Independents' Doomsday

Published Friday, August 11, 2006 by Kevin Breathnach | E-mail this post

Gerry O'Sullivan asks you not to vote for an Independent in the forthcoming election.

Independents, by and large, have a loyal following in their local areas. If they manage to blackmail convince the government to do their bidding, they are seen as champions of the local cause. But this just encourages others, until we get to the point that government cannot form a coherent national policy on anything, because they have so many local deals in place to keep the independents sweet. Now if a coalition combination can get the numbers to form an effective government, then it's not such a big problem. But in the event of a hung Dáil, this is where it gets sticky.
Let's say there is a hung Dáil next time around, a very likely scenario. Whoever forms the government will depend on the support of independents, with whom they will have to do some deals. This will further propagate the notion that independents deliver for local issues, and before we know it, in two or three elections time, more than half of Leinster House is populated with a bunch of jumped-up county councillors and single-issue chancers. Result: chaos.

I probably fall into Gerry's line of thought. I think I can justify this with two reasons. Firstly, Independents tend to fall far from my political starting-point: in Ireland, Finian McGrath and Co. are just one facial hair short of communists; in England, Nigel Farage and Co. seem to epitomise Daily Mail xenophobia. In principle though, Independents run by and large on very narrow, local issues. While this can often be a good thing, it advances the notion that, in Ireland, we'll hand our vote over to whoever will get us, the individual, the best deal. In other words, that we vote for selfish reasons.

For Gerry though, I offer some hope. Reluctant though I am to quote myself, I'll do so just for the hell of it. In Febuary, I discussed the concept, history and future of Independents in Ireland in relation to an interview Finian McGrath gave to Magill.

During the course of the interview, McGrath suggests that because he feels neither of the big parties are going to come out of the next election with enough seats to form any sort of stable government, “we should have an alliance of Independents running on a common platform that’s agreed on before the election.” We’re later told that there is a gang of 9 Independents who meet every Tuesday, before finally we’re informed “Tony Gregory is our whip.(!)”

The idea of an alliance, let alone an alliance with a whip, goes a long way towards defeating the whole notion of the Independent. He had previously claimed that people vote for Independents because "they believe that an Independent is loyal to them and no one else." Indeed, this seems to be the reason for Gerry's disapproval of them. With an alliance such as that described above though, the notion that they are in fact loyal to nobody else is defeated. A situation in which nine representatives hold a prospective government to ransom based on the loca concerns of one is not, in my eyes, a realistic scenario. With that, the attraction of the Independent is lost. So, though an alliance would give Independents a fallacious potency, it could in many ways prove their own undoing.

Independents' Doomsday

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