Ireland gets a new government

It’s almost two months since the Irish parliamentary election, held on 29 November (see my preview here), but only yesterday did the country succeed in getting a new prime minister. Micheál Martin has been sworn in at the head of a government that includes his own Fianna Fáil, its traditional rival Fine Gael, and some independents – more about them shortly.

Coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael isn’t new. They came together after the previous election, in 2020, in a government that also included the Greens. Martin served as prime minister then for two and a half years, before handing over to the Fine Gael leader (first Leo Varadkar, then Simon Harris). Now it’s Fianna Fáil’s turn again.

In what was a notoriously bad year for incumbents, both parties held their ground well at the election. Their shares of the vote barely changed, and in a lower house increased by 14 seats to 174, Fianna Fáil picked up an extra ten and Fine Gael an extra three. Their main opponent, Sinn Féin, which had topped the poll in 2020, dropped 5.5% to fall to third place, although in terms of seats it was still one ahead of Fine Gael.

The problem for the government was that the Greens were almost wiped out, losing more than half their vote and 11 of their 12 seats – a repetition of what had happened last time they joined a government, in 2007-11. So Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, with 86 seats between them, were two seats short of a majority. On the other side were Sinn Féin, an array of smaller mostly left-wing parties (although also including a new far-right party, Independent Ireland, with four seats), and 16 independents.

To no-one’s surprise, Martin and Harris opened negotiations with each other and with the independents. Last week they announced a deal under which a group of seven conservative independents would support the government in return for two of them becoming junior ministers and a third becoming Speaker.*

From there it should have been straightforward, with the lower house set to confirm Martin in a vote on Wednesday. Instead chaos broke out when it emerged that as part of the deal with the independents, those of the group who had committed to supporting the government but not actually been given office would continue to be counted as part of the opposition for purposes of allocating speaking time and the like in parliament. The new Speaker, being herself a member of the group, confirmed this arrangement.

The opposition, understandably enough, was outraged, pointing out that the independents were trying to have their cake and eat it too. It was somewhat reminiscent of the fracas in New South Wales in 2020, when the National Party decided it wanted to sit on the crossbench while retaining its ministerial positions.

And like that occasion, this one ended with a backdown. The government tried to tough it out on Wednesday, but disruption from the opposition eventually forced parliament to adjourn without a vote being taken on the new prime minister. The next day, the Speaker announced that the independents concerned would not be recognised as an opposition group until the issue was considered by a parliamentary committee, which will effectively give the opposition a veto on the move.

With that out of the way, Martin was confirmed in office on a vote of 95 to 76. The plan is that Harris will again take the job for the second half of the term, from 2027. But with the two once-dominant parties now commanding less than 43% of the vote between them, they won’t be able to afford too many more false steps.

And in case you’re wondering what happened in nearby Iceland, which confusingly voted the following day, the formation of a new government there was considerably easier, being completed in just three weeks. The three parties that formed the previous government all lost seats, with one of them (the Left-Greens) being eliminated from parliament. In their place a new coalition has been formed by the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the (broadly centrist) People’s Party, who between them have 36 of the 63 seats. Social Democrat leader Kristrún Frostadóttir is the new prime minister.

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* Comprehension of Irish politics is hampered by the odd habit of English-language media of using Irish (Gaelic) terminology: so the Speaker is referred to as Ceann Comhairle, the prime minister as Taoiseach, the lower house of parliament as the Dáil, and so on. We don’t do this with any other country, so I have translated them all into English, just as we would with, for example, Dutch or Bulgarian terms.