Ireland’s three main parties are almost neck and neck in the polls ahead of Friday’s general election, as the taoiseach, Simon Harris, struggles to contain the damage inflicted on his campaign by a disastrous interaction with an angry care worker.
In what has been called the “Simon slump”, Fine Gael, the centre-right party which Harris leads, and which seemed almost certain to top the polls, is now under pressure. An Irish Times poll on Monday showed FG had lost its commanding lead of two weeks ago and was down six points.
With the three largest parties all now within two percentage points of one another, a three-way TV debate on Tuesday night between Harris, Micheál Martin, the leader of his government partner Fianna Fáil, and Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, is seen as critical.
Emblematic of a campaign which has been brief but, critics say, full of missteps, Harris’s testy handling of concerns raised by Charlotte Fallon in Kanturk, County Cork, last week has come to dominate recent days’ coverage.
In footage that went viral after being filmed on Friday, Fallon, a disability care worker, accused Harris of doing “nothing” for her sector in the budget, adding she was “not confident” that real changes would be made if he were returned to power.
Harris appeared to dismiss her words, saying “that’s not true” several times before shaking her hand and walking off abruptly. Since then, he has been forced to apologise repeatedly.
On Monday, he admitted he had handled the exchange badly. “I got it completely wrong. I was wrong, simple as,” he said, adding that he had spoken to Fallon and apologised for falling short.
In the same interview with RTÉ, he said: “I didn’t meet my own standards, let alone anybody else’s.” He was particularly annoyed with himself, he added, because he had a brother with additional needs.
“I have been that 16-year-old teenager who’s watched my own mother cry with frustration at being a mother of a child with special educational needs,” he said. “I know what it’s like.
“I know what it’s like to be in a family where you feel isolated, where you feel let down, where you fight for services. And, on that issue, of all issues, I am so passionate about it.”
In an interview with Cork Today radio, Fallon said it was “beyond time” that the government rectified a difference in pay between disability workers like her and those employed elsewhere in the Irish health service.
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Fallon said she couldn’t understand why people were congratulating the taoiseach as he walked around the supermarket and that was why she buttonholed him.
With just two days to the election, Harris is struggling to shake the incident off.
The Irish Times/Ipsos B&A poll showed that the momentum has drained from Fine Gael, which is predicted to get around 19% of the vote, with Sinn Féin ahead by one point on 20% of the vote, and Fianna Fáil two points ahead at 21%.