Ireland’s liberal fantasy The conditions for revolt are clear to see

No matter how often British observers try to dismiss Ireland’s wealth as some kind of tax dodge, the reality is that most of Ireland really is richer than most of England — as anyone who spends even the briefest amount of time there can attest. This fact alone stands as a painful rebuke to the British state which does not provoke anywhere near as much self-reflection as it should. Ireland fought a war to leave the UK when it was the poorest part of these islands. It is now richer than the country it left behind. It is not only the Scots who should be angry about this.

Nevertheless, there is something fraudulent about Ireland’s success today that, like the country itself, is eerily familiar to the English observer. In 1997, fresh from his landslide election victory, Tony Blair wowed the Labour Party conference in Brighton with a vision of a future Britain would lead. In the great globalised economy that had emerged from the ashes of the Cold War, Blair argued, Britain would become a “beacon” for the rest of the world to follow, combining the best of America’s economic dynamism with Europe’s social conscience. With the City of London as its beating heart, so the story went, Britain had all the ingredients for success in the 21st century: an open and flexible economy supported by a well-educated, liberal and tolerant people happy in their own multicultural skin. While this fantasy has long since crumbled in Britain, it remains modern Ireland’s comforting mythos.

When observing Ireland from afar, then, the temptation is to see it as the last citadel of a lost Fukuyaman world: Byzantine Constantinople just before the fall, naively getting on with its life behind the walls that will soon be breached. Perhaps this is why Ireland’s political class is so admired by Britain’s lonely podcast centrists who spend their time lamenting the loss of the civilised pre-crash world in which they felt comfortable. Ireland, to these characters, remains recognisable: living proof that their world view is not out of date as they wander lonely in an England that is no longer home.

Yet, the fragility of the Irish settlement is there for all to see. As Silicon Valley’s tax-avoiding bridgehead into the European Union, Ireland is particularly exposed to the geopolitical world now coming into being. Indeed, it is noticeable how clearly this has been understood and expressed during the campaign this year.

On immigration, too, there are obvious parallels with Britain. The flip side of Ireland’s position as a great floodplain for global capital, is that it must also be a place for people to arrive too. A country of just 5 million, Ireland’s net migration is now running at around 80,000 — far lower than the 600,000-1 million that have come to Britain in most recent years, but proportionately higher. With a housing crisis that is, if anything, even more acute than in Britain, the conditions for popular revolt are clearly visible, even if you discount the riots that gripped Dublin after a naturalised immigrant attacked primary school children with a knife.

None of this means Ireland will fall or even necessarily falter. There’s every chance the second Trump term will be as insubstantial as the first, tinkering at the edges of global trade without changing its fundamentals. Perhaps Ireland will not reveal the emptiness of Blair’s prophecy but become its ultimate realisation, Britain’s inheritance transferred to Ireland in some cosmic display of imperial karma.

Beyond mere economics, Ireland’s politics offers plenty of other notes of caution for those in the Starmer government who will be keeping a close eye on developments today. The first is that no matter how impressive Ireland’s economic performance has been in recent years, there remains a deep malaise in the country that is entirely recognisable. On questions of housing, immigration and public services, the anger of the Irish public is as tangible and acute as it is in the UK, while also being gripped by the same intuitive sense that its political class have become so distant they no longer appear to like the opinions of its own citizens.

Perhaps this, too, is the price of wealth. I have been struck in the past by how approachable its political class seemed. Attending the Irish Derby in the late 2000s, I was able to walk up to the then Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, to ask him a question — largely unthinkable in Britain. Cowen was, of course, deeply unpopular for his role in the financial crash, the unlucky figure left standing when the music stopped. Still, looking back, he was a recognisable Fianna Fáiler. Simon Harris, today’s Fine Gael Taoiseach, represents Ireland’s new generation of leaders, tetchy and unpopular, seemingly unable to cope with direct contact with the people.

The defining moment of the election campaign was a toe-curling encounter in a Cork supermarket when a tearful care worker accused Harris of ignoring those, like her, who worked for low wages looking after the disabled. “No you weren’t,” Harris replied, only for the lady to persist. “You’ve done nothing for us, our people are suffering,” she continued, voice quavering. “That’s not true to say that,” Harris replied, now getting frustrated. At that point, as the lady continued to complain, Harris simply offered his hand and turned away from her, only to then double back as if he realised he’d made a terrible mistake. “You’re not a good man,” the lady then muttered, now beginning to sob. “Okay, well if you think I’m not a good man”, Harris then muttered before walking away for good leaving onlookers to mutter, shame. This remarkable exchange, captured on video, has torpedoed Harris’s campaign, with his party slumping in the polls as a result.

To English eyes, this is all so remarkably familiar. In 2010, Gordon Brown’s election campaign exploded after he was recorded dismissing a voter as a “bigoted woman”, while earlier this year, Rishi Sunak sunk his attempt to remain Prime Minister by abandoning the D-Day celebrations. On each occasion — Brown, Sunak and now Harris — offered grovelling apologies to stem the loss of support. And on each occasion in Britain at least, they failed.

The power of each of these moments was not just that they were personally embarrassing, but that they seemed to capture something essential about the country itself: the disdain for the common assumptions and prejudices of the ordinary voter, whether over immigration, healthcare or patriotism itself. Dipping into Irish social media these past few months certainly gives the impression that the view of an out-of-touch elite holding ordinary voters in contempt is now as common in Ireland as it is in England. Even Sinn Féin is now being accused of treachery among some of the more fringe nationalists for their attitude to immigration. This is not a good road to go down.

To me, Ireland always seemed to offer yet more proof of George Orwell’s caustic observation that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality”. Over there, it seemed, there was a deeper and entirely unironic reverence for the myths and symbols of its nationhood in a way that has long since been lost in England. The energy that existed among revisionist Irish historians during the Troubles seems to have petered out. Such is the strength of the reverence towards the official Irish narrative, in fact, that to the Unionist northerners the land of the Republic remains as foreign as ever — its customs are not theirs.

As such, I have always thought it ironic that while Ireland is held up by those who know little about its history as a beacon of civilised internationalism, it is just as easily definable as a place of successful conservative nationalism of the sort dismissed in Britain. Indeed, for the former to be sustainable you could argue that a country must first have the latter. An Irish diplomatic friend once joked with me that the most jarring Englishman of all was not the bumptious ruling class toff of lore, but the self-hating liberal who adores everyone else’s quaint nationalism but his own. Perhaps the reverse is also true: the most jarring modern Irishman is the one who believes his own nationalism is merely an expression of some kind of modern, enlightened internationalism.

Ireland, then, remains a foreign land that is homely in its familiarity, even as it changes to adapt to the modern world. Going to the polls today, there is a three-way tie between Harris’s Fine Gael, the former Taiseach Micheál Martin’s Fine Gael and Mary Lou McDonald’s Sinn Féin, each on around 20% of the vote and destined, it seems, for another grand coalition of its traditional centre.

For the average Englishman used to first-past-the-post, such a scenario might appear foreign — and yet remarkably familiar at the same time. There is now a growing realisation within Westminster’s political class that Reform UK may yet do to British politics what Sinn Féin has done in Ireland, not simply dying off but establishing themselves as a new, viable third (or fourth) party, stabilising at around 20-25% in the polls. If this were to happen, there would be a plausible scenario in which Labour, the Conservatives and Reform each go into the next election neck-and-neck in the polls, with the position of Prime Minister available to the leader of the party able to eke out the slenderest of leads. There are now senior political analysts speculating about a realignment in British politics in which Farage’s Reform leads a merger-acquisition of the Conservative Party after the next election to secure the premiership.

Ireland was once destined to follow Britain, its big brother across the water. Perhaps now it is showing us our future in more ways than one. We remain in touch, London, Belfast and Dublin.

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Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.

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