Opinion: The Perils of Being the Junior Party or Independent TDs in a Coalition Government
By Paula Dennan, Deputy News Editor
We are unlikely to know the complete makeup of the 34th Dáil before Christmas. While it seems clear that it will consist of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, it is unclear whether a smaller party or group of independent TDs will fill the remainder of the seats needed for a Dáil majority. Between them, FF and FG have 86 seats. Fianna Fáil won 48 and Fine Gael won 38. With 174 TDs elected, 88 seats are required for a majority. The larger the majority, the better, so Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will look for more than two TDs to form the next coalition.
Fianna Fáil ruled out governing with Sinn Féin, so despite winning 39 seats, SF will remain in opposition. Given their ideological differences, People Before Profit-Solidarity pledged not to go into coalition with FF and FG. That leaves Labour, the Social Democrats, and the newly formed regional grouping comprising nine independent TDs and the two Aontú TDs. Although the Aontú TDs are not seeking to be involved with the government formation talks.
Labour leader Ivana Bacik initially proposed that Labour and the Social Democrats should enter government formation talks with FF and FG as a combined centre-left bloc, considering each party won 11 seats. The Social Democrats rejected this proposal. During the election, the Social Democrats emphasised their deal breakers for any programme for government. However, talks are likely hampered by their suspension of newly elected Eoin Hayes over his inconsistent statements to the media about when he sold shares in Palantir, his former employer.
While the parliamentary parties of Labour and the Social Democrats have decided to continue their respective talks with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, in recent days, the odds seem to favour the Regional Group over the centre-left parties. The Regional Group’s Seán Canney and Kevin ‘Boxer’ Moran were previously members of the Independent Alliance that formed part of the 2016 Fine Gael minority-led government, with Canney and Moran rotating the role of Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform with responsibility for the Office of Public Works and Flood Relief.
Coalition governments have been the norm in Ireland since the 1980s, yet elections have not always been kind to the junior parties or groupings in those coalitions. The Greens lost all but one of their 12 seats. Winning 12 seats in 2020 was itself a remarkable comeback for the party. They had suffered a complete wipeout in the 2011 general election, losing their six incumbent TDs following their term as the junior party in coalition with Fianna Fáil.
Labour has also experienced the electoral fallout of being in a coalition government. The most significant was that only seven of its TDs were reelected in 2016 after their coalition with Fine Gael.
The Progressive Democrats disbanded in 2009 after losing six of their eight TDs in the 2007 general election. The PDs had served in four coalition governments with Fianna Fáil between 1989 and 2009.
The Independence Alliance's TDs also suffered electoral losses following their stint in coalition with Fine Gael from 2016 to 2020. TDs Shane Ross and Kevin ‘Boxer’ Moran failed to be reelected in 2020, although neither campaigned as Independence Alliance candidates. Moran regained a Dáil seat in 2024 and is now a member of the Regional Group.
This is not to say that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have not had their own electoral collapses. In the 2002 general election, FG lost 23 seats, and in the 2011 general election, FF lost 57 seats. Having bounced back to win 76 seats in 2011, FG again suffered a loss of 26 seats in 2016. However, FF and FG have recovered in ways other parties haven’t because they were larger parties to begin with.
Fianna Fáil’s collapse, the Green Party wipeout in 2011, and Fine Gael and Labour losses in 2016 came during the austerity years after the 2008 economic crash. Voters understandably took their anger to the ballot box. Yet the fallout was more consequential in the immediate and longer term for the Greens and Labour.
When a coalition government is formed, the parties and groupings involved will have agreed on a programme for government. It is this document that underpins the work of the government. For the Greens, a central reason for going into government in 2020 was to pass the Climate Action (Amendment) Bill. Its passage was a target of the programme for the government. The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act became law in 2021. Whatever your thoughts about the Greens as a political party, they had a stated aim and they achieved it. And yet, the electorate all but wiped them out. Again.
The outgoing government’s lack of action over Israel’s genocide against Palestinians undoubtedly factored in how people voted on November 29th. 71% of people in Ireland consider Palestinians to be living under Israeli apartheid, according to polling carried out by Ireland Thinks on behalf of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Campaign for Palestine. 71% of Fianna Fáil and 56% of Fine Gael supporters polled agreed that Palestinians live under an Israeli apartheid system. The disparity in how Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael fared in the election compared to the Green Party collapse cannot solely be credited to a straightforward narrative of one party’s supporters being against Israel’s genocide against Palestinians while the supporters of other parties either don’t consider it genocide or are genocide supporters.
Coalition governments are unlikely to disappear from the Irish political landscape anytime soon. As voters, we must ask ourselves why we continually expect the junior coalition partners to move the centre-right parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael further to the left than their agreed programme for governments. Most Irish electoral politics inhabit the centre, with the centre-left parties taking up the junior coalition role when they enter government.
I include myself in this. I understand the urge to expect more from centre-left parties and want them to govern in ways that demonstrate their ideals. However, they can only achieve so much in coalition when the larger parties are centre-right. Telling people to vote left and transfer left sounds great in theory. But without a substantial agreed-upon voting pact or shared policy platform, voters may wonder what it means in their constituency.
Given the candidates on my ballot, I agonised over voting left and transferring left. It wasn’t clear-cut in that respect, especially when some of the most progressive candidates in my constituency were from parties that weren’t considered left-wing enough by many to be worthy of a transfer vote. I know I wasn’t the only voter facing that dilemma. Ultimately, I voted for the candidates who would do the least damage for the most marginalised people should they get elected. But I was also certain that four of the five incumbent TDs in my constituency would be reelected, so the candidates I gave my higher preferences to were unlikely to win a seat. I was correct. And the fifth seat went to a second Fianna Fáil candidate.
Whatever the configuration of the next government, left-wing and centre-left political parties and politicians must spend its lifetime building a left-wing alliance that gives voters a real chance that voting left and transferring left will result in a left-wing government next time around.
