The Emergence of the Right-Wing Irish Voter

The biggest lesson of recent polls

The most devastating finding for the Government, and Fine Gael in particular, from this weekend’s Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll was not that only 28% of the public approve of the performance of the Government, as against 65% who disapprove.

It was not even the finding that the vast majority of the public consider that the budget did not improve their personal finances. Or the finding that about one in five people now consider immigration the biggest threat to the economy.

No. It was this:

Disapproving of a politician is one thing; but a majority of the country now concluding that the soon-to-be-Taoiseach is not qualified to run the country is quite another. That’s a loss of confidence in a government that is barely with precedent in Ireland. During the darkest days of the Cowen Government, I don’t think many would have said the same about Brian Lenihan, unpopular though the Government was.

There’s a difference between a loss of support, and a loss of faith. Irish politics – and Fine Gael in particular – are now suffering the latter.

In any case, and perhaps as a result, something undeniably interesting is now happening in the polling: Multiple polls from multiple pollsters put the combined Aontu/Independent Ireland vote in the mid-teens. Put them together in this poll, and they’re essentially level with Fine Gael, within the margin of error. Combine them, and they’re well ahead of any individual party of the left bar Sinn Fein.

What are we seeing? The rightmost fifth of the electorate is starting to congeal into an electoral vehicle, albeit one with two steering wheels and two drivers.

Caveats apply: Aontu stubbornly resist being called right wing, in part because they’re not really and in part because a great many people in that party still hear the words “right wing” and think of Mrs. Thatcher. But what you call yourself is less important than who your voters are, and they are attracting people who are annoyed about immigration, upset about crime, and generally oppose wokeness. There’s not a vast gulf between the Aontu voter in Ireland and the Reform voter in the UK.

That’s equally true of Independent Ireland, whose leadership aren’t exactly likely to be featuring on stage at global conferences of conservative politicians. But, for better or ill, voters are now rallying around both parties.

There’ll be a tendency amongst some “OG” right-wingers to mourn this development: All these years you’ve waited for a right-wing party to come along, and you get two: Neither of which is really an intellectual engine of the right.

But here’s the thing: The support for both parties is much more important than what the parties themselves truly are. Waiting for the right-wing parties to come along was always a fundamental mistake: What you’ve been waiting for is the mass-market of right-wing voters to come along. And here they are.

There’s something notable, then, about the fact that Fine Gael’s Ard Fheis will debate a motion seeking to identify it as a “centre right” party – a motion pulled together by somebody I for one have a lot of time for, economist David Higgins. David is a genuinely good and decent fellow, though a blueshirt to his core. I believe he genuinely would like to see a centre-right Fine Gael, as would many of us.

But the window for that has long-since closed.

The party that presided over unprecedented immigration, the era of “peak woke” (which has not yet crested in Ireland), the relentless social liberalisation of the 2010’s, and the covid lockdowns is not going to be able to wake up after next week’s Ard Fheis and say “surprise, we’re conservatives and moderates, now”.

No – Fine Gael, and Simon Harris in particular, have created the very voter that is now flocking to Aontu and Independent Ireland. Voters created in opposition to Fine Gael are not going to vote for Fine Gael. It’s too late.

But Aontu and Independent Ireland, though both are on course for major growth, should be wary as well: They are, I think, now becoming repositories of protest votes. I talk to more right-leaning voters in Ireland than, I think, the average person, and being neutral I tend to hear what they think. What I hear is pragmatism: We’ll vote for Toibin or for Ind Ire (they never say “Michael Collins”) because they’re the best option. Not because “we love what they are selling”.

This is, on balance, a good thing: It means that voters are finally prepared to punish Irish politicians by voting to their right, but also not slavish enough to be buying 100% what either Aontu or Ind Ire are selling.

At the same time, both parties have done something for which we should all be eternally grateful: They have shown that it can be done. And they have demonstrated the value of organisation, policy, leadership, and discipline.

Given that Patrick Stewart has just died, I think it’s right to use a Star Trek metaphor: These guys, and the voters they have attracted, represent first contact. The next generation is still to come.