Government must deal with ‘signal issues’ if it is to win a third term

THERE is a concept in policing and justice called signal crimes. These are crimes which are interpreted by members of the public as warning signals about their level of security. The resonance of a signal crime in the immediate surroundings where it occurs or in the wider community means that such crimes have a particular impact on the public’s view of the police and of the criminal justice system.

Where they are high profile incidents, that resonance and impact is greater. Even though there may be only one victim of the crime, there are many who feel they may become a victim of a similar crime, irrespective of whether or not that fear is statistically justified.

In Irish politics today there are a number of signal competence issues. The Government’s capacity to solve these high profile public sector problems will have a significant impact on how the public regards Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats and will influence their prospects of being re-elected to government.

The rise in Fine Gael’s support in last week’s opinion poll owes much to that party’s improved political performance of late. However, the fact that Fine Gael has upped its game will not explain the extent of the dramatic drop in the support for Fianna Fáil and in the Government’s approval ratings.

The falling Government ratings may also flow from the fact that many voters feel it has lost the capacity to tackle and solve a number of high profile problems.

Prime among these signal competence issues is the Accident and Emergency (A&E) problem.

Few issues have captured the public attention more than the persisting difficulties in some hospitals. There is deep and justified public annoyance that these problems have still not been solved. Not alone is it politically unsustainable but it is morally intolerable that people, especially older people, should have to be subjected to what at times can be inhumane conditions.

Some people are annoyed by the A&E situation because they or someone close to them had a bad personal experience.

A larger portion of the electorate is annoyed because it offends them, in this day and age and in the midst of a booming Celtic economy, that anyone is subjected to such conditions.

The number of people who actually end up in A&E is very small, and the number who will face the difficulties depicted on last week’s Primetime Investigates programme is even smaller. However, a large percentage of the population have real fears that they themselves or their parents will face these conditions.

The political impact is exacerbated by the reality that even the wealthier sectors of society (who can usually avoid or buy their away around defective public services) cannot avoid the risk of being a patient stuck in an A&E ward.

Against this signal competence test, the Tánaiste is in a difficult position.

When she argues that most of the 3,300 people who go to A&E every day are dealt with within hours and without difficulty, she is offering an argument similar to that of the mayor or police commissioner who insists that overall citywide crime rates are falling, even though some more high profile signal crimes remain unsolved.

The state of the electoral register has become another signal competence issue, although obviously a less significant one than conditions in A&E.

As I have written here before our local authorities are primarily responsible for the abysmal state of the electoral register.

However, the politically significant point is that the state of the register has now become a national issue.

A solution to the problem has been demanded from Government and promises that the problem will be sorted out have now been extracted from the Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche. This all means that if the problems with the register are not resolved before the general election, it is the Government that will be held responsible — not the local authorities.

In a year’s time we are likely to be in the middle of the election campaign and at a point where, for obvious reasons, people will be focusing on whether or not they themselves are on the register — or indeed, how often they are on it.

AS voters are thinking about going to the polls, they will also be assessing whether the problems with the compilation of the electoral register — which by then will have been highlighted for more than a year — have been sorted out.

The other significant thing about last week’s TNS/MRBI poll is that the electorate do not believe that a change of government will affect their personal economic wellbeing. This finding should worry the current Government parties.

It is said to be a golden rule of electoral politics that in good economic times, governments are re-elected.

This maxim — popularised by Bill Clinton’s campaign manager James Carville in the soundbite “It’s the economy, stupid” — has as its corollary that whether a government is re-elected or not is determined primarily by how well it has handled the economy.

If this thesis is true in its purest form, then Bertie Ahern is due a further stint in the Taoiseach’s office after the 2007 election. However, there are many reasons why this golden rule may not be applicable in the case of the 2007 general election. The economy is indeed booming, but the extent of it is not necessarily appreciated by all voters, some of whom are too young to remember bad times or to contemplate any risk of returning to bad times.

More importantly, many of the voters do not feel credit for the booming economy is owed to government, or to the incumbent Government alone.

It is also significant in political terms that, as of now, most voters are not convinced that the country’s economic success will dissipate entirely or slow down if the government were to change.

The objective of both Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats between now and polling day will be to persuade the electorate that they and their policies have been responsible for the boom and are indispensable to sustaining it. At the very least they will need to persuade voters that changing the government at this juncture would risk that economic success.

Although they regard the medium term prospects for the economy as very good, the Government will also argue, or at least intimate, that they are the best team to steer the ship of state through any troubled waters which may be ahead.

By comparison, the opposition parties will contend that the economic success is not due to the current Government. Fine Gael and Labour in particular will also seek to claim a share of credit for what they see as their contribution to the economic success, most recently during their term as the Rainbow government of 1995-1997.

They may even argue that they laid some of the ground work during the FitzGerald-Spring governments of the 1980s. Simultaneously, they will argue that the current Government has misspent or misapplied the benefits of the boom and failed adequately to tackle the side-effects of growth.

If it is to get re-elected this Government will not only have to convince or remind more of the electorate that they are better at managing the economy than the alternative, but they will also need to show the electorate that they can solve some of the signal competence issues, particularly the problems in A&E.