The single issue is that there is no longer a single predictable issue

WOULDN’T you be sorry for the deer? Sunday is the one morning they usually have the Phoenix Park to themselves, at least until the day is well-aired. Yesterday, as a blood-red sun arose over the trees, they had to contend with a State car, media vehicles, a rake of microphones and Charlie Bird. God love them.

Putting the trauma to Bambi & Co to one side, yesterday’s dawn strike was the result of comprehensive planning by Bertie Ahern. Think about the last week. It was stuffed with calm lengthy interviews done by the Taoiseach: the kind of interviews he couldn’t hope for once the Electoral broadcasting rules on balance kick in. It featured an opinion poll ghastly in its implications for Fianna Fáil and consequent pessimistic inputs to radio programmes by Fianna Fáil activists, talking about “the most difficult” campaign they could remember.

Now, think about next week. If the Mahon Tribunal goes ahead, today will see the issuance of a Tribunal summary statement which is unlikely to be useful to the Taoiseach, and the next few days will see Tom Gilmartin making allegations about bribes and back-pocket money.

The Sunday summons to media to get themselves to Áras an Uachtaráin wiped out last week and pre-empted next week. The Taoiseach’s stress on a clean campaign about issues laid down a marker to the opposition: push the Tribunal stuff and you’re going to be seen as not just doing negative campaigning, but negative PERSONAL campaigning.

Not that people on the opposition side accept for a moment that Fianna Fáil will run a clean, issues-driven campaign. Within minutes of the calling of the election, former Fine Gael Minister Ivan Yates was suggesting on Sean O’Rourke’s programme that Enda Kenny might usefully invest in one of those hard hats traditionally worn on building sites. Yates’ prediction was that attacking Kenny’s CV is going to be a central thrust of the Fianna Fáil campaign.

“If Fianna Fáil use that as their main line, Enda Kenny will prove them wrong,” Richard Bruton opined, shortly afterwards on the same programme.

Without any overt personal attack on the Fine Gael leader, Dermot Ahern nonetheless managed to establish that the key claim to be made by Fianna Fáil is that it can prove to the electorate that it has “the best capability of bringing them through reasonably bumpy times in the immediate future.” Ah. The competence issue. The central issue of this election.

The key danger facing Fine Gael, Labour and the Green Party, in the coming weeks, is not attacks on Enda Kenny’s CV or proving competence. It’s the possibility of an opinion poll-driven error. The most recent opinion poll demonstrates possibility, not probability.

Like any national poll, it skated over the reality that what will happen, three weeks from now, is 43 mini-elections informed by local factors, local loyalties and new demographics. Almost every single one of the constituencies contains a variable factor that will change the nature of the result from the overall picture presented by opinion poll statistics, no matter how elegantly balanced.

The day of the landslide result is over forever. The 1977 Jack Lynch result for Fianna Fáil can never again be delivered, no matter how charismatic the leader, no matter what promises are made, no matter how much money is poured into a campaign.

Thirty years ago, there was immeasurably greater coherence to Irish voting patterns and reactions. Local activists could predict to the last preference what would come out of most homes in most townlands. Ireland represented a solid single entity of belief, of practice and of culture.

The Ireland of today is radically different. The breakup of traditional family structures is only the beginning of that difference. A multiplicity of factors has come together to fray predictable loyalties, whether those loyalties are to a radio station or a political party. The CAO system of removing teenagers from the family home to immerse them in communities of their peers in another location has contributed. Immigration has added its input too, as has the development of the dormitory town.

It’s not the phenomenal and growing size of towns like Drogheda, Swords, Dundalk and Lusk that makes this election so different. It’s the nature of the population in those growing towns which represents a largely unacknowledged sea-change.

On the one hand, you have a younger population of first-time buyer commuters. On the other hand, you have an older population of retirees escaping from the capital.

The combination of these factors, plus the proliferation of apartment blocks, changes the level of certainty about voting patterns and undermines the illusion of a nationwide swing delivered by the polls.

The overwhelming likelihood, at the end of this election, is that we will have a hung Dáil. Nobody in a recognised party block is likely to ‘win’ at the polls. That’s the other extraordinary factor about the 2007 General Election: it’s likely to be won AFTER the results are in, and it is likely to be won by negotiation and deal-making. If Fine Gael’s recovery under Enda Kenny comes to full fruition and Pat Rabbitte’s personal popularity translates into Labour Party wins, then the negotiation and deal-making will be with the Green Party.

If Fianna Fáil do better than opinion polls would predict, the negotiation and deal-making will be with the Labour Party.

Much has been made in recent months of the perhaps terminal threat to the Labour Party of going into government with Fianna Fáil, based on what happened last time around. Two factors matter here.

The first is that, while political and media consensus holds that the voters waited in the long grass to punish Labour the last time for going to bed with Fianna Fáil, too little consideration has been given to the losses consequent on simply being in government. Anti-establishment voters, by definition, reject anyone who is part of the establishment, and participation in government inevitably shifted Labour, in the minds of its more radical voters, into the establishment.

That, however, can be oddly liberating for Labour at this time. It’s arguable that the more radical, youthful left-of-centre voters, or a substantial number of them, have been mopped up by Sinn Féin. By the same token, for Labour’s current old guard, this is their last chance at power, so they may be persuaded, if numbers so indicate, that their duty to the nation is to provide stable government by entering a pact with Fianna Fáil. Just as the 20-somethings currently running for Sinn Féin look knowingly mystified when the troubles in the North are mentioned, the 20-somethings who will succeed Labour’s current generation will be able to start afresh, untainted, even if they were to enter Government with Fianna Fáil after the election.

The electorate is not asking what are the promises. The electorate is asking which are the parties best able to deliver on those promises. This may toll the knell of the single issue candidate.