Irish Examiner view: If the election was tomorrow, little would actually change

SF and FG level pegging, FF lagging behind

Mary Lou McDonald. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

A weekend opinion poll suggests that, were there an election this summer, it is unlikely that there would be a change in government. 

Fine Gael and Sinn Féin are on 29%, Fianna Fáil is on 14%, with the Greens on 5%. 

That prospect would again give some commentators an opportunity to show that they do not understand our democracy and decry that the change they voted for did not materialise. 

Some of that commentary shows a misunderstanding of parliamentary arithmetic but some of it is deliberately disingenuous.

That analysis might be outflanked if grumblings of discontent in Fianna Fáil lead to a liaison, as a junior, jump-through-the-hoops suitor, with Sinn Féin. 

Such a change would be more like moving the Titanic’s deckchairs as it would provoke the kind of split sounding the party’s death knell — or at least a death knell for today’s Fianna Fáil. 

Such a breakaway would invite the kind of irrelevance pushing Labour close to the precipice. Alan Kelly’s party is on 3%. 

A recovery from this rating would make Lazarus’ rejuvenation seem a modest enough achievement.

And as a return to some kind of normal, or at least a new normal, politics is imminent, it might be interesting to speculate how these ratings might stand if the last number of administrations had discharged one of their undeniable social obligations and actually resolved our shameful, fixable housing crisis. 

There may yet be a rush for those deckchairs.