Ireland’s liberal centre conceals something darker

Who will represent the country’s fragmented edges?

Ireland’s taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael, Simon Harris (centre), with his coalition partners Micheál Martin of Fianna Fáil (right) and the Greens’ Eamon Ryan (left). Photo by Mostafa Darwish / Anadolu via Getty Images

As Europe rushes to the fringes – with incumbent governments shedding voters at unprecedented speed and British conservatives lurching rightwards to neutralise the Reform effect – Ireland is entrenching itself in the centre. The country’s first general election since 2020 will be held on 29 November, and all signs point to the continued dominance of Ireland’s liberal centrist establishment.

Since the state’s inception in 1922, only Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – which form the current governing coalition – have ever commanded enough support in the Irish parliament to produce a taoiseach, in spite of the multi-party state. Even Sinn Féin, a party born out of Ireland’s irredentist national movement, once an alternative to the status quo, is courting voters in the middle ground. Ireland’s mainstream political culture is homogeneous, centrist and conformist, while its edges remain fragmented. The general election will not stress-test that arrangement; Ireland will likely continue – as it did at this summer’s local and European elections – to stave off the populism that has crashed over much of Europe this year. But this surface-level stability lulls the nation into a false sense of security: the chasm between government and its electorate is widening.

Dublin is one of Europe’s richest cities, thanks mainly to low corporation tax rates enticing foreign tech multinationals including Amazon, TikTok and Meta to use it as their European base. The government runs a fiscal surplus, and on the campaign trail all parties have promised spending to mollify the cost-of-living crisis.

But this economic growth has also fuelled a destabilising population boom, caused in part by the intake of 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and 26,000 other asylum seekers. In the shadows of the Grand Canal Dock – Ireland’s Silicon Valley – authorities frequently have to clear rows upon rows of young asylum seekers camped out in tents. Ireland’s biggest export was once its emigrants. Today, nearly a fifth of the population was born outside of the country. These two versions of the nation – one of staggering wealth and decrepit public services, of tech behemoths and housing crises, of huge population growth with little plans for harnessing it – were destined to come into conflict.

On the evening of 23 November 2023, Dublin was set ablaze by rioters. Earlier that day an Algerian-born naturalised citizen attacked three primary school children and one teacher with a knife. A housing crisis and precipitous demographic change had led anti-immigrant sentiment to percolate through the fringes. In the months prior to the riots, the city’s East Wall had played host to anti-immigrant marches, and in 2019 a hotel in County Leitrim earmarked for asylum seekers was set on fire twice.

Despite growing unrest, the bien pensant centre of Irish politics tends to avoid the topic of immigration. But the question has broken Sinn Féin’s electoral coalition.

Sinn Féin cohered out of the remnants of an old party as the political wing of the IRA. Its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, was hand-selected by Gerry Adams – former IRA commander and Sinn Féin leader – to guide the party from the republican fringe into mainstream respectability. The privately educated woman from leafy Dublin was perfect for the task, a marked change from the gruff and violent men of the party’s traditional leadership. She oversaw Sinn Féin’s most successful election in the Republic in 2020, forcing Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to drop enmity forged in the civil war and form a coalition. Just a year ago she was considered taoiseach-in-waiting.

Young voters flocked to Sinn Féin’s new mix of leftish populism and social liberalism (the party broadly supported legalising abortion in the 2018 referendum). But in courting this vote, Sinn Féin was fastening itself a Gordian knot. On one side of its base are urban liberals concerned about social justice and housing. On the other, the party’s traditional voter: uninterested in progressive politics, but driven by republican aspirations and anxiety over increasing immigration.

It is not easy for a party to cast itself as a liberal open-borders dove and a nationalist immigration hawk at the same time. At one of many anti-immigration marches in Dublin in recent months, attendees branded Sinn Féin “traitors” for abandoning its former principles in the pursuit of power. McDonald’s party looks just like the establishment it claims to abhor, without ever having had the chance to govern.

The differences between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, meanwhile, are slight but not invisible. The former – the party of Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s youngest and first openly gay Taoiseach – is more socially liberal than its opposite number (during the abortion referendum of 2018 a majority of Fine Gael TDs, or members of parliament, supported the liberalising measures, while a majority of Fianna Fail TDs did not). It describes itself as a party of enterprise, compared with Fianna Fail’s scepticism of big business and tech. Fine Gael emerged out of the mercantile class and Dublin’s private schools, and is seen as the natural home for doctors and barristers; Fianna Fail’s roots are more radical, of the lower-middle classes.

On the doorstep in Fine Gael heartland – the affluent suburbs south of Dublin – earlier this month, I heard some consternation about housing (though far less than in 2020, a veteran campaigner told me). Childcare costs came up most often. Voters there made scant reference to immigration, in stark contrast to the more deprived inner city. Parts of Dublin Central – McDonald’s constituency – are in considerable disrepair. There, protesters have marched under banners declaring the far-right clarion call “Ireland is full”. The area’s Parnell Square was the location of last November’s knife attack. Here, voters were apathetic: fed up with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil’s born-to-rule posture; disenchanted with McDonald’s progressive turn.

Dublin is a wealthy city with a rundown centre and an elite that dare not speak of immigration while residents rioted over the question of proposed asylum centres. It is the capital of a country that fought to escape forced fealty to the United Kingdom only to willingly pay fealty to Silicon Valley. In 1939 Louis MacNeice wrote of Dublin’s “seedy elegance”, its “glamour and squalor”. Today, Ireland has never been more defined by its contradictions.

No matter this incoherence, the liberal centre will hold. The system – as it drags fringe politics to the middle ground – ordains that it must. But it conceals a deeper agitation in the electorate, an agitation that will keep searching for the political expression it cannot find in the mainstream.