A mood of change – up to a point

One Government party has been in power for 13 years, the other two for five. A dire shortage of houses, a chronically inadequate health system and the rocketing cost of living are three of the predominant features of modern Irish life, each one a source of real public anger. Half of Fine Gael’s TDs have decided not to stand for re-election – usually a sign that a party knows it has run out of road.
Knowing just those bare facts, and watching the clock tick down on the 33rd Dáil, you might assume there could only be one outcome in the coming general election: that the three Coalition partners – Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party – will soon vacate their offices, the voters enthusiastically waving them on their way. Indeed, a slow-motion uncoupling is already under way. But as the latest Ipsos B&A opinion poll in The Irish Times underlined this week, in reality the landscape looks very different. The poll shows that support for Fine Gael has risen and that approval for its newish leader, Simon Harris, has leapt by 17 points to 55 per cent. Fianna Fáil and the Greens are holding steady. If Harris’s strong showing is one reason for the Coalition’s optimism, another is the continuing decline in support for the largest Opposition party. Sinn Féin is down three points, and support for its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, has also declined sharply. Our lead editorial this weekend reflects on another striking if related finding: the public wants change, it seems, but only to a point.
I’m not sure the public is all that preoccupied by the date of the next election, but politicians, journalists and everyone else who watches the scene closely certainly is. One thing is for sure: Harris will now be under even greater internal pressure to go back on his word and call the election this side of Christmas. Yesterday, Jack Horgan-Jones broke the news that Government was to scrap its controversial hate speech laws. As Jack and Pat Leahy point out, it will be seen as a clearing of the decks before an election.
There are other politics-themed stories that you should be across this weekend. One is the Government’s decision to raise the threshold for tax relief on the pension pots of high earners. Our editorial called it a retrograde move. Some of the strongest lobbying for the change came from within the senior public service. The reason, as Pat Leahy points out, is not discussed often enough: those at the top of the public sector have pensions bigger than most people could even imagine.
There is not much that has not been written about mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor, but relatively little understood is his role in encouraging allies and acolytes to get involved in Irish politics – at times with some success. Conor Gallagher has the story in this profile of a man whose views seem to change with the seasons.
Aspiring barrister Simeon Burke, whose family you may have heard of, can’t find a “Master” to mentor him in the Law Library – a condition of entry to that branch of the legal profession in Ireland. In a thought-provoking opinion article, John McManus argues that the episode raises questions about “access to the profession for those whose world view does not conform to the rather narrow one that prevails in society”.
Columnist Mark O’Connell recently spent some time with John Hinkley, who shot and wounded Ronald Reagan in 1981. Mark’s piece this week compares Hinckley’s motives with those of Ryan Wesley Routh, who tried to shoot at Donald Trump a week ago. Elsewhere in Opinion, Jennifer O’Connell reflects on what is behind the opposition to what ought to be a relatively uncontroversial proposal to extend the State’s free contraception scheme for women to 16-year-olds.
Homework battles may never end. The latest contribution to the debate on whether or not it improves children’s learning is a study from Maynooth University concluding that homework is a good thing, but too much of it is not. Carl O’Brien writes on the difficulty of finding the right balance for a child.
When Mary C Murphy, from Waterford, went to study in Queen’s University Belfast, she was the first person in her family to travel to Northern Ireland. Today, she is an academic authority on relations between Northern Ireland and the world, and the new head of Boston College’s Irish Institute. She tells Freya McClements that “people in the Republic don’t really understand Northern Ireland”.
Saoirse Ronan, one of Ireland’s most gifted and successful creative practitioners, talks to Donald Clarke about her transition from child star to adult actor and the “kinship” between Ireland’s community of film actors.
Finally, Sally Rooney. Last week we published an exclusive interview with the 33-year-old, whose three novels have sold in their millions and made her one of the most influential contemporary Irish writers. Her fourth, Intermezzo, is out this week, and our critic Michael Cronin has given it a rave review.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
Editor
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