McEntee on RTE sums up Fine Gael's tone-deaf misery of a campaign

I received a text message from a despairing Fine Gael supporter at around about the time, last night, that RTE’s immigration debate started. It read “the party’s in crisis so some genius has decided to wheel out Helen to talk about her record on immigration”.

FG supporters, or at least the ones I know, are already in pre-mortem mode for the result they now fear might be coming their way on Friday. The blame is going towards Simon Harris, and the backroom team, and a bad slogan, and a poorly judged manifesto.

But in truth, as McEntee proved last night, the blame should go to things that long since pre-date this campaign. Here she is, telling the public that no matter their opinions on the matter, the country needs more migrants:

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“We need people to come and help with our economy”, says the Minister for Justice. “We have full employment”.

Well, that’s the first lie, because we don’t have “full employment”. What we do have is 150,000 people on the live register – the dole – because they either cannot or will not find work.

Second, there’s the matter which Fine Gael politicians can’t seem to wrap their heads around, but which most people can understand instinctively: That immigration as currently constituted in Ireland is a ponzi scheme. We have a housing crisis, but a Government committed to ever more migration, which drives up demand for houses and perpetuates the demand for construction which in turn justifies the need for more migrants to build the houses but in turn means more homes are needed.

Eventually, we all instinctively know, that whole house of cards will collapse. And I’m talking economically.

Because that appears to be all immigration is to Minister McEntee: An economic matter. But that is not how it is felt across the country, where it is vastly more a cultural and social matter. On that same show, last night, a woman from Dundrum in Tipperary talked about how the population of her small village was doubled, overnight. Last week, an American journalist here to cover the election asked me for a meeting and remarked during said meeting that it was baffling to him that an Irish person could observe the demographics of Dublin City Centre and not realise how radically or quickly Ireland had changed since he was last here, for the election in 2020.

The Government does not simply have obligations to the economic health of the country. It also has obligations to the long-term social cohesion of the country. Most people understand that instinctively – and no matter how much RTE lecture them to the contrary, they also instinctively understand that dramatically changing the cultural balance of the country will have long-term consequences that are not being discussed, or debated.

Yet even on her own terms, McEntee’s case is nonsense. She says that we need more people to come here, but she cannot tell us how many. That is the fundamental question which friendly interviewers never ask: How many doctors? How many nurses? How many engineers?

If this was “immigration to help the economy”, the answers to those questions should be readily available. It’s a simple question, really: How many immigrants does Fine Gael believe Ireland needs over the next five years, and in what sectors of the economy are those people needed?

This all comes back to a fundamental problem now afflicting the party’s election campaign. This morning’s Irish Times poll showed that 88% of the public want change. 35% want radical change, and 53% want “moderate” change. Only 9% of the public wish for there to be no change.

Yet Fine Gael is offering no change of any kind: It is offering, instead, “a new energy”, which translates as I have written before to “more of the same, but more vigorous”. Further, the notable thing about McEntee last night was her unwillingness to acknowledge even a single mistake made by her Government in an area of policy where an overwhelming majority of the voters have expressed severe dissatisfaction with her performance.

There’s a smugness, and an arrogance, to this, which is likely proving fatal to the party’s chances.

The polls showed, I think, that voters were willing to give the party another chance, and certainly to give them a hearing. They have given them a hearing now for two weeks, and they simply have not heard what they wanted to hear. Far from “moderate change”, the party has doubled down on every mistake and run a gaslighting campaign that tells voters that they, in fact, were the ones who were wrong.

A Fine Gael friend remarked the other day that the opinion poll results did not surprise him because the party’s campaign has “reminded voters why they don’t like us”. I think that’s spot on.

Wheeling out your least popular – by some distance – Minister to defend your least popular – by some distance – policy, was stupid. Worse still, McEntee is one of those politicians who thinks that she can persuade people by speaking her talking points slowly, and in a vaguely patronising manner, as if talking to schoolchildren who just haven’t figured out the facts yet.

This is all very simple. The public don’t like Helen McEntee. They don’t like Fine Gael’s immigration policy. They don’t much like Fine Gael’s record in Government. They want change.

And instead of offering change, the party is offering them more Helen, for five more years.

Good luck with that, lads.