WELL, I HOPE you’ve all managed to survive without Surrealing in the Years for three whole weeks while I was in Japan.

While away, I did, naturally, from time to time, check in on what was happening back in Ireland. We have a spy in the Dáil, I notice! That would have made for some fine material. Alas, I was busy taking notes on how they conduct themselves in a society typically thought to be more advanced than our own.

The cross-country bullet train does travel at a top speed of 320km/h but they don’t put your names above your seat, so, score one for Iarnród Éireann there. Another weird fact is that when you ride the bus in Kyoto, you get on in the middle and get off at the front, and when you disembark, the driver thanks you. This sounds like a joke but that is what actually happens.

What did I learn? Ultimately, little more than if I leave the country for five minutes then a lot of strange things start happening to Sinn Féin and we end up on the cusp of an election we’d been repeatedly promised wasn’t happening until next year. 

Sinn Féin’s fate had already been hanging in the balance since its disappointing performance in this summer’s local and European elections. The last thing they needed was for… Well, in the end about four different things that could have been categorised as ‘the last thing Sinn Féin needed’ all happened about five minutes apart in the last week or so. Those scandals are covered in more detail here by my colleague Christina Finn. 

So disastrous a period has it been that the resignation of TD Patricia Ryan from the party has practically been relegated to a footnote.

After four years in the ascendancy, it seems Sinn Féin have now begun to nick every hurdle that comes before them, much like a distracted dressage horse. A dressage horse who was too afraid of losing ground to a burgeoning far-right movement and as such took its eye off housing policy, which, for the sake of this metaphor, can be represented by the showjumping hurdle that looks like a low-brick wall. 

Sinn Féin have sought to defend themselves against all of the above, insisting that the party dealt with each individual scandal according to best practice. That may be true! Still not ideal to have that many scandals to deal with, unfortunately. And the timing, well, the timing really couldn’t be worse.

Election on the horizon

From the Green Party to Labour to… probably the Green Party again, Ireland’s modern political history is not short on tales of junior coalition partners who have been wiped out due to their participation in an unpopular government, whose voters became embittered that they were unable to keep their promises. Sinn Féin, on the other hand, may become the first party to be punished for failing to keep their promises without ever even having the opportunity to keep them.

If Sinn Féin are unable to right their course, it appears they are doomed to reflect upon one shining moment – a patch of about four-and-a-half-years, all somehow taking place between two elections – when they might have shed the baggage that has suppressed their share of the older vote, and surged into government on the back of an ambitious housing policy that seemed like just what a country of disillusioned, locked-out young people needed. 

Between 2020 and 2023, it seemed almost inevitable that enough people had grown tired of a political landscape that so proudly prioritises landlords and multinational corporations, and that a Sinn Féin-led coalition from 2025 was almost inevitable. 

But with each passing day, it seems more and more like the game is gone for Sinn Féin. If that does turn out to be the case, then the same party that has overseen the housing crisis and month after month of record-breaking homelessness will remain in power. Neither overspend to the tune of over a billion euro on a hospital that still doesn’t haven’t an opening date or the reality that 21% of the country’s electricity is now consumed by data centres rather than actual human people will not be enough to dislodge Fine Gael. The number of children on waiting lists for spinal surgeries, the sheer non-existence of CAMHS across broad swathes of the country, and whatever else you’re having yourself, none of it is enough to render another approach to governance viable in the eyes of the public, according to the polling as it stands.

Despite a performance whose effects on the country are so often calamitous, the Taoiseach’s party has seemingly found its polling floor and recovered. It has, after all, endured not only scandals, the failure to correct many major infrastructure issues, and the standing aside of over half of its sitting TDs, and come out on the other side pretty much unscathed. 

Naturally, Sinn Féin’s omnidirectional wobble is proving a tough test of the the government’s long-held wink-nudge insistence that it would see out its full-term and not call an early election. While Simon Harris chastely avoided pulling the trigger as soon as the Opposition’s polling figures started to drop, it appears that this pile-up of scandals may simply be too much teasing for him to bear. It now seems inevitable that the government will, in fact, call an early an election. You know what they say: strike while the iron is absolutely screwing itself six ways from Sunday. 

Indeed, Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman became the first to come out this week and call for a general election on 29 November. 

Simon Harris poured cold water on O’Gorman’s intercession, saying: ”It is the Constitutional prerogative of the Taoiseach to call a general election. The Taoiseach has consistently stated he will engage with the coalition leaders before deciding. He has also consistently stated he will not do that through the media.” In fairness, he has also “consistently stated” that his government would run its full term, which seems increasingly unlikely. 

Sure, six months of steadfast insistence that the government would see out its full term only to do a U-turn and call an election in the moment that your opponents are at their weakest might seem like an example of naked, cynical opportunism. But who cares? There no longer appears to be any opposition worth worrying about.