Ireland’s liberal center is hiding something darker

As Europe moves to the periphery (incumbent governments are losing voters at an unprecedented rate and British Conservatives shift to the right to neutralize the effect of reform), Ireland is entrenched in the center. The country’s first general election since 2020 will be held on November 29, and all signs point to the continued dominance of Ireland’s liberal-centrist establishment.

Since the creation of the state in 1922, only Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, who form the current governing coalition, have ever enjoyed sufficient support in the Irish Parliament to create a taoiseach, despite a multi-party state. Even Sinn Féina party born out of the Irish irredentist national movement that was once an alternative to the status quo is now seeking middle-ground voters. Ireland’s mainstream political culture is homogeneous, centrist and conformist, although its borders remain fragmented. The general election will not be a stress test of this arrangement; Ireland is likely to continue – as it did in local and European elections this summer – to stave off the populism that has hit much of Europe this year. But this superficial stability lulls the nation into a false sense of security: the gap between the government and its electorate is widening.

Dublin is one of Europe’s wealthiest cities, thanks largely to low corporate tax rates that encourage foreign tech multinationals including Amazon, TikTok and Meta to use it as their European base. The government has a budget surplus and during the election campaign all parties pledged to spend money to ease the cost of living crisis.

But this economic growth has also contributed to a destabilizing population boom, fueled in part by the admission of 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and 26,000 other asylum seekers. In the shadow of the Grand Canal dock – IrelandSilicon Valley in Russia – Authorities often have to clear ranks of young asylum seekers camped out in tents. Ireland’s greatest export was once its emigrants. Today, almost a fifth of the population was born outside the country. These two versions of the nation—one with staggering wealth and decrepit public services, one with tech giants and housing crises, one with enormous population growth and little plans for using it—were destined to come into conflict.

On the evening of November 23, 2023, Dublin was set on fire by rioters. Earlier in the day, a naturalized Algerian citizen attacked three primary school students and one teacher with a knife. The housing crisis and rapid demographic changes have caused anti-immigrant sentiment to spread to the outskirts. In the months before the riots, the city’s eastern wall became the site of anti-immigrant marches, and in 2019 a hotel in County Leitrim intended for asylum seekers was set on fire twice.

Despite the growing unrest, nice pensioner The center of Irish politics tends to avoid the topic of immigration. But the issue has split Sinn Féin’s electoral coalition.

Sinn Féin was formed from the remnants of the old party as the political wing of the IRA. Its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, was chosen by Gerry Adams – a former IRA commander and leader of Sinn Féin – to lead the party from the republican fringes into mainstream respectability. A privately educated woman from leafy Dublin, she was ideally suited to the task, which markedly distinguished her from the rude and cruel men of the traditional party leadership. She oversaw Sinn Féin’s most successful election in the republic in 2020, forcing Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to abandon civil war animosities and form a coalition. Just a year ago she was considered a person.

Young voters flocked to Sinn Féin’s new combination of left-wing populism and social liberalism (the party widely backed the legalization of abortion in the 2018 referendum). But in seeking this vote, Sinn Féin tied itself in a Gordian knot. On one side of his base are urban liberals concerned with social justice and housing issues. On the other hand, the traditional party voter: uninterested in progressive politics but driven by Republican aspirations and concerns about growing immigration.

It’s not easy for the party to simultaneously act as a liberal open-borders dove and a nationalist immigration hawk. At one of the many anti-immigration marches in Dublin in recent months, participants branded Sinn Féin “traitors” for abandoning their previous principles in the pursuit of power. McDonald’s party looks exactly like the establishment it claims to hate, even though it never had the opportunity to govern.

Meanwhile, the differences between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are small, but not invisible. The first – the party of Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s youngest and first openly gay man – is more socially liberal than its opposite (during the 2018 abortion referendum, a majority of Fine Gael TDs, or Members of Parliament, supported liberalization measures at the time as most Fianna Fail TDs did not). She describes herself as the party of enterprise compared to Fianna Fail’s skepticism of big business and technology. Fine Gael emerged from the merchant class and private schools of Dublin and is considered a natural home for doctors and lawyers; Fianna Fail’s roots are more radical, lower middle class.

On the doorstep of Fine Gael town center – an affluent suburb south of Dublin – earlier this month I heard some concern about housing (albeit much less than in 2020, a veteran campaigner told me). Child care costs were the most common expense. Voters there barely mentioned immigration, a stark contrast to the more deprived inner city. Parts of Central Dublin – the MacDonald District – are in serious decline. There, protesters marched under banners proclaiming the far-right slogan “Ireland is full.” Parnell Square in the area was the scene of a knife attack in November last year. Here voters were apathetic: they were fed up with the attitude of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, born to rule; Disappointed with McDonald’s progressive turn.

Dublin is a wealthy city with a dilapidated center and an elite who dare not talk about immigration, while residents riot over proposed asylum centres. This is the capital of a country that has fought to escape forced allegiance to the United Kingdom only to voluntarily swear allegiance to Silicon Valley. In 1939, Louis MacNeice wrote of Dublin’s “shabby elegance”, its “glamor and squalor”. Ireland today has never been so defined by its contradictions.

Regardless of this inconsistency, the liberal center will endure. The system – because it relegates fringe politics to the middle ground – dictates that it must do so. But behind this lies a deeper unrest among the electorate, an unrest that will continue to seek political expression that it cannot find in the mainstream.

(See also: “Your body is my choice”: the scary slogan of the Trumpian alt-right)