Conventional dinner party wisdom goes something like this: Ireland has resisted the populist wave cresting over Europe but it should not be complacent. Sections of the public are agitated – apparent in attacks on proposed asylum centres, and clashes with gardaí in places such as Newtownmountkennedy. The liberalising energy of the 2010s was not infinite and Ireland is not immune from the broader global vibe shift against immigration. All it takes is a cohering, energetic figurehead to marshal the diffuse discontent – and this is how our centre collapses.
Roll that one out over a meal with friends on Friday night and you will be met with a sea of approving, knowing, and insufferably smug nods. Bonus points for the Yeats reference.
None of it is wrong, of course. And it certainly should give pause to Ireland’s mainstream political class: toughen up, sense the global directional change, maybe take a leaf or two out of Canada’s Mark Carney playbook (a centrist with some bite, one who refuses to be swept up in 2015-2020 style liberal pieties). All the warnings about a Nigel Farage-esque or Giorgia Meloni-lite figure waiting in the wings are important too: we should be alive to potential ructions in the status quo, welcome or not, and no matter how unlikely. But there is something missing from this correct (if by now, rather pedestrian) analysis: Nigel Farages and Giorgia Melonis are talented, effective and rare.
I suspect I feel more positively towards Farage than standard taste in Ireland dictates. But it is too easy to reduce the man to a simple run-of-the-mill far-right populist, interested only in whipping up anti-immigration sentiment. This may have been true of his Ukip years, but since establishing Reform, he has moderated his style and rhetoric, and attempted to adopt the countenance of the respectable mainstream. His party is now polling higher than the Conservatives and Labour after the recent local elections in England. And though pronouncements of the death of the Tory party are premature, Farage has certainly exposed its serious failings. He is forcing the movement to adapt.
Could a Nigel Farage or Giorgia Meloni be good for Irish democracy?
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He is a preternaturally gifted communicator who, in spite of being in his seventh decade, has worked out how to use social media better than any of his parliamentary peers. He can speak to the marginalised, the discontented, the left-behind (this he shares with Donald Trump). But something going under-noticed right now is the increasing appeal of his Reform party to Britain’s middle classes too – that is an impressive coalition to generate and maintain. He detects political weather long before the machinery of the establishment parties can – on Brexit, immigration, cost of living. After Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair he might even be one of the most consequential people in British public life since the second World War.
We do not need to say he is a good man (I doubt he is). And we don’t even need to believe in any of his material politics. But a politician who forces the system to interrogate its shortcomings is good for democracy, and might even counter-intuitively help keep the real radical fringe at bay. But Farages are extraordinarily hard to replicate and politicians like him do not crop up with irritating frequency (the same cannot be said of the run-of-the-mill strongmen in the Orban or Bolsonaro model). Whether good or bad, the character is unique.
And so, Ireland should not over-index the threat of someone with such a roster of talents taking over the unhappy fringes. It is a generationally difficult thing to do, not least in a country where moving the needle on the status quo is rendered nearly impossible by the hegemonic establishment centre.
A lot of time and column inches have been dedicated to Conor McGregor, the future of the radical right in Ireland, and the question of whether he could be the man who finally unites the discordant group and unleashes Ireland’s jingoistic, inward-looking tendencies. First, the existence of those tendencies is overstated. And second, of course not. I once believed that McGregor might act as some kind of figurehead, a front for a clever behind-the-scenes puppeteer. But I was wrong: McGregor is more popular outside of Ireland than within it.
And more than that: he has none of the rhetorical discipline or restraint of the truly successful populists; it is unclear what constituency he actually speaks to; he has faced numerous legal issues. If the Irish far-right is looking for a white knight to wrest them out of the political trenches then they need to look elsewhere, and fast.
There is something else to take heart in too. Donald Trump – though this is a small saving grace – is proving the logic of a united Europe run by the sensible metropole centrists of Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz et al. Dalliances with fringe politics might be an exotic quest for an electorate in peacetime. But as threats start to feel existential and the stakes rise minute by minute, in Ireland at least, the fringe should be understood as a frivolous and unserious distraction.
The task for the centrist establishment is not to focus too heavily on an insurgent far right that doesn’t exist, but instead to counter threats that actually do.
