MINISTER FOR HIGHER and Further Education Simon Harris has said that voters should not buy into “the inevitability of the outcome of the next election”, after an Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll showed that Sinn Féin is growing its lead over Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael as the most popular party in the country.

The poll results showed that support for Sinn Féin has risen to 35 per cent, some 15 points ahead of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, who are both on 20 per cent.

Speaking on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics, Harris said the combined support for government parties was still higher than support for Sinn Féin, adding: “I think media, politicians, commentators need to be very careful not to buy into the inevitability of the outcome of the next election. I think nothing annoys the Irish electorate more than people sitting in studios predicting with great certainty what’s going to happen.”

He pointed to the slogan “Gilmore for Taoiseach” – referring to former Labour leader Eamon Gilmore, who was confident of his party’s chances in the 2011 election, but never did become Taoiseach.

Harris said: “We’re in a midterm cycle here, in the middle of a global pandemic. People are hurting. People are struggling. And people are rightly telling governments they want us to do more and do better and we hear this.

“But this inevitability, or nearly this cocksuredness, of the outcome of the next election is doing a real disservice, I think, to discourse and to the actual reality of how politics works here in our country. We have a long way to go into the next general election. We will be judged on our actions.”

Sinn Féin’s housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin said: “Simon is right. Nothing is inevitable in politics.

“Obviously our view is we’d like to see that election as soon as possible. I think what the polls do show, though, is a growing dissatisfaction with government and an enormous appetite for change because Simon is right – people are hurting.

“They’re hurting”, he said, “because government’s policies on housing and healthcare and childcare are failing miserably. And even on a range of Covid matters – while some of what the government has done has been positive, and we’ve supported it, in many instances, been far too slow to respond, even to their own expert group advice, whether it’s on antigen test or HEPA filters in schools.

He added that poll “doesn’t say who’s going to win the next election or who is or isn’t going to be in government, but what it does show is the appetite for change and the growing dissatisfaction with a government that is just limping from from crisis to crisis, and which has absolutely no cohesion.”

Independent TD Verona Murphy said that Harris seemed to be of the impression that the opinion poll was “all about Covid”, when in reality, she said, “I think the people are far more concerned where they going next month, not with the next election.

“We have people who can’t get GPs in this country, many, many on waiting lists continually, and it’s all because we have not resourced in the right way,” she said.