Terry Prone: Sinn Féin became boring and predictable, and voters responded accordingly 

Sinn Féin spent far too much effort pleasing its core supporters via social media — when it's the floating voters that all political parties need to get them over the line

Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald speaking to reporters at the RDS flanked by senior party figures including Dublin Fingal TD Louise O’Reilly. Picture: Damien Storan/PA

One of the election leaflets in my postbox last week, from a long-term councillor, offered four pages worth of the achievements of my local county council, none of which scratched me where I itch.  

I itch over the beautiful place on Dublin’s extreme northside where I live being defaced by visually assaultive structures.

Within one small area at Portrane beach sit three such atrocities. The first consists of huge concrete pipe sections allegedly designed to prevent the beach sand from disappearing. Great objective. Pity about their ugliness which is so atrocious, it would make you want to avoid that particular beach, with or without sand.

Recycling tanks such as those at Portrane Beach 'are so spectacularly ugly that no local authority should permit them to exist,' writes Terry Prone. 

Not 20 metres away is a Rehab line-up of garish tanks for the disposal of clothing, bottles, and cans. 

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I would modestly suggest that these tanks, ubiquitous throughout the country, are so spectacularly ugly that no local authority should permit them to exist, and yet they are a given, everywhere, surrounded by bags of detritus dumped in front of them because they’re always stuffed to the orifice.

They testify to lowered expectations. 

Two hundred years ago, we expected public utilities like drinking water pumps to be elegant and pleasing. It’s been ugliness all the way down since.

The third edifice destroying the spectacular beauty of this particular view is a four-throne toilet in a navy shed.

Now, to be fair, public toilets have, for almost a century, been out on their own as examples of vile architecture, but this set surpasses the bad norm, and also seems to have faulty doors, so you get, for free, a clear view of one actual toilet as you pass. If any decent public servant had a look at it, they could not but be ashamed.

Now, because no candidate came near my domicile during the campaign, I had no chance to tell them that if they promised a pilot public improvement plan affecting loos, orange one-eyed recycling tanks, and abandoned concrete pipes, they’d have my vote. 

Not too much to ask for, right? 

When it comes to local elections, most people are transactional. Promise to fix our pothole/public toilet/bottle bank and we’ll divvy up with the vote. That’s if we actually go to vote. 

The latter decision is often sparked by spite. In my case, anyway. The leaflet in my post box telling me Ireland was full and promising to inhibit the EU in its management of the next pandemic moved my visit to the polling station from a good intention to a furious certainty.

At the polling station, the first obvious factor in play was good humour. Everybody seemed to be in flying form and amused by having to address ballot papers long enough to wear as scarves. I was greeted warmly by name by a returning officer who at the same time automatically opened the passport I handed him, and then roared laughing at the contradiction.

On Saturday, the headline story was so impelling that Sinn Féin's doughty Louise O’Reilly, two hours after the officials started stacking votes, could see no way to convince observers that her party hadn’t tanked. She did a clever U-turn and started to talk, instead, about the importance of the upcoming general election. 

A couple of hours later, Paschal Donohoe made what in any other politician would have been a crowing triumphalist observation, commenting that the narrative which regarded Sinn Féin inevitably being in government next time around was now shattered.

Vindication was in the air for the opinion pollsters who’ve been telling us for some time that Sinn Féin is on the slide. The question, inevitably, is why. Why, when they’re doing pretty much the same thing that created a massive surge in their direction at the last general election?

You know something? That’s their problem, right there. Remember that maddening observation to the effect that doing the same thing while expecting a different outcome is daft?

The variation, emerging from this weekend’s election results, is this. Doing the same thing while expecting the same outcome is just as daft. People are fickle. People hate being bored. People hate predictability. And Sinn Féin has become boring and predictable.

The party is hampered by its addiction to social media — one of the key factors that got it to where it was. But the party has never learned that social media is a steroid-infused version of real life.

The three categories of voters

In real life, smart politicians know that the voting public breaks into three uneven sections.

The first is the cohort who think you and your party are mighty altogether. Let’s call them the converted. The second is the cohort who think you and your party are a collection of scumbags and they’d rather keel over than vote for you. They might be called the unconvertible.

Somewhere in the middle are the floating voters. At your peril will you devote time and money to the already converted and the unconvertible. The floaters are who you need to get you over the line.

Social media and preaching to the converted 

The problem with La La Social Media Algorithm Land is that it favours the converted who, addicted to condemnation and rage, must be triggered by constant attacks on Government. 

For its part, Sinn Féin, accordingly, has cut its cloth according to social media’s measure, concentrating obsessively on asking parliamentary questions that make a certain kind of answer inevitable and allow the upload of question, answer, and condemnation.

In the process, they have become predictable. They could get away with predictable when Leo Varadkar was constantly attacking them as if they were a real and present danger to the nation.

Absent the excitement of that attack, boredom has set in. We know what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it and that very predictability affects how voters see them.

Or, rather, it affects how voters see themselves, which is what matters. Just a couple of years ago, to vote Sinn Féin meant you had an image of yourself as courageous, free-thinking, future-directed. Too cool for school.

That’s gone to hell in a handbasket. Voting for Sinn Féin now has no great coolness payoff. They have gone out of voter fashion so much that even what Fergus Finlay calls their “unmatched ground game” could not rescue them. They’ve become the equivalent of that uncle who used to sing ‘Kevin Barry’ at family parties. 

All the guff about their mistake being overpopulating each constituency with candidates should not distract from the fact that overpopulation just meant more candidates ended up competing for a vote share that was godawful to begin with.

The real danger Sinn Féin now poses to the Government is that its relative failure will empower the “go early” brigade. However, as demonstrated by the election footage of the Taoiseach, cone in hand, forcing gardaí to run to catch up with him, Simon Harris, in addition to speed, has a deeply-entrenched sense of purpose.

Plus, you may have noticed, he loves being Taoiseach. So he just might not buy into the “go early” argument.