, from which it would never recover. The first Red C poll, taken in late October 2008, had them at 26 percent. Once it became clear throughout 2009 that the bailout of the banks and the establishment of the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) were not the panacea for the Irish economy that they had been portrayed by Fianna Fáil as being, it simply became a question of how low Fianna Fáil would go.

It should be noted, however, that in the years between the general elections of 2007 and 2011 Ireland witnessed a series of events that no one possibly could have anticipated. When Fianna Fáil won their third general election in a row in 2007, they did so by promising to continue the same economic policies that had brought such political success. By the time the government fell in January 2011, the Irish people had witnessed Taoiseach Bertie Ahern resign from office under the significant cloud of the Mahon Tribunal; the Progressive Democrats go out of existence; the government first lose, and then win, an EU treaty referendum; the state bail out the banks by guaranteeing all their deposits and obligations, probably the most momentous political decision taken by any government since the foundation of the state; the country enter a severe and prolonged recession; and the EU and IMF come to the...