Why has Ireland escaped the right-wing wave crashing over Europe and North America?

MAGA is coming for you

Ireland stands almost alone: its voters at the recent general election chose to retain the incumbent government. Almost everywhere else, the right is either in power or gaining in the polls - opinion or real - to the point where they are on the cusp of power. Austria is one instance of the latter, Canada another. Trump, of course, is at the top of the list. Even in the UK, which is but one example of the curse of incumbency, the centrist winner of the July general election has seen its popularity plummet with the single issue - anti-immigration - party, Reform, gaining at its expense. Nigel Farage is regularly mentioned as favourite to be the UK’s next Prime Minister.

Ireland is also notable for the failure of far-right candidates to win a single seat in the election. That’s not to say that no conservative or ‘moderately’ right-wing people were elected but merely to note that the ‘business as usual’ election result was notable - unique perhaps - for being precisely that.

Why is right ascendant almost everywhere? Why is Ireland immune to this particular virus?

Lots of commentators have tried to answer the first question, me included (here and here, for example).

Local and global issues played out, to varying extents, during all of 2024’s plebiscites around the world. There are links and commonalities between all of the issues that prompted the great sweep of incumbents from office:

1. Immigration

2. Inflation

3. Housing

4. Health crises

5. Wokeism, especially gender & identity politics

6. The new media landscape

7. Crumbling infrastructure (‘nothing works any more’).

All of these factors have been present in Ireland. Some, like housing and health, have been salient for years. Irish people have been exercised about this list for a very long time. And, as elsewhere, been on occasion very angry.

Note that there is little or nothing in the list that hints at a new wave of ideological, or philosophical, or psychological adoption of far right beliefs. It’s a reasonably well-established fact that a certain proportion of humanity has a predisposition to authoritarianism. Give or take, the data suggests around 20% of us like a bit of strongman politics.

Our list of seven discontents are objections to the outcomes currently produced by our economic and social systems. Of course, that could mean we have fundamentally rejected those systems and have discovered that neo-fascists were right all along. But I don’t think so. For the most part we were relatively content with middle-of-the-road social democracy (or whatever) until the perception grew (often rooted in reality) that the system wasn’t working any more. Or, at least, working for enough people.

Revolting

The November 2023 Dublin riots were reported around the world as the moment when Ireland joined the global list of countries possessing a politically significant far-right - and one that takes to the streets. This is how the BBC’s former Ireland correspondent has described those riots:

In autumn 2023, the world woke up to the existence of a new face of Irish politics: a violent far right. On a cold November night in Dublin, young men apparently inspired by inflammatory online calls to arms, attacked police officers protecting a crime scene where it’s alleged a foreign-born Irish citizen had stabbed young children and a care worker (the case is currently before the courts). It was the worst riot in modern Irish history.

But, unlike the rest of the world, the mob was unable to translate their anger (about immigration mostly) into parliamentary seats. Why?

One simple (simplistic?) answer is that while plenty of Irish voters are exercised by our seven factors, they aren’t that bothered. Or, at least, not enough Irish people are exercised about them. Economic prosperity for just about enough people must be part of the answer here.

Even when Ireland was in the cross hairs of the new plutocrats, few people seemed to notice. While Elon Musk has sent UK politics into convulsions, his (and other) attempts to force regime change in Ireland mostly fell on deaf ears.

Here’s Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon piling on Ireland:

One big reason for the failure of the extreme right to score is the absence of an Irish mainstream party representing their views. Sinn Fein’s loss of support throughout 2024 was a direct consequence of its far-right fringe peeling away, frustrated by the Shinner’s refusal to join the anti-immigration bandwagon. Anyone puzzled by the presence of neo-fascists in an ostensibly left-wing party should ask Chat-GPT about the horseshoe theory of politics.

Anti-incumbency has proven to be less potent in PR electoral systems like Ireland’s. Voters can express dissatisfaction with their current rulers while nevertheless re-electing them. It’s different in first past the post regimes. Donald Trump got less (just about) votes than the combined sum of his opponents but still won. That said, the three Irish coalition parties only garnered 45.7% of first preference votes between them. Therein lies the lesson: despite the average levels of prosperity presided over by the coalition, enough people either did not get a big enough share of that economic bounty and/or were exercised by one or all of our list of seven factors of discontent. There are still plenty of unhappy people in stable old Ireland.

Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, Trudeau in Canada: all have still failed to absorb the lessons contained in the successes of Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, Meloni and Orban: Centre-left and centre-right politics have failed.

The Great Financial Crisis crystalised that failure for many voters. It revealed a system that is rigged against them. Unfettered financial capitalism doesn’t work for nearly enough people. For those whom the system does work, business as usual, post financial crisis, meant presiding over a deteriorating public realm, increasingly unaffordable housing, and an an ever-louder narrative to the effect that ‘nothing works any more’. Even in Germany, headlines moan that the trains no longer run on time.

Presiding over gradual economic and social decay permits your opponents to mount their favourite hobby horses and claim that its all the fault of immigrants and critical race theory. Centrists can witter on all they like about how immigration is more of a solution than a problem but nobody is listening to them.

The argument here is that electorates are not embracing the new right with gay abandon, but are more reacting to failure of the elites to provide economic growth, roads, railways, hospitals and houses. Voters have gravitated towards politicians who promise, falsely, that only they know how to tackle all these problems.

Electorates are demanding change. They are not expressing ideological preferences but are merely asking somebody to make things better, to make some things work.

For those who do not believe that sending immigrants ‘home’ will solve anything, a business-as-usual response simply will not cut it. Radical change is now required if the rightward lurch is not to gain even more momentum. Just as it is not good enough for Keir Starmer to base his premiership on being nice - ‘not being a Tory’ - it won’t be good enough for the next Irish government to assume that continuity will bring its own rewards.

'Delivery’ sounds dull but it is now everything. Somebody has to be upset: NIMBY’s everywhere have to be seen off. Starmer has to stop with the nonsense of promising to get closer to the EU and then doing nothing that might risk getting closer to the EU. Vested interests are everywhere, a lot of them contained within the planning system. Dominic Cummings was not wrong about everything: the civil service in many countries is chock full of smart, decent people who have osmotically absorbed a change-resistant culture.

Many of my friends tell me they have mentally ‘checked out’ of politics and will have their next engagement in four years time ‘when Trump has left the stage’. Comparisons with the 1930s are odious but Derek Scally in the Irish Times reminds us of what Germans in the 1930s called ‘inner emigration’: their version of mentally checking out while the Nazis came to power.

Rats eat their young

The multiple contradictions presented by the new right could lead to their downfall. But it would be wrong to count on it, even though there have been plenty of amusing headlines already:

Steve Bannon says he will ‘take down’ the ‘truly evil’ Elon Musk

by Lauren Irwin - 01/12/25 6:54 PM ET

Musk and MAGA Fight Over Visas

Clichés are great: hope for the best but prepare for the worst!

Lessons

The key lesson of all of this is that unless things are fixed - people’s lives actually made better - MAGA is coming for you, even in Ireland. The only vaccine against the virus is to give enough people belief that things can be made to work again. That requires radical delivery. Incremental change, business as usual - if your mindset embraces either or both of these things, you are, politically, toast.

Yes, it’s not easy to build houses, reform broken health systems and confront vested interests (especially NIMBYism). But not doing the hard things means leaving your country’s door wide open to people who really do not have your welfare at the top of their list of priorities.