Kathy Sheridan: Meet the Irish party that is happy to follow Farage's lead

Our newest party has already splashed an estimated €40,000 on a big billboard campaign. That’s just an industry guess because the Irish Freedom Party (IFP), while urging us all to “take back control”, is not saying. The money, according to a spokesman, was provided by “generous and patriotic members of the IFP alone”. So, since the IFP has yet to be registered, this is an outfit raising unknown quantities of cash from unknown sources to run candidates in democratic European elections.

Last month, it emerged that one of its candidates – a 72-year-old retired nurse, allegedly – appeared not to actually exist and a photograph carried on its website was a stock image. The group explained that a profile on the website was created as an “internal example” and the press release had been sent to local papers by someone as a “political prank”.

Political start-ups are challenging, in fairness. According to the IFP website, its founder, Hermann Kelly, remains director of communications for the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group (EFDD) in the European Parliament. That’s the one chaired by Nigel Farage, formerly of Ukip now of the Brexit Party (formed when even he found some of his old muckers beyond the pale) and Kelly’s job must be a nightmare.

Just three of the original 24 elected Ukip MEPs are still Ukippers under the EFDD umbrella. Of the remaining four still clinging to the Ukip tag, three found a home with the ENF, the group that boasts Marine Le Pen’s French National Rally as the largest party.

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Eurosceptics

Along with the eight Ukippers who morphed into the Brexit party, Kelly has to manage a 40-strong EFDD comprising the waifs and strays of Europe’s nationalist, hard Eurosceptic right as well as 14 from Italy’s co-governing Five Star Movement (twice rejected by other EP groups). Meanwhile, Farage’s new Brexit Party leader back home has had to resign due to racist posts found in her social media.

It’s worth recalling that for all Farage’s contemptuous dismissal of undemocratic, dictatorial Eurocrats, his Ukip party won 24 European Parliament seats with 26.6 per cent of the vote in 2014. A year later, in the UK general election, it managed to win just a single Westminster seat with half that vote.

It's almost as if the Irish people never had to ponder the true, non-charlatan meaning of the word 'patriot'

Still, it clearly makes sense to Hermann Kelly, who remains so delighted with the intellectual, economic and philosophical cut of Ukip’s jib that he is attempting to import it wholesale into the Republic in the guise of a “patriotic party”, aiming at “taking back control by the Irish People of our law-making, our citizenship, our currency, our trade policy, our borders and immigration”.

It’s almost as if the Irish people never had to ponder the true, non-charlatan meaning of the word “patriot”. Almost as if we can’t see or hear the brawling, shrieks, thuds, death threats and Monty-Pythonesque farce emanating from the next-door neighbours or never laid eyes on Farage’s ugly, racist “Breaking Point” billboards or saw him bellowing from a Westminster rally platform that the Houses of Parliament are “enemy territory”. This, in a union so hopelessly riven that eight in 10 people now believe that no political party represents them.

With Kelly as the driver of this proposed new party and the highly-accomplished UCD professor of translational science Dolores Cahill taking the chair, the dialogue is developing as expected.

Under an RTÉ tweet about Cahill’s appointment as chairwoman, someone wondered how much of her research was funded by the European Union. A look at her CV suggests, rather a lot.

Her post-doctoral break was winning an EU ‘human capital and mobility’ post-doctoral fellowship at the Technical University in Munich, after which she became group leader of the protein technology group in the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Genetics in Berlin. Her “extensive management experience” includes “successfully obtaining funding from the European Commission (FP4, FP5, FP6, FP7 and Horizon 2020)”.

Putin fan

No doubt Prof Cahill’s prestigious UCD background and considerable scientific achievements will lend gravitas to the IFP enterprise. But it cuts both ways. She will need to spend a good chunk of her valuable time keeping an eye on her fellow freedom fighters. A glance through a random IFP follower’s industrial-level Twitter activity suggests that Donal (from Derry, apparently) is a big Putin fan, dedicating his pinned tweet to a Putin quote, “National sovereignty surrender is abandonment of God-made diversity”, extracted from an article headlined “Putin: The ‘New World Order’ is Normalizing Pedophilia [sic] in The West”.

The rest of Donal’s output is drearily generic. “Fossil fuels are our friends in energy production”; “95% plastic in oceans comes from 3rd World Counties . . . Fact”. He is a keen retweeter of conservative, foreign clerics; of rabid Trump supporters; of anti-vaxxers, anti-choicers and protesters against LGBT+ lessons in English schools; and of Americans who spout about “illegals coming across our order, potential carriers of diseases that could overwhelm our country with an epidemic/pandemic”.

The problem with the likes of angry Donal is that he enters your orbit to disrupt and distress. And sadly for the embryonic IFP, he sees them as his people. We can only wish them all the luck that they would wish for us.