Ireland’s populist insurgency Dublin’s marchers have to convince a silent majority

As the crowd assembled to march through the city centre, the delegation from Newtownmountkennedy, the rural Wicklow village where protestors clashed with Gardaí over the bussing in of migrants from central Dublin, shuffled to the front behind their banner to loud cheers. Maybe two or three thousand protestors had turned up, the Garda officer overseeing the demonstration told me: the organisers placed the figure at far more, and the Irish press at far less. As they marched through central Dublin, waving Irish tricolours and shouting “Get Them Out” and “You’ll Never Beat the Irish”, bemused tourists watched on from pub terraces. Working-class Dubliners were heavily represented, along with older couples from the provinces and a remarkable number of populist influencers, their selfie-sticks wavering in the air. Outside the GPO, the site of the Easter rebellion that eventually created the modern Irish state, Gardaí Public Order units in body armour separated the thousands of marchers from a few dozen Left-wing counter-protestors, waving Palestinian and Spanish Republican flags and chanting “Refugees are welcome here” through loudhailers. Sinn Féin, previously a staple of pro-migration activism, was notable for its absence: with the anti-immigration movement cutting into its support base in working-class Dublin, Ireland’s largest party has begun to pivot on its previous pro-migration platform, now voicing opposition to “open borders” and the new EU migration pact.

But that wasn’t enough for the protestors, loudly shouting “Sinn Féin traitors” and booing every time the party leader Mary Lou McDonald’s name was mentioned. There was something of a pantomime atmosphere as the folk villains of the moment were named from the podium, to loud boos from the crowd massed outside Dublin’s grand neoclassical Custom House. Taoiseach Simon Harris, Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman, Justice Minister Helen McEntee were all met with boos and shouts of “Get them out!” from the crowd, as a speaker vowed to “clear that cesspool of a Dáil out”. So did Gardaí head Drew Harris, a controversial Northern Irish appointment “who learned his craft well with the RUC”, as the independent MEP candidate Malachy Steenson, a Dublin solicitor and former candidate for the Republican-Socialist Workers Party, told the crowd. “We are the risen people,” he declared, “and we have it within our power to change this society forever. And if we don’t take this opportunity in June, well then it’s over. Don’t come back whinging and saying ‘we should have done something’. Get out in June and make that change.”

Yet it is unclear whether the widespread popular dissatisfaction over migration will actually make an electoral impact. Recent polls show that Sinn Féin’s support has grown in recent weeks, while the different parties presenting themselves for popular acclaim in Dublin are competing for the same enthusiastic but not necessarily large voter base. The Midlands-Northwest constituency for the European elections alone is running 10 different anti-immigration candidates, while Dublin shows an equally crowded roster for a narrow vote share.

Insofar as the Irish press has covered these parties — which is not very far at all — very little effort has been made to analyse their platforms outside the immigration question. Yet while sharing the same podium, and making a show of unity against what they see as a hostile matrix of government, media and NGO lobbies, the parties competing for the popular anti-immigration vote represent a wildly differing policy mix, from the libertarian and anti-EU stance of the Irish Freedom Party, the largest party in attendance, to the continental-style Identitarianism of the National Party, standing on a “remigration” platform and railing against “global capital” from the stage. The Sinn Féin breakaway party, Aontú, the only immigration-sceptical party with a seat in the Dáil, and standing on a socially conservative, social-democratic platform, was not in attendance. Significantly more Left-wing than the Right-wing parties with which Irish leftists often bracket it, Aontú is perhaps the best positioned for an electoral breakthrough, and is now a regular staple for soundbites on the Irish television news.

“I’m sure that once this election is out of the way, there will be a reconfiguration, an amalgamation of various parties,” Hermann Kelly, the sharply-suited leader of the Irish Freedom Party told me. In Kelly’s eyes, the opportunity is there for the taking: “Within the last six months, there’s been an absolute sea change in that a nationalist consciousness has started to rise again in Ireland,” he said. “Look at the polls, 79% of Irish people have had enough of mass immigration. So the political class are still mouthing the same words, but the people out there on the doors are all telling them we’ve had enough. Hey, we never consented to be colonised. Ireland is different from Britain in that we were never a colonial power, never colonised anyone else’s country, and we don’t expect it to be done to ourselves.”

Standing on a diametrically opposed platform to the Irish Freedom Party’s long-term goal of leaving the EU is the radical-right National Party, whose new leader, the farmer James Reynolds, recently ousted its unsettling founder Justin Barrett. Barrett, given to approvingly quoting Hitler and wearing an SS uniform at protests, has in turn created a new, more or less openly fascist party, Clann Éireann, while running against Reynolds in the Midlands constituency on the same National Party ticket due to a convoluted internal feud. “We’re not pro-Brexit, we have a very different outlook to the British,” Reynolds told me. “And I think that Hermann Kelly’s outlook is as much fixated on leaving the European Union as it is on doing anything disruptive to change it from within, which is my intention. I believe there’s going to be a huge Right-wing surge in the next European elections. I want to be part of it. I think I can achieve much more within the European Parliament than if we were outside.” Citing his links with Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party and Hungary’s Mi Hazánk, Reynolds’s National Party represents the Irish wing of a European Right-wing political strand quite absent from Britain.

Yet even still, Irish liberals and Sinn Féin activists are wont to describe the nascent Irish Right-wing as a British plot. While the tortuous logic of this claim does not bear much scrutiny, what was instead most striking was the degree to which the protest was framed within the language and symbolism of Irish nationalism — indeed, it arguably represents a Rightward shift in the long and historically very politically diverse Irish nationalist tradition, which has in recent decades tilted the other way under Sinn Féin’s leadership. “We fought the Brits for 800 fucking years, and we beat them,” one speaker bawled at the microphone to loud cheers, “and we’ll beat these fucking cunts too.” Protestors waved the Irish Republic flag of the Easter Rising and sang along to Sinead O’Connor’s rendition of the rebel song “The Foggy Dew”, as speechmakers quoted Patrick Pearse, alluded to the ancient Irish tradition of aisling poetry, lamented the loss of the Irish language, and referenced the rebel justice mechanisms of the Civil War period: one speaker declared his wish to “appoint local people as justices” to “arrest all the traitors”.

At the same time, Steenson declared that the Irish government’s recent attempt to blame the migration crisis on Sunak’s Rwanda plan was populist misdirection. “They’re “trying to play on the old prejudices against the British government,” Steenson told the crowd. “They’re trying to get us to blame the Brits for the immigration problem in this country. The British government are doing what the Irish government should be doing… What they should be saying to Rishi Sunak is: when your plane takes off from whatever airbase in England, keep a few seats on it, land it at Baldonnel [airbase near Dublin] and we’ll fill the rest of those seats.”

After the protest, Steenson, a Eurosceptic, described to me his hope to “reunite our country as a sovereign state — the sovereign Irish Republic… free from all imperialist powers, whether it’s Britain, Europe or the United States or anywhere else. We will determine our own destiny.” But asked whether he saw the protest movement translating into electoral success, Steenson was more equivocal. “I suppose we’ll know the answer to that on 8 June. There are a lot of people standing, and I think that the stronger candidates will prevail, hopefully,” he told me. “We know who stood with us, and we know who stood against us.”

Yet Monday’s protest, while large, was perhaps smaller than the organisers had hoped. While a significant majority of Irish voters support immigration restrictions, the degree to which the energy of the largely social-media-based protest movement can actually make an electoral impact remains, until next month, an open question. Some candidates, such as social media influencer Gavin Pepper and radio talk-show host Niall Boylan, command large audiences, yet as Reform’s performance in Britain’s council elections shows, an outsized media platform does not necessarily translate into electoral success.

The Euroscepticism of candidates like Steenson and Kelly’s Irish Freedom Party is also a marginal position in Ireland, a country whose urban economy has rocketed as the European tax home of American corporations, and whose sizeable farming constituency is largely dependent on European subsidies. To British eyes, more radical parties such as the National Party are remarkable for the degree to which their slogans are accepted by the essentially “normie” crowd — yet they are so far without any electoral representation. If Monday was an attempt by the aspiring leaders of the movement to gauge the turnout they can command, June’s elections will provide the answer as to whether it can reshape Ireland’s political system, or remain a loud and angry voice shut outside power. While Dublin’s anti-immigration marchers vastly outnumbered the pro-migrant counter-protestors, it is Ireland’s voting majority, sitting quietly at home, who will determine the country’s political future. And for all that Monday’s protestors revile them, Sinn Féin remain by far Ireland’s most popular party — and seem destined for power.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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