Coalition fooling no one on timescale for election

Every day a Minister appears in Merrion Street and dutifully declares – with a poker face – that the Government will last its full term. And every day, somewhere in the country another selection convention is taking place, as parties rush to get their slate of candidates full before the general election.

The two contradict each other. Parties say they want to prepare well in advance of March. The reality is that just about everyone is predicting an election in mid-November and nobody wants to be caught with their political pants down once an election is called.

The slide rule we all use is the local elections and the opinion polls. Problem was that both were worse that useless as guides in 2020. The form book was thrown upside down by the election. Sinn Féin pulled a rabbit out of a hat and dominated the campaign.

Hindsight is foresight. Its two main rivals, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, came to believe that the timing of the general election was wrong and gave Sinn Féin too much time to repair its hands after poor local and European elections.

For its part, Sinn Fein identified its strongest spokespeople and its strongest issues – housing and rents; the sense many people had that they were not feeling the recovery. A few other issues played into its hands: the proposed RIC commemoration; proposals to increase the pension age; and the exclusion of Mary Lou McDonald from the RTÉ leaders’ debate. The last one was huge.

But Sinn Féin did not feel overly confident going into the election. It pared down its number of candidates sensing it might lose a few. The party could have won between five and ten additional seats if it had run bigger slates.

Not noticed so much was that Fianna Fáil ran too many candidates. The party was targeting seat gains that could bring it close to 60 seats so had a multitude of hopefuls. Problem was when its vote spiralled downwards, the candidates split the vote in some constituencies with not enough transfers coming back to the best prospects for winning a seat.

It’s a notoriously tricky exercise deciding how many candidates to run. You base it on how well you think you do.

But if you are doing well now, it’s not necessarily the case that you will be doing well in two months' time. Politics has become like a churning sea, with an unpredictable swell ready to engulf you at any second.

Pictured: Cynthia Ní Mhurchú... starting a celebrity candidate trend.