Ireland’s flirtation with liberalism may be coming to an end

For many Europeans the 2010s were a decade of a depressingly consistent trudge away from the optimistic “end of history” 1990s in which it seemed that liberalism, internationalism and multiculturalism were destined to triumph.

But throughout this period, one corner of the continent seemed to keep the old faith. The 2010s, if anything, saw the strengthening of the trends that had transformed Ireland from a religiously conservative, illiberal and monocultural society into a socially liberal, internationalist and multicultural one.

By 2018 Ireland had become a standard bearer of liberal values with abortion and same sex marriage pushed through not by a liberal elite but by popular referendums. At the same time, the country remained proudly committed to European integration and had moved from hosting a tiny foreign-born population to having one of the highest proportions of immigrants in Europe, all without the kind of backlash seen in other countries.

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The apparent persistent popularity in Ireland of optimistic globalist liberalism gave succour to believers in the “if only” school of politics who believed that multiculturalism and internationalism could thrive more generally “if only” particular missteps such as inegalitarian economic policies, the pandering of mainstream politicians to anti-migration sentiment or the emergence of manipulative populist figures (Melloni, Orban, LePen) could be avoided.

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Ireland had moved from being the outlier in terms of its illiberal conservatism to being the outlier as the only remaining example of a place where, to use the term popularised by political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book, history had “ended” and a paradigm based on globalism, capitalism and liberalism had seen off all challengers.

Recent opinion polling has shown that a large number of voters agree that “Ireland has taken in too many refugees”

This view of Ireland as a kind of “Fukuyama Island” has taken a knock in recent weeks with the spread of anti-immigration protests to a number of areas. These protests have been fuelled by the large number of Ukrainians arriving in the past year and the long-standing shortage of accommodation. But they have also broadened out to express broader displeasure with the level of migration and asylum seeking more generally.

The transformation of Ireland from a society of emigration to one where 17 per cent of the population is foreign-born represents one of the biggest social changes since independence, and the Irish immigration system faces similar difficulties to those of other prosperous European societies in ensuring that those whose claims to international protection fail leave the country.

Despite this, until now, all of the mainstream parties have avoided making migration a feature of political debates. This may be about to change. Recent opinion polling has shown that a large number of voters agree that “Ireland has taken in too many refugees”. As the emergence of the List Pim Fortuyn 20 years ago in the Netherlands and the steady growth of the Sweden Democrats show, electoral politics abhor a vacuum and even if mainstream parties avoid making an issue of migration, a political force will emerge to capitalise on the electorate’s concerns.

It was, therefore, unsurprising that last week, the Taoiseach made headlines by urging the European Council to do more to protect the union’s external border, expressing the desire that more needs to be done to ensure that those who claim asylum are successfully deported.

This abrupt about-turn on migration is not the only reason to doubt whether Ireland will remain the hopeful example it has been to those who still yearn for 1990s-style end of history.

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As in many countries which have seen the emergence of anti-migration and Eurosceptic parties such as Hungary, Poland, France, Greece and the Netherlands, the centre left in Ireland has been decimated in recent times. The Labour Party which won a fifth of votes in 2011 is languishing at less than 5 per cent in the opinion polls.

Sinn Féin, the party that has replaced Labour as the main voice of the left, is both nationalist and traditionally Eurosceptic. Irish voters have also regularly elected populist, anti-EU figures as MEPs.

Does this mean that the last exemplar of 1990s-style end-of-history politics is about to submit to the nationalist and migration-sceptic tendencies that have marked politics in most other prosperous European states?

That is not certain. Although its voters are fairly sceptical on migration issues, Sinn Féin has resisted making immigration an electoral issue. Furthermore, Ireland’s development into a society of immigration is part of a wider transformation that included increased prosperity and the throwing off of previously dominant conservative religious values.

The association with these two other highly popular changes may shield the issue of migration to some degree as voters may be wary of anything that seems to hark back to what are widely seen as the bad old days of poor, conservative and monocultural Ireland.

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That said, in most prosperous western European states, anxious debates around migration achieved critical mass only a couple of decades into the migration process. Ireland went through key experiences such as prosperity, secularisation and migration much more recently than most of its neighbours so there has been less time for a backlash to develop than in countries like France, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands where these processes began much earlier.

For many decades, intensely conservative and religious Ireland stood out as an exception to wider European trends. Ultimately this exceptionalism abated and Ireland joined the European mainstream. The events of recent weeks raise the prospect that the very different “Fukuyama Island” exceptionalism displayed by the country for the past decade may prove equally transient.

Ronan McCrea is a professor at University College London where he teaches courses on EU law and politics