Governments 1923 to 2002

The forthcoming general election, the 26th to be held since the foundation of the State, follows an unusually lengthy interval of five years since the preceding poll.

This was not at all as expected before the May 1997 election, while the emergence of the minority Fianna Fáil Progressive Democrats administration after the results occasioned widespread predictions of a short life for Mr Ahern's new government.

It faced the looming hazards of possible embarrassment for key members at the hands of the Flood Tribunal on planning corruption in North Dublin, and there was also pressure to establish a further inquiry into the finances of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey and former Fine Gael Minister Michael Lowry (this was duly done through the creation of the Moriarty Tribunal in September 1997).

Eamon de Valera: became Taoiseach and Minister for External Affairs in 1937.

The PDs, a party which placed particular stress on good governance, seemed unlikely to tolerate any ethical lapses or oversights of the kind with which Fianna Fáil had recently been associated in the public mind. In addition, the Ahern coalition would be dependent on an unhealthily large and demanding group of independent TDs.

Yet despite the predicted shocks arising from the tribunals, the Fianna Fáil/PD coalition has performed the remarkable feat of going the full term, something which only one previous Irish administration - the de Valera government of 1938-43, when matters were distorted by the challenge of avoiding involvement in the World War - managed to do.

People may debate the performance in office of the Ahern coalition, but no one can doubt that the pundits, academics as well as journalists, were hopelessly wrong in predicting its early demise. The only sure lesson of Irish electoral history is that 'expert' predictions are seldom right.

This became clear in the Irish state's first election in August 1923, which was also the first in which Irish women enjoyed the same voting rights as men. Held amidst the ruins left by civil war, W.T. Cosgrave's newly created Cumann na nGaedheal party (the forerunner of Fine Gael, which was formed in 1934) appeared to have all the advantages: it controlled the machinery of government, and it had decisively beaten anti-Treaty militarism; it had the support of commercial and industrial interests throughout the state; the Catholic hierarchy and the national and local press were almost entirely hostile to the anti-Treaty movement because of the civil war; most of the republican leadership and its organizational talent were among the twelve thousand people behind bars; and republican activists on the outside were subject to considerable state harassment.

The voter turnout of 60 per cent was disappointingly low, probably reflecting a combination of apathy, exhaustion and some deliberate abstentionism, and the results were a considerable shock: Cumann na nGaedheal won 39 per cent of the vote, and sixty three of the 153 seats.

Other pro-treaty groups did surprisingly well, indicating that there was a definite constituency for non-civil war parties - organized Labour and agricultural interests - which approximated more closely to the political cleavages visible in mainland European politics: the Farmers Party got 13 per cent of the vote and fifteen seats, Labour (11 per cent and fourteen seats), and other parties and independents (11 per cent and seven seats). But the big news was that, despite abstentionism, republican candidates won 28 per cent of the votes cast and took forty four seats.

The evidence of a significant anti-Treaty electorate was crucial in determining the course of Irish politics. While styling himself as the head of a notional Irish republican government, on his release from prison in July 1924 Eamon de Valera took stock of political realities and in 1926, after breaking with the republican purists of Sinn Fein, created a new political party, Fianna Fáil. In the June 1927 election the new party, still pledged to abstentionism, took 26 per cent of the vote and forty four seats, while the sterile absolutists of Sinn Fein and other republicans got just 5 per cent and five; Cumann na nGaedheal won only forty seven seats, a loss of sixteen, yet Cosgrave remained comfortably in power because his natural enemies would not participate in the Oireachtas.

Following the murder of Kevin O'Higgins in July 1927, new legislation was announced which would require Dáil candidates to undertake to take their seats if elected. This measure forced de Valera to cross the Rubicon and lead his party into the Dáil. It was a seismic moment in Irish political life, yet we should reflect that, although now dependent for a Dáil majority on a congeries of smaller parties and independents, after the September 1927 election W.T. Cosgrave was able to continue governing for another four years despite Fianna Fáil's sustained attacks on his administration (all Oireachtas debates since 1919 are now searchable).

Since the 1920s Fine Gael, Labour and the various small and transient niche parties which have been a feature of Irish electoral life such as the Farmers Party, the National League, the Centre Party, Clann na Talmhan, Clann na Poblachta, Democratic Left (a party which still has a cyber existence), the Workers Party, the Socialist Party, the Green Party and the Progressive Democrats have spent much of their time attempting, and occasionally succeeding, in keeping Fianna Fáil out of office, or since 1989 in restraining that party's alleged excesses in coalition.

Eighty years after the establishment of the state, a historian is struck far more by the continuities than by changes in Irish electoral life. Irish voters are still more likely to express a first preference for one of the two major parties which dominated Irish politics in the 1920s than for any other party. Turnout in the forthcoming election is likely to be in the mid-60 per cent range, deplorably low but no worse than was seen during the state's first turbulent political decade.

The late 1920s saw the assimilation of mainstream republicanism into constitutional politics through Fianna Fáil's entry into the Dáil; the last decade has seen the near death of purist republicanism through Sinn Fein's abandonment of abstention in both parts of the island.

Perhaps uniquely in Western Europe, continuity extends not only to parties but to families: in Dun Laoghaire and in Clare voters even have the chance to vote for a Cosgrave and a de Valera.

While independent Ireland decisively turned its back on the trappings of monarchy with the 1937 constitution and the declaration of the republic in 1948, dynastic politics are alive and well, and the civil war split still serves as the underlying rationale for the state's two largest parties. Will it be so in another eighty years?

Eunan O'Halpín is professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin.

© The Irish Times