“Ireland is Full is now mainstream,” it was claimed in a video posted by anti-immigration activist Niall McConnell this week.
The video featured links to a petition against a planned mosque in Letterkenny, Co Donegal, but its main focus was a clip from an interview with Independent Ireland leader Michael Collins on RTÉ last Sunday.
Collins, whose party held its national conference last weekend, was asked if the party’s view was that “Ireland is full” – a slogan often used by anti-immigration activists.
“Yes indeed,” Collins said. Ireland had been “brilliant” at caring for people, “but we have to now see after our own people”, he added.
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Collins went on to say migrant workers were needed, but that part wasn’t clipped.
After the recent fuel price protests, Independent Ireland reported a jump in membership that it partially attributed to its support for protesters.
The protests defy easy political categorisation, but many of the sentiments expressed within them overlap with Independent Ireland’s rhetoric: rejection of elites, criticism of government waste, climate policies, immigration and funding for Ukraine or non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
The protests were owned by no party, but could Independent Ireland catch the wave they have created?
Independent Ireland’s TDs reject the label “far right”, even contesting the idea that they are on the right.
Michael Fitzmaurice, the party’s Roscommon-Galway TD, told The Irish Times the party would “never be going far right ... we will speak common sense”.
However, its voting pool overlaps with constituencies and activists on the right. Polling suggests the party, along with Independents and Aontú, draws support from conservative, traditionalist and right-leaning voters.
Pollster and political scientist Kevin Cunningham estimates this comprises about 15 to 20 per cent of voters. It is a “bloc vote that’s out to the right of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and concerned with immigration principally”.
Jane Suiter, a political scientist in Dublin City University, says the right has had limited electoral success in Ireland because “there hasn’t been a right-wing party with any charismatic leader”.
But the conditions on the ground are there, she says, with some voters able to absorb fuel prices and others who simply cannot.
Cunningham says within the electorate “two groups tend to be most distinctive”: one largely urban and liberal, and another rural and lower income.
“There’s a clear vote out there these guys are appealing to without much effort,” he says.
Gaps in the political market are easier to identify than fill, especially for small parties.
Independent Ireland already has four TDs and an MEP, as well as 24 councillors, but much of its national success comes from the individuals, not the party brand.
Collins and Fitzmaurice were into their second full Dáil terms when the party was founded. Until 2015 O’Donoghue was in Fianna Fáil, as was Cork North Central TD Ken O’Flynn, who left the party in 2019.
The party recruited high-profile candidates; former RTÉ journalist Ciarán Mullooly won a seat in Midlands North West during the European elections and radio presenter Niall Boylan came close to getting elected in Dublin. However, its structures are underdeveloped; a former candidate said TDs were helpful but there was little centralised funding or organisation.
The Galway West byelection on May 22nd, to fill the seat vacated by Catherine Connolly’s election as President, is a road test for Independent Ireland. The party’s candidate, Noel Thomas, is a former Fianna Fáil councillor who left the party amid disciplinary action after comments he made following a fire at a planned accommodation centre for asylum seekers when he said: “The inn is full.”
The party is seeking to build its ground game: it has two full-time employees and another part-time role, and is developing codes of conduct for members, Collins says. Fitzmaurice says its councillors are working to set up local branches, and are developing policy documents and alternative budgets.
Above all, he suggests, the goal is to make sure Independent Ireland is “not classed as a ruling party”.
Independent Ireland has sought to compensate for size with volume: in the Dáil, the party’s four TDs can be combative; the Social Democrats made a complaint alleging that the party barracked female Government deputies during a confidence motion this month.
O’Flynn uses the parliamentary system and social media to pump out prodigious quantities of material. He put down almost 3,000 parliamentary questions last year – 1,300 more than the next busiest questioner.
Some in Government departments privately questioned whether he automated the process using artificial intelligence. O’Flynn denies this, but says he uses AI tools to check formatting and spelling as he is dyslexic.
Growth for the party would require tactical and strategic choices, but there can be a lack of internal consensus at these junctures.
Beyond Leinster House is a political, campaigning and activist ecosystem clustered around the protests and other issues Independent Ireland has campaigned on.
This week, Collins distanced himself from online comments made about Tánaiste Simon Harris by protest spokesman James Geoghegan.
O’Flynn was due to share a stage on Sunday with Geoghegan and fellow protest spokesman John Dallon, as well as Dublin city councillor Gavin Pepper, who has been described in the Dáil as a “far right activist”.
The event in Cork city – “Fuel Protests – What Next?” – is organised by Breaking Point, which describes itself as a forum founded by recent graduates “to foster meaningful cultural debate”. Its chief operating officer, Oisín Kavanagh, says it has no political position, but its co-founders have conservative pedigree.
Con Óg Ó Laoghaire received 119 votes in the 2020 general election running for the Irish Freedom Party. The following year he entered a women’s 5k race in Trinity in what conservative news website Gript said was an “effort to expose the absurdity of the college’s gender policies”.
Another, Dean Keating, was a director of Free Speech Ireland and is a former Ógra Aontú chair, working for party leader Peadar Tóibín in Leinster House. He has written for Gript and conservative British magazine The Critic.
Asked about the event, Fitzmaurice and Collins distanced the party from it. Fitzmaurice said the party was “not approached and did not make a decision to be associated with that”.
He later added that he had shared stages with people he didn’t agree with, saying discontent grows “if you try and shut down people you might not agree with”.
Collins also said it had “nothing to do” with the organisers or other panellists.
He also suggested O’Flynn was no longer planning to attend, but on the same day the Cork North Central TD said it was still in his diary.
O’Flynn also said he had been on panels with people he didn’t agree with, adding that listening to other points of view “makes you a better politician”.
Collins spoke last week of courting disaffected Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael councillors, but O’Flynn and Fitzmaurice later told The Irish Times they would prefer candidates from within the party.
O’Flynn said he was not particularly interested in people “trying to jump on board to save their seats”. Collins later said both organic growth and recruiting sitting councillors was possible.
The party has seen departures: co-founder Elaine Mullally left saying it “no longer aligns with my values and principles”. This came as Mullooly, the MEP and former RTÉ journalist, joined a centrist Renew group of MEPs in the European Parliament.
Independent Ireland wanted to be in government formation talks after the 2024 election, but found its policies on carbon tax (it wants to refocus the tax towards aviation) made discussions a non-starter.
The party’s TDs also felt they were being used as a bargaining chip in talks between the larger parties and the group led by Tipperary Independent Michael Lowry, who ultimately agreed to support the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition.
Fitzmaurice says government is the goal.
“[We] want to be where the dinner is cooked, not looking at an eaten plate.”
Fitzmaurice hopes “disaffected Fianna Fáil” voters in particular would consider backing the party.
Cunningham, the pollster, says parties that rely on far-right voters – largely young, disaffected, working-class men – have limited success. The real growth in recent years “has been when they capture a rural disaffected vote”, he says.
Suiter believes Independent Ireland has a choice: whether to associate with “new upstarts ... or hold a more traditional rural position”.
“It is a turning point for them where they have to decide where they want to go.”
