“What will happen in this room over the next two days is very significant from a national perspective,” Eddie Hobbs told hundreds of delegates at the “Irlforum” conference last weekend.
Hobbs – once Ireland’s best-known financial adviser and now a podcaster (who isn’t?) and critic of immigration, globalisation, the political establishment and the mainstream media – is one of the leading figures in the political world that exists to the right of any of the parties represented in the Dáil. It ranges from those who are quite right wing to those who are, by any fair definition, far right.
Many of them hate being labelled far right. Maybe that’s understandable. It’s a subjective definition. And to have concerns about immigration doesn’t make you far right.
But if you’re going around warning people that the government is trying to replace the indigenous Irish population with foreigners so it can control them more easily and it’s all happening on the instructions of a shadowy international elite, then, I’m sorry, but you’re not just on the far right, you’re a far-right conspiracy theorist.
READ MORE
You have every, er, right to be far right and to advocate for your views. You are entitled to believe what you want. But if this is what you believe then don’t complain when someone calls your views far right.
[ Those seeking new Irish government should seek help from Maga movement, Eddie Hobbs tells conference ]
Not everyone at the “Irlforum” conference, of course, shares these views, though some of the speakers certainly did. The first panel on Saturday morning was on “family, housing and wealth”. Chaired by Hobbs, the speakers were councillors Linda de Courcy and Malachy Steenson and the founder of an organisation called the Natural Women’s Council, Jana Lunden.
It didn’t take long to learn the one thing that everyone seemed to be agreed on: Ireland was being swamped by large-scale immigration, much of it illegal, and this was at the root of many social problems, especially housing. Variations on this theme were among those most loudly endorsed by the audience.
“We need to close the borders,” Jana Lunden said, to enthusiastic applause. “I say this as an immigrant.” Nobody chuckled, apart from me.
There was much in this vein, some of it considerably fruitier on the subject of the threat to the Irish people (immigrants weren’t having abortions, said barrister Una McGurk, while the Irish couldn’t get enough of them). Some of Hobbs’s speakers raised reasonable points; others were nasty, brutish and short.
What about solutions, Hobbs repeatedly asked. “What can we do to knit all this together?” And this is the question that brought me to the conference: is this new right building a coherent political identity and a viable political movement that could have a meaningful impact on Irish politics in the future?
[ Eddie Hobbs: From consumer advice to conspiracy theories ]
This certainly appears to be the goal. Hobbs has appeared on the War Room, the podcast of Steve Bannon, the American far-right guru and early Trump strategist. He, Bannon, is spending a lot of time “to help form an Irish national party”, Bannon said recently. “They’re going to have an Irish Maga, and we’re going to have an Irish Trump.” Hobbs says he wants to reach out to the diaspora in the US for help.
There is certainly an energy around this new right. That much was palpable last weekend and it’s a trend clear all over Europe. In many countries, opposition to immigration is a driving force.
Sensing that mood, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin have shifted to the right on the issue. Reducing the numbers of asylum seekers and of other immigrants is now the goal of the Government. Sinn Féin criticises them for not getting on with it quickly enough.
Will that move stymie the emergence of new right political forces here?
The question of why there has not been a popular Irish far-right party is one that has flummoxed pointy-headed political scientists for years.
Finally, in 2024, it seemed that the lacuna would be filled. Immigration leapt on to the political agenda, with large numbers of people professing concern about immigration and protests against asylum centres springing up around the country. Surely the far right – academics who discuss the issue in the indispensable How Ireland Voted 2024 prefer the term “conservative ethnonationalists” – would finally make its breakthrough?
Nope. None of their candidates was elected to the Dáil and only a handful were successful in the local elections six months earlier. In the general election, they got about 2.6 per cent of the vote. Polls suggest their support could be higher, and some figures on the right insist the 13 per cent of spoiled votes in last October’s presidential election is a better indicator of their potential support levels. That seems quite a stretch.
A number of reasons have been advanced for their political failure.
Significant among these is the fracturing of this “ethnonationalist” vote. Among those jostling for votes and attention at the general election were: Anti-Corruption Ireland, Direct Democracy Ireland (renamed Liberty Republic), the Irish Freedom Party, the National Party, Ireland First and the Irish People. With this in mind, there is a clamour for a coming together of the new and far-right forces.
The conference last weekend was evidence of political energy. But it’s hard, at this point anyway, to see any signs of a viable political force emerging. Their election results are risible. There is no charismatic leader and no common platform. There is no sign of the discipline to lessen their differences in the cause of a greater political objective.
It is true, as the pointy-heads in How Ireland Voted say, that the liberal consensus on immigration has been broken. But, so far, that is the extent of the new right’s victories.
*How Ireland Voted 2024 is edited by Michael Gallagher, Eoin O’Malley and Theresa Reidy and published by Palgrave Macmillan. It will be launched in Dublin next week by, er, me.
