With the coalition fresh from handing over the captain’s armband at half time, this government is keen to make sure it goes the distance.
And with Sinn Fein still ahead in the polls, the government parties will be keen to have as much time as possible to try to catch them, or at least catch them out.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar back at the helm of government will perhaps mean a bit more ceremony and grand announcements, in contrast to the understated manner of now-tanaiste Micheál Martin.
We will probably see a push to get even more legislation through the Oireachtas, something this coalition has been good at, despite criticism that much of it has been rushed with not enough time for scrutiny.
The backbiting between the government and its sworn enemy Sinn Fein shows no sign of dissipating. The government has a number of crises to tackle, and will want to be seen to deal with them before the local elections due in 2024. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein will be gunning to repair their councillor numbers after their disaster day out in 2019.
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So what will be the major issues that will dominate the politics of Ireland in 2023?
Ukraine
February 24 will mark a year since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and Ireland’s political landscape has been defined by the crisis since.
Everything from energy prices to housing and education has been affected — with 60,000 Ukrainian nationals welcomed to our shores — and it will continue to have an impact this year.
The influx of refugees has not yet begun to have a real effect on the already dire housing emergency but is likely to become more of a challenge.
It’s expected that thousands of asylum-seekers will be moved out of hotels as their deal with the state expires and tourism returns with a vengeance post-Covid.
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The government has already been forced to back down when attempting to relocate children from hotels at little notice, but this will not be an option as available hotel accommodation becomes increasingly scarce.
Protests outside reception centres at East Wall in Dublin and in Cork have made the government uneasy and keen to stop the spread of anti-immigrant sentiment in the country. However, as services continue to struggle to cope with the unprecedented wave of war refugees, the fallout from Putin’s war in Ukraine will continue to dominate the political agenda here
Brexit
Despite many assertions by Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, that his Brexit deal was “oven-ready”, it wasn’t and the impasse still hasn’t ended.
Negotiations continue between Brussels and London with Ireland stuck in the middle. Micheál Martin, the new foreign affairs minister and former taoiseach, will be keen to impress in his role and to be seen to repair very damaged relations between Britain and Ireland.
Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, promised President Biden in November that a deal would be reached with the European Union over the Northern Ireland protocol by the time of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement in April.
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After a meeting between the two leaders on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, a statement from Downing Street said they “looked forward to working together to take forward co-operation between the UK and the US on areas including trade, defence and upholding the Belfast (Good Friday) agreement”.
All eyes will be on Martin to ensure that Irish wishes are represented in any deal reached between the EU and UK.
The people of Northern Ireland have been left without a sitting local body of lawmakers since last February.
Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, postponed plans for an election after previously insisting that he would call one immediately for a new Northern Ireland assembly in the event of Stormont’s collapse.
If a deal can be reached between Brussels and London, the voters of the province might be able to avoid another day at the polls.
Election mode
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Next year may seem a long way away at the start of the new year, but time certainly flies when you’re trying to convince people to vote for you.
The local elections are due in spring 2024 and the government parties will be keen to prove that their performance has filtered out to grassroots popularity.
Fianna Fáil are determined to set out their stall as being independent from Fine Gael with their own separate identity, while the Green Party will be extolling their achievements on climate action after their successful day at the polls in 2019.
Expect to see party leaders embark on a mini-tour of the country in the latter stages of the year, back-slapping their local representatives on local media to boost their popularity come polling day.
Meanwhile, Peter Burke, the minister for planning and local government, has allocated funding of €215,594 to seven political parties and two independent groups to encourage an increase in the number of female candidates and people of diversity running in the next local elections, as the Irish government is keen to see better representation of both groups in local authorities across the country. There is no gender quota for parties in local elections.
Housing
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While many political crises come and go, Ireland’s dire housing situation is the one that shows no sign of stopping.
By the end of 2022, just over a year after the launch of the government’s multi-billion-euro Housing for All plan — a strategy touted by ministers as being the solution to more than a decade of housing undersupply — homelessness rates were at record levels.
Along with that, Central Statistics Office figures show that house prices increased by an eye-watering 9.8 per cent in the 12 months from October 2021.
With the population at an all-time high according to the latest census, Housing for All targets are widely expected to be revised upwards pending a review in 2023, to take into account the growing number of people on our shores.
Given that housing targets are set to increase, it makes the sizeable drop-off in building commencements in 2022 — homes that would be expected to be completed in 2023 and beyond — all the more troublesome for the government.
Cost of living
Inflation and the cost-of-living crisis was one of the dominating concerns across Irish society in the past 12 months and looks set to wear on into 2023.
The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has forecast that inflation will average out at 7.1 per cent in 2023. While that figure is lower than the levels being experienced now, it will give little relief to those under the most financial pressure.
Measures introduced in September’s generous budget are yet to come into play, including further energy credits for households.
The funding for such measures came largely from the bumper corporation tax receipts last year.
As fears over the stability of Ireland’s tech sector and what that could mean for the state’s tax income continue to simmer, there are questions over whether the government could foot the bill for another giveaway budget next year to mitigate the effects of a lingering cost of living crisis.
The Labour Party
After a difficult 12 months, it seems as though the Labour Party are looking at a year of uncertainty ahead.
The troubled party dropped two percentage points in the latest Sunday Times/Behaviour & Attitudes poll, languishing on just 3 per cent.
Ivana Bacik, the Dublin Bay South TD, has failed to inspire since taking over the leadership from Alan Kelly last March, with rumblings in the corridors of Leinster House of a rural-urban divide within the party.
A lack of unity could be seen in recent weeks during Seanad and Dail votes on the funding of Ireland’s greyhound and horse-racing industries. Kelly, Seán Sherlock, the Cork East TD, and Mark Wall, the Kildare senator, voted against the rest of the parliamentary party.
With young, fresh and more social media-savvy candidates, the Social Democrats, led by the ex-Labour minister Róisín Shortall and her co-leader Catherine Murphy, are nudging in on Labour’s patch.
The Social Democrats have repeatedly brushed off discussion of a merger with Labour in recent years and if they attract the right talent ahead of the next election, the position is likely to remain the same.
Healthcare
Having survived December’s cabinet reshuffle, Stephen Donnelly, the health minister, has a mountain to climb when it comes to addressing problems across the board in health. In 2022, the HSE fell short on its recruitment targets for healthcare workers while hospital overcrowding figures for the year were among the worst on record.
General practice is in crisis as the sector haemorrhages doctors while hundreds of thousands of people remain on waiting lists.
Meanwhile, senior officials involved in the construction of the new National Children’s Hospital, a much delayed project, repeatedly refuse to provide an estimate for what the final cost of the facility will be.
While 2023 will see the introduction of some welcome additions to the health service, including publicly funded fertility treatment, long-standing failures need to be addressed.
Good Friday agreement
The Belfast agreement was signed on April 10, 1998, and will turn 25 this year.
The deal to end 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland is held up around the world as a model on making even the most seemingly impossible peace happen.
To mark the agreement’s 25th anniversary, the UK and Irish governments will hold a number of ceremonies and publish a number of initiatives to celebrate all that was achieved.
Fianna Fáil will be keen to be at the forefront of the celebrations, given that its former leader Bertie Ahern, as taoiseach, helped broker the deal.
Rumblings around Leinster House that Ahern may be welcomed back into the fold of Fianna Fáil around the time of the anniversary have become louder, but Micheál Martin has been quick to dismiss any such talk as rumour and speculation.
While Ahern is praised for his role in the peace process, his government’s economic policies are widely blamed for leading to Ireland’s disastrous financial crash in 2008.
Fianna Fail faced an unprecedented wipeout in the 2011 election, losing 51 seats, sparking an existential crisis for the party. It is a lower electoral base from which Martin is still trying to rebuild.
