Ireland’s Far Right

With parties of the radical right coming first or second in a series of Western EU states in last month’s European elections, Ireland might seem an exception. It’s true that no politician in the mould of Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders or Marine Le Pen is banging at the doors of power. Ten years after UKIP became the largest group representing Britain in the European Parliament, Nigel Farage’s former press officer Hermann Kelly sought his own path to Europe from the other side of the Irish Sea. Still flying high in British politics, Farage speaks with considerable affection of Kelly – ‘dear old Hermann … a big strong strapping Paddy’ – but his erstwhile protégé managed to get only 2 per cent of the vote in the Midlands North-West constituency.

Yet Ireland’s local and European elections, held simultaneously on 7 June, saw far-right groups win a foothold in the political mainstream for the first time. A new party of the right, Independent Ireland (II), took one of the country’s fourteen seats in the European Parliament with 6.2 per cent of the vote. Four minor groups that stand further to the right had a combined vote share of just under 5 per cent, although none of their candidates came anywhere near winning a seat. In the local elections, the far right barely registered overall, but three candidates running on anti-immigration platforms were elected to Dublin City Council (out of 63 seats in total).

Independent Ireland was created less than a year ago by three TDs who won seats as independents in the last general election, in February 2020. The name reflects the new formation’s carefully ambiguous profile. At one level, it’s a pitch to the sizeable portion of the electorate that frequently votes for independent candidates (a non-party party, so to speak); at another, it implies that Ireland’s independence is under threat from actors whose identity remains conveniently vague. II’s leader, Michael Collins, attended a meeting of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in Kilkenny last year, and went to Italy last December for the Atreju conference, organised by Meloni’s party, where he spoke on a panel with far-right leaders from Cyprus and the Balkans.

Ireland has three constituencies for European elections. II picked figures with an established media profile to represent it in two of them, Dublin and Midlands North-West. Niall Boylan is a veteran shock jock from commercial radio whose record of public commentary includes the suggestion that Jimmy Savile may have been the victim of a posthumous stitch-up. Ciaran Mullooly is a more polished and emollient performer, having worked as a correspondent for RTÉ, the national broadcaster, before his jump into politics. While Boylan stirred up controversy by regurgitating the talking points of climate-change denialism, Mullooly presented himself more in the style of a traditional centre-right politician.

This softer image helped Mullooly squeeze home to take the last seat in Midlands North-West whereas Boylan fell at the final hurdle in Dublin: the Irish electoral system allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference on the ballot paper, so the more second-preference or third-preference votes you attract, the more likely you are to make it over the line. Yet Luke Flanagan, a left-wing independent who topped the poll in Midlands North-West, observed that Mullooly’s campaign team were ‘very comfortable hanging out’ at the count centre with the likes of Hermann Kelly.

The right-wing campaigns this year drew on energies that were generated outside the electoral field. Since the end of 2022, there have been protests against the housing of asylum seekers in areas such as Dublin’s north inner city. Two of the new independent councillors elected in Dublin, Gavin Pepper and Malachy Steenson, were prominently involved in them. Ireland has taken in about 100,000 Ukrainian refugees since 2022, and there has been an increase in asylum claims from other parts of the world too. But it would be wrong to see the growing salience of immigration on the political agenda simply as a function of how many people are arriving in the country.

Ireland’s far-right activists have spent the last few years scrambling around for a cause they can latch onto. They found a wider audience during the Covid pandemic, when frustration at lockdowns sent many people down conspiracist rabbit holes. As normal life resumed, some leading figures on the far right organised protests at public libraries, demanding the censorship of books that were said to promote ‘gender ideology’.

One striking feature of the protests was the laid-back response of the Gardaí. When the trade union representing public sector workers in Cork organised a rally in support of the library staff, their main demand was simply for the Gardaí to enforce the law and protect the workers from abuse. In another case, police officers escorted far-right protesters into a North Dublin library while keeping a counter-demonstration at bay.

The indulgent policing carried over into the handling of protests against temporary accommodation for asylum seekers. The Garda commissioner, Drew Harris, claimed it was part of a careful strategy to avoid ‘falling into the trap’ set by the far right. For their part, the organisers seemed grateful for the opportunity to blockade roads and other public spaces without interference.

A report in the Sunday Times earlier this year quoted a landlord who spoke anonymously:

You would have to be off your head to lease a building to the International Protection Accommodation Services agency. The government won’t protect you. We have provided Gardaí with CCTV footage of unmasked people smashing the windows of our building. When workmen tried to repair the damage, they got harassed. The Gardaí said it’s a civil matter when we sought help.

The idea that either criminal damage or harassment would be a ‘civil matter’ is nonsense. During the election campaign, there were several reports of candidates and their canvassing teams being assaulted or threatened with assault. In one incident a man brandished a knife while screaming at two young women, demanding that they take down a poster. A Garda spokesperson said they had been informed but ‘no criminal offence was disclosed.’

Government ministers seem to have been genuinely put out when the soft-touch policing was applied to a picket by masked men outside the home of their cabinet colleague Roderic O’Gorman. But in general they have little reason to be unhappy with the recent turn of events. To a remarkable extent, Ireland’s far-right movement directs its bile against the opposition parties rather than the politicians in power – in particular against Sinn Féin, whose leaders have been impugned as ‘traitors’ at anti-immigration rallies.

Sinn Féin has long resisted the temptation to beat the drum against immigrants in search of electoral gains, but it has struggled to respond to the emergence of unapologetic drumbeaters. For much of last year, the party leadership appeared to be hoping the whole controversy would blow over if they kept their heads down. Towards the end of 2023, though, there was a notable shift in rhetoric, which seems to have alienated supporters on the left without satisfying those for whom immigration controls are a priority – a familiar story for European centre-left parties in recent times.

By shifting the focus of public debate away from the housing crisis and towards immigration – or by presenting the housing crisis as the consequence of immigration, which amounts to the same thing – Ireland’s far right has performed a valuable service for the government parties. Sinn Féin did badly at the local and European elections, with a much lower vote share than the party achieved in the 2020 general election. Although there has been no surge in popularity for Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil, the prospect of a Sinn Féin-led government emerging from the next general election is – for now – slipping away.