The Irish Right’s Money Problem

Not having it, and spending it wrong when we do.

Big news over in Blighty this week: Nigel Farage and Reform UK have netted £72m in two separate donations from crypto-billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harbourne. Full disclosure: I’ve met Delo a few times, and he’s a fascinating chap. But he’s never, to my knowledge, funded anything or anyone in Ireland.

I know a little bit about fundraising, having spent seven years over at Gript. And let me tell you: It’s difficult. But let me tell you something else: The left are just better at it than the right. And smarter in how they spend it.

Let me say something controversial: Nigel Farage and Reform do not need the kind of cash they have just been given. It’s an absolute waste of cash.

There is, very genuinely, a limit to how much money you can spend in an election campaign, even without legal spending limits. It’s the old economic rule of diminishing marginal returns: at some point you have saturated the market and every extra euro spent gives you very little.

In context: Boris Johnson’s Tories, to win a majority at the UK election of 2019, spent £16.5m and won a majority. Five years later, the very same party spent nearly half as much again - £24m – and got their worst result in over 150 years. The Labour Party spent £30m on the last election.

So, what do you even do with £72m? Let me tell you what you do: You waste it.

Not intentionally, of course. Most of what you do with £72m will sound good on paper: Some consultant will devise some new and expensive way to reach voters online or profile them. Somebody else will suggest hiring new staff in Scotland to maximise the vote there. Instead of getting the leaflets printed on bog standard paper, some fool will suggest that you spend thousands more on the top-of-the-market stuff instead. It gets frittered away with very little impact.

In Ireland, the problem of people giving massive sums to right-wing political parties is not one we have. We lack both the parties to give the cash to, and the donors willing to fork it over. In any case, the laws here prevent it: Elon Musk himself could move to Ireland in the morning and be capped by law from giving any more than about six grand to any one party.

But in both countries, the same problem exists for the right: People only want to fund parties. The actual day-to-day stuff that makes much more of an impact, nobody wants to put money behind.

Forget politics for a moment: Imagine the impact a well-funded, well-resourced think-tank could have in Ireland, putting out policy papers and doing research and opinion polling and figuring out what the public actually wants, before translating that into news angles and talking points.

Or imagine what properly funded lobby groups on immigration, taxes, crime, and free speech could achieve, training researchers and spokespeople to go on radio and television shows and make a case consistently over time, like the ESRI and the ICCL and all the rest of them do.

Before you win an election, you must first win the argument. And in Ireland (and to a lesser degree in the UK) the infrastructure needed to win arguments is not there, and nobody is willing to fund it.

What S and I are trying to do here, in our own very, very, limited way, is to build up, very slowly and sustainably, a small piece of durable infrastructure – and to do it on the cheap. If somebody wants to give us a hundred grand, we’ll take it, but what I’ve learned from 20 years on the Irish right is that nobody ever does. Ever.

What would I do with £72m, or even £7.2m, adjusted for population? I’d focus on doing one thing: Making being publicly on the right in Ireland a viable career path.

I’d run debate competitions for secondary school kids, to identify talent. I’d run scholarship programmes for university students. I’d set up a series of networks in the professions, and fund them: for lawyers; for doctors; for accountants, and so on. I would focus on the long term, building support networks and influence so that in two decades time getting a scholarship from the right-wing education trust would put you on a fast-track path to a job in a law firm where the very first scholar was now a partner.

And I’d run polling and research: Find out what beliefs Irish people hold that are at odds with the left, and then trumpet them amongst trained spokespeople representing appropriate think tanks and lobby groups.

This is what the left did – and then when they took power they augmented it with an endless flow of taxpayer money.

What the right in Ireland needs is not £72m, or lots of people piling into political parties. What it needs is an infrastructure that allows those things to happen later, from a position of greater strength.

To be honest, the UK needs more of it also. Delo and Harborne could have just given Reform £10m each, and put the rest of it into the kind of stuff I describe above. It would make a much bigger difference, from my point of view.

Delo and Harborne have given Nigel Farage enough money to run several enormous election campaigns. Good luck to him. But if the right wants to change a country rather than merely win an election in it, then eventually somebody has to start funding the boring stuff that happens in between elections.

That is where the left beat us. And it is still where they are beating us.

JMG