Can Ireland stave off populism forever?

As the country heads to the polls some voters want to rip up the status quo.

The Republic of Ireland is voting today in an election that seems unlikely to alter very much. Ever since the state’s inception in 1922 only the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil parties have ever produced a taoiseach. The country is currently run by a coalition of the two, after they dropped historic enmity first forged in the civil war to work together (first in a confidence and supply agreement in 2010s and then a formal arrangement in 2020). There is every reason to suspect that the next government will be another coalition of the two.

The parties now cohere around a liberal centrist policy platform. This holds especially for Fine Gael (who cleave more socially liberal and pro-enterprise than their counterpart). Earlier this month while canvassing in Fine Gael heartland I found voters concerned about childcare costs and housing but who otherwise formed a large part of Ireland’s bourgeoise – those who basically found the country was working for them.

But, as I wrote in last week’s magazine, the stability of Ireland’s centre conceals the darker forces brewing. In November 2023 Dublin city was beset by rioters, protesting the huge inward migration Ireland has experienced in recent years (thanks in part to the 100,000 or so Ukrainian refugees Ireland has accommodated). The trigger for the riots was a knife-attack on young school children in Parnell Square on Dublin’s inner north side that morning, committed by an Algerian born naturalised citizen. It was all that was needed to provide a match to simmering resentment. Precipitous demographic change combined with an acute housing crisis has generated an unhappy urban working class.

But across Ireland’s establishment you will find scant reference to immigration – they are anxious to deviate from liberal orthodoxy, wary that in Ireland in the 2020s a sceptical mention of immigration figures would have them labelled far-right or racist. “St Patrick was an immigrant” former taoiseach Enda Kenny said in 2017 in the White House, pinning the bien pensant centre’s colours to the mast. On its march to the end of history Ireland was being realised as an outward looking tolerant utopia with none of the problems general to the rest of the West. Even Sinn Féin – a party that once found its base in the republican working class, those anxious about demographic change – have cleaved to the centre on the question of immigration.

There is some logic to the idea that Ireland could evade continent-wide trends. Thanks to its low-corporation tax (12.5 per cent) Dublin, and Ireland’s second city Cork, have become the European home base for huge American tech and pharmaceutical companies. This set-up has afforded Ireland wealth that many in Britain truly do not comprehend, especially given the diminutive assumption of Ireland as a tiny country on the edge of Europe, with paltry influence and little cash. (This is a hangover of Ireland’s former fealty to the United Kingdom, which no longer bears any resemblance to reality.)

Ireland is also sitting on a healthy €13b tax receipt from Apple, after the European Union ordered the tech giant to pay. So now political parties are throwing money at the cost of living crisis, hoping they can stave off the populist wave crashing over the continent with its favourable financial winds.

But there is serious jeopardy looming. The spectre of a Donald Trump presidency, and his project of economic nationalism, threatens Ireland’s high-profit, high-productivity multinational economy. The bitter antagonism to asylum seekers – from a small but not insignificant proportion of the electorate – is one thing while the country is rich and fully employed. It is a very different beast if the population continues to grow in an economy hobbled by Trump’s possible isolationist turn. If Dublin was a tinderbox last November, it could be a powder keg under these circumstances.

Yet there is no radical vision for reshaping an economy dependent on the whims of an erratic president. Instead, Fine Gael position themselves as the party who navigated Ireland back to staggering prosperity after the financial crash and ruinously expensive bailouts in the ensuing years. A safe pair of hands is the subtle message. Upholding the status-quo, while tinkering at the margins, is the strategy for now.

Sinn Féin will likely perform better than initial predictions suggested. But the party will not see the surge it enjoyed in 2020, making it the most popular party in the country (though, unable to form a government as Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil alike refused to work with a party that emerged as the political wing of the IRA). But Sinn Féin, despite some radical posturing, has fashioned itself as a party looking evermore to the centre, too.

The simmering disquiet among the electorate will find expression in a slew of independent candidates, whose soap boxes range from far-right “Ireland is full” immigration policy to gentle hawkishness on the question. But they are by definition disunited. The parliamentary arithmetic needed to form a government will remain in favour of the centre so long as the edges are fragmented. But no matter the result that will emerge, no one has articulated a new vision for a place defined by a rift between the voter and the mainstream politician.