The biggest challenge posed by the far right in Ireland is convincing yourself to take it seriously. It must be done but it’s not easy. There is even a strange comfort that one of the two Irish novels shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize, Paul Lynch’s gripping Prophet Song, imagines an Ireland of the near future in which a far-right party has taken power. Comforting because the book demands quite an effort of the imagination. Lynch makes this possibility chillingly real, but it is a reality that, as of now, only a very good novelist could create.
Last week, 200-odd (some very odd) demonstrators in effect blockaded the seat of parliament in Dublin for most of an afternoon, preventing members from entering or leaving. They erected a mock gallows bedecked with pictures of leading members of all the main Irish political parties. The effigy hung from it had pictures of both the commissioner of police and the minister for children, equality and integration, who is particularly hated by the far right because he is both Green and gay. They shouted racist abuse at people of colour passing by, threw plastic bags filled with urine at two women, and a young American on her first day as a parliamentary intern had her phone stolen.
The incident was undoubtedly nasty, and all the more disturbing because Ireland has managed to endure as one of the few developed countries in which the far right has no real foothold. It is one of a handful of nations whose political centre of gravity has shifted to the left in the last decade. It has done so even as it has been transformed from a country with almost no immigration to one in which 20% of the population is made up of people who were born somewhere else.
Yet it is hard to see the mob outside parliament as representing any real threat to Irish democracy. It was small in numbers. The stated objects of its rage were almost random: immigration, transgender rights, planned hate speech legislation, Covid vaccines, the globalists, sex education in schools, Irish government support for Ukraine, and even (bizarrely) proposals for a constitutional right to housing. Some of the most prominent figures in the crowd have been travelling around to public libraries in different parts of the country and harassing librarians to demand the removal of children’s books, especially those that fail to demonise homosexuality.
This scattergun approach reflects an inability to cohere into a single movement. There are too many candidates for the dream job of Ireland’s post-democratic Duce. There is a plethora of micro-parties, among them the Irish Freedom Party, Ireland First, Anti-Corruption Ireland and the National Party. The last of these has recently added to the gaiety of the nation by engaging in internecine warfare over the ownership of its stash of gold bars. This comedy gold added to the general feeling that, however unpleasant these people may be, they have little chance of becoming a serious political force.
And yet, there are some grounds for caution. One is, paradoxically enough, the strong possibility of radical change in Irish politics with the emergence of the radically nationalist Sinn Féin (formerly the political wing of the IRA) as a serious contender to lead the next government. Polling suggests that in the general election to be held next year or early in 2025, Sinn Féin will emerge as the largest single party in the Dáil. It may then be able to take power at the head of a coalition government.
What would follow is predictable enough: a strong wave of disillusionment. At the moment, Sinn Féin is the biggest single barrier to the emergence of a far-right movement of any substance. Its roots are in the kind of ethno-nationalism that the far right seeks to harness, but Sinn Féin thinks of itself as a leftwing anti-imperialist party. To its credit, it has never sought to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment. Yet it has soaked up many of the energies that would otherwise flow into the far right with its promises of a united Ireland and a quick end to deep crises in the provision of housing and healthcare.
Those promises would be very hard to deliver on in the short term. Sinn Féin would probably be much more pragmatic and cautious in government than it looks in opposition. And that would create an opening for a party of the radical right – if such a party can cohere around a single strategy and the kind of half-credible charismatic leader that all quasi-fascist movements require.
There are also, deep in the groundwater of Irish politics, two elements that could yet resurface. One is conservative Catholicism. Ireland rightly got much attention around Europe for the two referendums that transformed its image from reactionary to progressive: the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2015 and removal of a constitutional ban on abortion in 2018. These were indeed electrifying moments – so much so that it is easy to forget that in each case about a third of voters supported the conservative status quo. Those voters now have almost no political representation – almost all the existing parties are socially liberal. So far, the right has failed to mobilise traditional Catholics, but they have not gone away. In France, Spain and Italy, they have provided a support base for far-right parties. It is not far-fetched to think that this could happen in Ireland.
The other dormant element is an old anti-democratic strain in Irish nationalism. Its most militant factions always maintained that they had no need for a democratic mandate (which Sinn Féin emphatically lacked for the IRA’s armed campaign), because they themselves embody the “will of the people” as decided more than a century ago during Ireland’s revolutionary period. A similar claim, as The PopuList project’s latest report has shown, is now the common currency of the European radical right. The volonté générale has its own specifically Irish accent. It is a current that a smart far-right leader (if one were to emerge) could plug into.
All of which means that the far right in Ireland has to be viewed simultaneously through two lenses. One shows a risible rabble. The other shows a petri dish in which, under the right conditions, something very dangerous could grow.
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times and author of We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland
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