Sitting in a community center in Tallaght, a sprawling, working-class suburb at the foot of Dublin’s mountains, Debbie Byrne sees little sign she’s living in the euro region’s fastest-growing economy.
The government is “trying to say things are on the climb,” said Byrne, 38, a homemaker who helps people who drop in grapple with drug addiction and a jobless rate soaring above the national average. “Show me where things are on the climb in these areas. There are people going hungry.”
Almost a year since Ireland exited its international bailout program, there’s growing discontent among people who say they feel no connection with the economic numbers and bond prices telling them the worst is over. The result is that the Irish are adding to the phalanx of Europeans who are decamping to political parties previously on the electoral fringes.
Disillusioned with the leaders she helped usher into power at Ireland’s 2011 election, Byrne counts herself among the new supporters of Sinn Fein, the party that for much of the 1980s and 1990s was the Irish Republican Army’s political wing fighting against British rule in Northern Ireland.
Led by Gerry Adams, a politician more synonymous with the conflict in Belfast than the parliament in Dublin, opposition to tax increases, spending cuts and paying holders of bonds in state-owned banks turned Sinn Fein into Ireland’s most popular party, a poll published last month showed.
An election isn’t due until 2016, yet Prime Minister Enda Kenny last week started laying out the battle lines, warning a Sinn Fein-led government would undo all the progress in fixing Ireland’s economy and finances.
European Trend
Ireland reflects the backlash in Europe after years of belt-tightening by governments, said David Schnautz, a fixed- income strategist at Commerzbank AG in New York.
Spain’s Podemos, “We Can” in Spanish, has overtaken the country’s two main parties in the polls before elections next year. In Greece, the anti-bailout opposition party Syriza is ahead. The U.K. Independence Party, which opposes immigration and the European Union, last month gained a second elected lawmaker in the British Parliament after defections from the governing Conservative Party.
“There’s definitely fatigue setting in across Europe with budget-deficit reductions,” said Schnautz. “This is the European-wide picture that obviously makes it easier for anti- austerity parties to attract protest votes.”
Unlike Greece and Spain, Ireland appeared to swallow the medicine of austerity with little complaint. The country exited its bailout program and its borrowing costs have fallen to records. At 1.37 percent today, Irish 10-year bond yields are closer to France’s than Spain’s.
Political Direction
Speaking after a British-Irish Council meeting last week, Kenny asked voters if they wanted a Sinn Fein led government “that had the potential to ruin all the gains the country had made by insisting people did not have to pay for anything.”
Two days ago, Finance Minister Michael Noonan called Sinn Fein a “tax and spend party whose economic policies would severely damage the economy.” Adams responded by calling on the government to hold an early election.
“The next election will be about the direction our society takes,” he said in a statement. “Will it be more austerity and bad politics by the conservative parties or do we grasp the opportunity for new politics?”
Neither Adams nor others in the Sinn Fein leadership responded to requests for an interview.
No Going Back
At the Fettercairn Community Centre in Tallaght, Byrne talks of the “irreversible damage” from cuts to health care and spending on the disabled.
The center has lost one full-time worker and a second has had to go part-time. She says 50,000 euros ($62,400) would see those positions restored. “They can’t go back on this,” Byrne said. “This is damage. This is abuse of the people.”
Byrne voted for the Irish Labour Party in the 2011 election, when the electorate handed Fianna Fail, Ireland’s most successful political party at the ballot box, its biggest defeat ever. A coalition of Fine Gael and Labour took over after what Prime Minister Enda Kenny described as a democratic revolution.
Sinn Fein increased its share of the vote to 10 percent, its best ever result in the party’s current form. Since then, there’s been another shuffling of the political cards. Some 26 percent of voters now support Sinn Fein, a poll published by the Sunday Independent showed on Nov. 1. The survey of 990 people was taken on Oct. 21-31, as protests against new water charges spread across the country.
Deflecting History
Two demonstrations against water charges have each drawn more than 100,000 people, with another planned for next week. Environment Minister Alan Kelly received death threats over the charge, while last month, Deputy Prime Minister Joan Burton was struck in the face with a water balloon by demonstrators in west Dublin who had trapped her in her car for hours.
Sinn Fein “have capitalized on, and articulated, the public’s fear on water charges,” said Paul Moran, analyst at Millward Brown, which conducted the poll published last month. “Their Teflon-esque ability to deflect attention from the past is as strong as ever.”
Yet analysts warn against reading too much into the rise of Sinn Fein in opinion polls. The party typically struggles to get its supporters in the south of Ireland to polling stations, and also tends not to attract the second-preferences of voters often needed to win seats under the Irish electoral system.
Locked Out
Moreover, the chances are growing that the country’s two establishment parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, may join forces to keep Sinn Fein out of power. That’s the most likely outcome of the 2016 election, according to Paddy Power Plc, followed by a coalition including Sinn Fein.
While the mainstream parties have had little leeway to diverge from the budget cuts prescribed by the EU, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank, Sinn Fein has been able to send a different message. It plans to introduce a third rate of tax of 48 percent on income over 100,000 euros and slap a 1 percent wealth tax on millionaires.
“People are disillusioned and battered,” said Neil Gibson, professor of economics at the University of Ulster. “Sinn Fein are saying things that are absolutely going to be popular, but the question is do the maths add up.”
Easter Rising
Founded in 1905, Sinn Fein means “We Ourselves” in Gaelic. The party still operates out of a four-story building on the 18th-century Parnell Square on the north side of city.
From this office, on what republicans sometimes call Revolutionary Square, Sinn Fein watched the 1916 Easter rebellion aimed at ending British rule of Ireland.
“In Ireland, there’s always a rebellion going on,” said Padraig MacFionnlaig, as he guides a Sinn Fein walking tour around some of the buildings where the rising was planned and rebels died. “Or someone is planning something.”
The party still trades on its revolutionary past. The Sinn Fein store in the city is filled with blue jerseys emblazoned with the number 16 and the message: “Dublin: the city that fought an empire,” and is filled with posters of Bobby Sands, an IRA member who died while on hunger strike in 1981.
The death of Sands, and nine other hunger strikers, triggered massive shows of support for the republican movement, and prompted a change in its approach to politics. As part of a strategy known as the “Ballot Box and the Armalite,” Sinn Fein began contesting elections in Northern Ireland in 1982, and now shares power with unionists in the U.K. province.
Adams Rebranding
Across the border, in the south, the party has worked on recasting its image, partly through social media. Banned from Irish national airwaves until 1994, party leader Adams, 66, is presenting a new face to voters through Twitter.
Adams’s 70,000 followers are routinely greeted with his latest culinary exploits. Last month, it was “garlicky chicken, floury spuds and Teds ice cream.” He also expresses his love for teddy bears and sends pictures of rubber ducks.
Voter satisfaction with Adams is now on a par with other party leaders, polls show. Adams still ranked above Kenny, the Millward Brown poll showed last month, even after he faced weeks of questions about his role in handling sex abuse allegations against IRA members in the 1990s.
“It appears that the allegations against the party leadership are having little impact on the party support,” said Richard Colwell, a pollster at Red C in Dublin. “The reality is that many normal everyday voters are more than happy to see someone stand up to the established parties who they often feel have failed them once again.”
Popularity Surge
Five years ago, Sinn Fein took 15 percent of the vote in local elections in the Tallaght district, best known as the childhood home of Ireland’s soccer captain, Robbie Keane. This year, it won 40 percent as the party became the biggest in Dublin.
“People looked at Fine Gael and Labour and they were offering an alternative,” said Brendan Ferron, a Sinn Fein lawmaker in the district who was elected in May. “It turned out within a couple of months that they actually hadn’t been offered anything different at all.”
The government under Kenny largely followed the template laid down by the bailout deal, introducing a property tax, water charges and more spending cuts. It says the strategy is working. Ireland exited its bailout in December, the economy is growing again and unemployment is falling.
Deficit Narrows
The budget deficit in the first 11 months of 2014 narrowed to 5.8 billion euros from 8.6 billion euros during the same period a year ago, the government said today.
Eamonn Maloney, a Labour Party lawmaker in Tallaght who has seen support ebb away to Sinn Fein, said his party should have challenged the bailout conditions from the EU, IMF and ECB, known as the troika, earlier.
“There was disconnect between the government, the cabinet, and the troika on the amount of pain that citizens could take,” said Maloney. “If you lose sight of the hardship that people are enduring, you’re finished.”
In Tallaght, that’s the outcome Byrne wants in 2016 or earlier: Sinn Fein in power.
“They are making promises that they’re seeing through,” she said. “That’s the difference.”
