THERE is a theory about the Trump victory which, if applied to Ireland would augur major change in the coming election.
That theory is that incumbent governments throughout the democratic world are falling in response to anger and unease accumulated through a series of recent crises.
Those include, obviously, the pandemic and the fuel price rises occasioned by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But we have been in an unsettled age since the financial collapse of 2008 when banks discovered that credit they held on paper was often worth about as much as the paper itself.
I was one of those who had benefited by a sub prime mortgage, a 100% loan without a deposit, issued in the early 1990s with no security but an endowment policy taken out alongside it.
This policy was meant to mature in time to meet the cost of the house. Some chance! But I’d sold the house before that critical moment was reached.
Millions of others around the world hadn’t and, what was effectively a scam which I had turned to my advantage failed many others.
The supposed value of my house had increased so fast that I was able to sell it for fifty percent more than the notional price I had bought it for three years earlier.
I had entered into that scheme at a time of high optimism. I’d never have got a legitimate mortgage by any other means.
Chimerical mortgages had empowered people with no money - like myself - to bid high and buy.
So house prices rose until the paper stack of dodgy loans tipped over and the value - if you can use that word - of our houses collapsed.
Ireland’s banks were about to fail and the government bailed them out. Then the EU bailed out the Ireland - for a price - and it looked for a time as if we were headed for decades of penury.
Young people fled to Australia and the USA and England to look for work, while the country was seeming to sink.
Actually it came round pretty well. It did so on the basis of a low corporation tax rate that invited Apple and other big companies to come in. Now where Britain next door is struggling with a deficit, Ireland is feeling flush.
We have a government which looks too familiar though. The radical things it was going to do, like legalising abortion and same sex marriage are now done, and even with the economy in good order, it still suffers from what other incumbent governments suffer from: an air of having been around too long through the bad times.
The US Democrats and the British Conservatives have suffered from a similar gamble by the electorate to elect a party they don’t like very much, or even know very much about, for the sake of getting rid of parties that they are tired of looking at.
This sentiment should be favouring Sinn Féin, the government-in-waiting party, the radical opposition.
Stay in power long enough and no matter how good you are you accumulate lots of things that people can criticise you for.
For the Democrats that included foreign policy entanglements that were expensive and unimpressive; handing Afghanistan back to the Taliban, funding a war in Ukraine but apparently just keeping it going rather than providing the heft for victory, and then backing Netanyahu’s disproportionate murderous assaults on Gaza and Lebanon.
Ireland didn’t need to worry about getting the blame for colossal moves like those. And, indeed, they may not even have factored much in the decisions of the US electorate.
What did feature was anger at the influx of migrants and that kind of anger plays significantly in Ireland too.
But the opposition, Sinn Féin is not seen as a credible counter to it. It has indeed been eroded by it, with many in the party’s support base joining the anti-migrant protests while the party struggled to retain its credibility as the party of the vulnerable and the poor, new arrivals included.
In England too, the rise of the Reform Party surfed the same mood and did well in votes if not so well in seats.
The irony is that the revolt against incumbent parties who have failed to assuage the new populist aversion to migrants may be saved by its obvious opposition’s failure to get its head round the problem too.
Had party leader Mary Lou MacDonald done what Trump and Nigel Farage of Reform did, and blamed most of our problems on refugees she might have gained political credit. But she couldn’t.
For one thing, she leads a party that just wouldn’t do that. It would be too much out of character with the party’s long identification with the oppressed of the world.
And being a united Ireland party it just can’t demand the closure of the border with the UK which divides the island.
Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the chief parties of the governing coalition have been fortunate in the opposition they face.
An anti-migrant movement is available in Ireland to a leader who will emerge and direct it. No such leader is to be found.
Whew!
See More: Donald Trump, General Election, Ireland
