Fintan O’Toole: Even the Blueshirts are turning red

Under the icesheet of the pandemic, a very large change in the nature of Irish politics has been taking shape. It can be summed up very simply: Ireland can no longer be governed from the right.

Last year, when Fine Gael was hoping that left-wing parties like Labour and the Social Democrats might be wooed as coalition partners, Simon Coveney told Seán O'Rourke on RTÉ radio that "Ireland, post this crisis, will be a different place. The role of the community will be different. The role of the State in terms of its relationship with the private sector will be different."

He predicted “an increased role for the State” and an end to the two-tier health system. When a listener commented that Coveney “sounded like a socialist”, he did not entirely demur.

If Blueshirts are adopting a pinkish plumage, it is because there is a Darwinian imperative to adapt to a changing environment

More recently, Coveney’s party leader Leo Varadkar has been promising to build 40,000 houses a year and to make the €4 billion in emergency funding for the health service permanent. In Miriam Lord’s delicious phrase, even Fine Gael now speaks “pidgin socialist”.

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Much of this may, of course, be cynical. But even political cynicism is driven by a sense of where the advantage lies. If Blueshirts are adopting a pinkish plumage, it is because there is a Darwinian imperative to adapt to a changing environment.

This new ecosystem has been forming itself slowly over time. The forces at work have been both negative and positive.

On the negative side, two successive forms of right-wing governing ideology have collapsed. The first, and most long-lasting, of these was the fusion of Catholicism and nationalism that constituted the State that was made by Partition. It was what Antonio Gramsci would have called a cultural hegemony or what most Irish people would have called "common sense".

The fusion of nation and religion created an extremely powerful governing structure. It lasted a very long time, arguably up to the fall of Bertie Ahern in 2007

It defined the assumptions and values, the ways of seeing, that dominated not this or that government or party but almost the entire public culture of the State. As recently as 1983, for example, the Supreme Court could rule quite blithely that it was perfectly fine to imprison gay men for having consensual sex “on the ground of the Christian nature of our State”.

This fusion of nation and religion created an extremely powerful governing structure. It lasted a very long time, arguably up to the fall of Bertie Ahern in 2007. And then it collapsed because its twin pillars, Fianna Fáil and the Church, were both eaten way by internal corruption.

In its final decades, this system of rule was increasingly supplemented by another, more secular, form of right-wing ideology, the market-worshipping neo-conservatism that became so dominant after the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It does not seem accidental that it had its heyday in Ireland in the first decade of the 21st century, just as the old religious-based ideology was running into trouble. It was a new way of being right.

This second form of right-wing governance had its own articles of faith. Its formula for creating miracles was to cut taxes and regulation and let the market do the rest. Since the exchequer was awash with money because of the Celtic Tiger boom, the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats regime did not in fact have to shrink the State.  It could have everything both ways.

And so of course could the banks and the property developers. When the bill for the consequences came to be paid, suddenly the big State was back in vogue. The rugged individualism of the “wealth creators” standing on their own two feet became “we all partied”. The banking and property systems, it turned out, were Maoist collective farms whose crops – massive debts – belonged to the people.

The implosion of these two governing ideologies is the negative part of the story. The more positive factors are economic and demographic growth on the one side and education on the other.

The State does not have the physical or human infrastructure to support the economy Ireland has – let alone the society its people want

If we go back to the 1990s, it was possible to make the case that the State, in the form of the public sector, was too large for the private economy that it serviced. Now, even the employer’s organisation Ibec recognises that it’s the other way round.

As Ibec director Danny McCoy has pointed out, when there were 1.5 million people at work in Ireland, about 300,000 of them were in the public sector. Now, with 2.3 million at work (assuming we return to pre-Covid levels), we still have about the same number in the public service.

Even for good solid capitalist reasons, it is obvious that the State has become too small. It does not have the physical or human infrastructure to support the economy Ireland has – let alone the society its people want. This is even more obviously the case when that economy has to be decarbonised rapidly, a challenge that cannot be met without massive government intervention.

If 2008 was socialism for the rich, the past 18 months have been socialism for most citizens

The other positive reason for change is the big shift in western political cultures. It is crude but accurate to say that the main dividing line in political identity is now education. Broadly, those with third-level education have shifted to the left, while those without have moved to the right.

Ireland has the highest rate of third-level degrees in the EU, with just over half of all 30 to 34-year-olds in Ireland having completed third-level education. If you knew nothing else about the country, this alone would suggest that the trend in its politics would be leftwards. If you also knew that these younger age cohorts are faced with a deep housing crisis, the suggestion would turn into a racing certainty.

The pandemic has solidified all of these disparate factors into an imperative. In 2008, we discovered in the direst possible way that the State underpins everything. In 2020 we learned this again, but in a more benign way. Public institutions became our refuge and our strength. They stood between us and, if not all harm, then at least as much of the danger and damage as could be mitigated.

If 2008 was socialism for the rich, the past 18 months have been socialism for most citizens. The common good has not been assured by trusting the market but by collective responses. We don’t price vaccines according to supply and demand – we provide them free and (mostly) on the basis of need.

Could a right-wing governing project be reinvented? It could – but it would have to be much further to the right than Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. It would be a local version of white ethnic identitarianism or, to give its proper name, pre-fascism.

It would be dangerously smug to suggest that this is not possible. But there is nothing to suggest at the moment that it is viable.

The immediate questions, then, are twofold. Is a left-wing governing project just “spend, spend, spend” or is it a coherent programme of transformation guided by economic and cultural creativity, sustainable development, democratic accountability and social justice?

And do we have the party political infrastructure that can carry it forward? Of the three big parties, two are centre-right nationalists and one is left-populist nationalist. The road to social democracy is open but the big vehicles are not built for it.