We are stuck with democracy

One of the most remarkable features of all recent opinion polls is the amount of people who are not happy with any of the political parties, whether of the Government side or the Opposition. That was also a feature of the recent Meath East by-election, with so many people not bothering to come out and vote at all.
In a poll conducted by the Millward Brown group and published by last week’s Sunday Independent, 32% said they didn’t know which party they might support. In other words, they weren’t happy with any of them. In the same poll, only 19% – less than one in five – said they were satisfied with the Government. A massive 73% of those asked expressed dissatisfaction with the Government. That is a trend that has been there for some time now. Another way of putting that is to say that some three out of every four people are dissatisfied with how the Government we elected just over two years ago is getting on with the task.
However, that poll, while bearing very bad news for Fine Gael and Labour, also showed that while Micheál Martin and Gerry Adams might be the most popular leaders – or should I say, the least unpopular, right now, more were dissatisfied than were satisfied with them.
What all the polls are showing is that politicians and the parties they represent are not very popular with the people. Some, of course, are more unpopular than others. The next Government will probably be formed by people who might not be too popular themselves but who might be less unpopular than the other crowd. I suppose you could say we get the best of a bad lot but that’s the way the people seem to judge them.
You have to go back to Jack Lynch’s Government that was elected in June 1977 to find a Government that had popular support and an overall one-party majority in the Dáil. However, that popular support didn’t last too long. Despite being a big-spending Government with a lot of goodies for the people, Jack Lynch himself was gone in a little over two years. Shows how fickle people can be. Can you blame them? The politicians themselves have shown they cannot be trusted. They tell you one thing before an election and then as soon as they are elected they proceed to do the very opposite.
Before the last election in June 2011, Fine Gael and Labour promised us that they would do things completely different to Fianna Fáil with regard to the economy – Frankfurt’s way would not be Labour’s way and so on. However, since the election it has been all Frankfurt’s way and Labour’s way has been forgotten. Is it any wonder that politicians are so unpopular? It doesn’t seem to bother them too much either, when they break election promises. Wasn’t it Pat Rabbitte himself who said that promises were things you made before an election? In other words, you had no intention of keeping them.
Promises are made with one purpose only and that is to get the votes and you can come up with all kinds of excuses if you fail to fulfill those promises. Like, “we didn’t realise the economy was in such dire straits when we made those promises; we never knew there was so little in the State coffers”.
They might as well tell us that the dog ate the homework. They expect us to swallow those excuses and to vote for them at the next election and yes, of course, some of us will and some of us won’t.
We will because perhaps we think the alternative is worse and we won’t because we are fed up being treated like fools and perhaps we won’t vote for any of them. That’s democracy for you. Until somebody comes up with a better system, we have to get along with it and hope that whatever government we elect is the best one.
At the last election, Fine Gael and Labour between them secured the biggest majority for a Government in the history of the State. That was mainly because the Fianna Fáil brand had become so toxic that large tracts of the country did not return even one Fianna Fáil TD. There are now no Fianna Fáil TDs in any part of Dublin.
But Fianna Fáil, they say, is on the way back. I am not too sure about that. Perhaps it is but the party is still languishing on about 25% of the vote – a far cry from the 40% to 45% that was the norm for them a few years ago. The only reason why Fianna Fáil is picking up some support since the election is because of the highly unpopular austerity programme being pursued by Fine Gael and Labour.
Some say it is time for a new political party but that’s been tried before and with no great success. There is no reason to believe a new party now would be any more successful than any of the new parties that came and went down through the years.
I think we just have to get along with what we have and continue to hope for the best.