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Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris and Foreign Minister Micheál Martin, from rival parties but currently coalition colleagues, have yet to begin negotiations on a new partnership following their latest win of the Irish election, almost obliterating left-wing parties.
The full results, confirmed Tuesday, December 3 saw their centrist parties gain unexpected strength following countless recounts under their single transferable vote system, but they still fall a few seats short of a governing majority. Martin, who is expected to succeed Harris as Taoiseach, the Irish head of government, because his party is now substantially bigger than that of Harris, said that Trump’s imminent return to the White House imposed an effective deadline on Ireland’s own government formation challenge. Both leaders have stressed they need to negotiate a wider political alliance and launch a new administration in time for January 20, Trump’s inauguration date.
Trump administration threat to Irish government
Ireland is among the EU’s biggest exporters to the US, most critically of pharmaceuticals made by the top American companies based in Ireland. The nearly 1,000 American multinationals in Ireland today constitute by far the country’s biggest contributors to income and corporate tax, Ireland’s top two sources of revenue. Harris has warned that if Ireland loses even the top three companies, a tenth of the state’s tax revenue might head overseas as well.
For Martin, the formation of government, which is usually a drawn-out process in Ireland, must not go past Trump’s return date because the key diplomatic event on the Irish political calendar is perennially St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, in Washington. The Irish, who sought to flatter their way through the first Trump regime and won more U.S. investment following the Republican’s 2017 corporate tax reforms, expect a much more awkward visit this time, if they are invited at all.
Who will be new Irish leader?
Among the many points of tension the Irish will have to overcome is who is going to take the top job. At the moment it’s Harris, a 38-year-old relative newcomer to the top job of Taoiseach. The election outcome has dropped Simon Harris’ Fine Gael party into second place slightly behind Martin’s Fianna Fáil. The two parties, which trace their origins to the opposite sides in Ireland’s vicious civil war that followed independence from Britain a century ago, combined political forces for the first time in 2020 to block a rapidly growing far left Sinn Féin party from leading a Dublin government for the first time.
Sinn Féin’s current tactic appears geared to making it more difficult for any of those smaller left-wing parties to break ranks and agree to prop up Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, which between them have led every Irish government since independence. If no party from the left agrees to work with the ‘civil war parties,’ it would be due in part to the terrible outcomes that have befallen any small party to have done so in the past.