Election 2020: the curse of Forest

As a regular visitor to Ireland I’ve been following the election with interest.

The outcome is a remarkable success for Sinn Fein which won the most first preference votes for the first time ever.

In terms of seats, the party came second with 37 seats behind Fianna Fáil (38) but ahead of the the governing party Fine Gael (35) whose leader Leo Veradkar had a humiliating wait before his election was confirmed after the fifth count in Dublin West.

I believe it was the first time a sitting taoiseach was not re-elected on the first count in his own constituency.

Michael Martin, the Fianna Fáil leader, fared even worse, having to wait until the sixth count for his election in Cork South-Central.

Even if you don’t follow Irish politics Martin’s name may be familiar to readers because I’ve mentioned him often enough.

As health minister in a previous Fianna Fáil government he is of course the man who introduced the smoking ban to Ireland in 2004.

As we know, this emboldened Scotland to do the same in 2006, followed by the rest of the UK in 2007.

The smoking ban is ancient history in political terms and has nothing to do with Martin’s current standing with the electorate in Ireland, but it’s worth noting because, despite his embarrassing result in Cork South-Central, there is every chance he could be the next taoiseach.

What that would mean for smokers and vapers remains to be seen but this is a man, remember, who won global recognition (and awards) for banning smoking in the workplace and knows how such policies can distract the public’s attention from far more pressing matters - the state of the nation’s health service, for example.

Thankfully the political career of another former health minister has come to an end before he can inflict even more damage on choice and personal liberty.

Having failed (again) to win a seat in the Dail (his third defeat in four years), Senator James Reilly promptly announced he was retiring from politics.

Reilly is credited with introducing plain packaging in Ireland but his mission to stop people smoking goes far beyond that. It had become a personal crusade.

Two years ago he successfully lobbied parliament to support a ban on smoking in al fresco dining areas. It has yet to be enacted by government but it sits on the table, waiting for someone like Michael Martin to give it the green light.

Last year Reilly even called for a ban on flavoured e-cigarettes.

Our spokesmen in Ireland have gone head-to-head with him several times on TV and radio and although he was widely unpopular for other reasons his absence will be felt by the tobacco control lobby. I wonder who will step up to take his place.

It won’t be Catherine Noone or Marcella Corcoran Kennedy. Awarded the title ‘Nanny-in-Chief’ at Forest’s Golden Nanny Awards in 2017 and 2018 respectively, neither Noone nor Corcoran Kennedy were elected.

The latter lost her seat and Noone’s attempt to be elected to the Dail for the first time crashed and burned in spectacular fashion.

She shot herself in the foot midway through the campaign when she naively suggested that her party leader, taoiseach Leo Veradkar, might be “autistic”, but despite her nannying ways I liked her a lot.

If she loses her seat in the Seanad (Ireland’s upper parliament), to which she was elected in 2011, it will be a loss to the vaping movement because she was one of the few politicians in Ireland who openly backed the use of e-cigarettes, albeit only as a smoking cessation tool.

Like Noone, Marcella Corcoran Kennedy also impressed me as someone who enjoyed a laugh. This might make me seem shallow but I think it’s important.

I also think their support for nanny state interventions were motivated by good intentions, but what a pity their own enjoyment of life didn’t extend to giving ordinary people greater freedom over their own choices without being denormalised and lectured.

Finally, another Fine Gael politician who seems to have fallen victim to the curse of Forest.

Noel Rock was also a guest at our Golden Nanny Awards in Dublin in 2018. He didn’t win an award because, unlike Catherine Noone and Marcella Corcoran Kennedy, he seemed a rare example of that endangered species - a genuinely liberal politician.

Not only was he seeking to protect electric scooters from unnecessary regulations, he once declared that minimum unit pricing of alcohol was based on “middle class guilt with working class consequences”.

Sadly, like most politicians, he was not immune to jumping on bandwagons. Literally. (Rock says hotels should be banned from providing mini toiletries in plastic bottles.)

Either way, nothing could save him from the political storm that rolled across Ireland at the weekend. What happens over the next few days will be fascinating.

By the way, I can see how the Irish electoral system is ‘fairer’ and more representative of the nation’s votes than the UK’s first past the post system.

Nevertheless it’s a pretty tortuous system in terms of producing a result and I prefer FPTP for the simple reason that, while it may be unfair on smaller parties who don’t get the number of seats their share of the vote might deserve, at least we get a clear outcome (most of the time).

The system in Ireland, as in a lot of European countries, lends itself to a never-ending series of coalition governments, or minority governments that retain power only as a result of a confidence-and-supply agreement with another party.

If anyone can persuade me that’s a better outcome than a single party in government with a substantial majority, let me hear your arguments.

I accept, btw, that some countries have more of a history of single party governments abusing their power, leading to fraud and corruption, so maybe coalitions and PR offer a safety net against that type of regime.

In the UK, though, I still think FPTP is the best option.

Below: Catherine Noone and Marcella Corcoran Kennedy at Forest’s Golden Nanny Awards in 2018. The curse of Forest has now struck both their political careers.