Mick Clifford: Where to next for far right in Ireland?

The far-right representation is now around 0.5% of seats in the State, but the question remains as to whether the far right can gain electoral purchase, writes Mick Clifford

In both Italy and Austria, far-right parties, including Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, pulled in more votes than any other entity in either country. Picture: Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images

Last November, in the wake of the Dublin riots, People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy named a number of what he called far-right agitators in the Dáil. These, he said, had been involved in inciting the riots, using what Murphy described as their “chance to spread hatred and division”.

“Derek Blighe had a video saying we are at war,” Murphy related. Blighe ran in the local elections for Cork County Council last week but was not elected. He also ran in the European elections in the Ireland South constituency, garnering 25,071 votes.

Currently, he is being sued for defamation by a Fermoy businessman on the basis of leaflets he distributed. Blighe was prominent in a campaign to stop asylum seekers being housed in the town last year.

Another name Murphy threw in was Philip Dwyer. “Philip Dwyer, a creche creeper and dog kicker, streamed a video saying he was going into town,” Murphy told the House. On Saturday, Dwyer was removed from the South Dublin count centre in Tallaght following a disturbance. He is due before the courts on a charge of allegedly engaging in threatening, abusive, and insulting behaviour outside a creche. He received 4,479 votes in the Dublin constituency for the European elections. In March, he tweeted that he was standing in the election “for the children of this country”.

Murphy also mentioned Gavin Pepper, who lives in the Finglas area of Dublin. “Gavin Pepper [is] another far-right agitator who called people onto the streets for seven o’clock,” said Murphy.

On Saturday, Pepper was elected to Dublin City Council. Last April, Pepper clashed with Green Party councillor Hazel Chu, who is of Asian extraction. Pepper filmed her on a street while she was on the phone, repeatedly saying to her, “Hazel, do ya like looking down on the working class people, do ya?” After securing his seat, Pepper went all Trump-like in attempting to undermine the voting process: “Pro replacement parties trafficked unpermitted immigrants to the polling stations to alter this election.”

This was the first election in this jurisdiction where individuals who subscribe to the popular concept of “far right” achieved success at the polls. Others who got elected from the same extreme on the political spectrum were Glen Moore of the Irish Freedom Party in South Dublin and Patrick Quinlan for the National Party in Fingal County Council.

There was also a seat for Malachy Steenson, an Independent, on Dublin City Council. On his election, Steenson, a former member of the Workers’ Party, told reporters that his success sent “a very clear message that the revolution has begun”.

The contention is highly dubious. Numerous other far-right candidates failed to get elected to the 949 council seats. As things stand, the far-right representation is around 0.5% of seats in the State. 

But there is significance in what represents the first encroachment into electoral politics of a movement that heretofore was confined to ugly protests and the spreading of hate and disinformation online. 

The question remains as to whether the far right in this country can gain any kind of an electoral purchase.

A protester holds a placard reading 'It is dark in the land of lights' as she demonstrates against the far right after their success in the European elections in France. Picture: Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images

The picture in Ireland is at variance with what is happening across most of the EU. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 30% of the vote in France last weekend.

President Macron responded by calling elections for the national assembly.

His gamble is that when faced with Le Pen’s far-right party governing nationally, as opposed to sending them to Brussels, the French people will reject the extremists. Time will tell.

In Germany, Alternative fur Deutschland came second in the election with 16% of the vote, more than any of the three parties in the governing coalition garnered.

One of the leading figures in AfD, Maximilian Krah, said at the outset of the campaign that not all members of the Nazi SS were criminals. The party has voted to exclude him from its delegation of MEPs.

In Holland, Geert Wilders’ Party For Freedom got nearly 18% of the vote. Meanwhile, in both Italy and Austria, far-right parties, including Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, pulled in more votes than any other entity in either country.

Despite that, the swing to the far right has not been as extreme as feared. The centre right European People’s Party, of which Fine Gael is a member, remains the biggest of the five voting blocks in the European Parliament.

Plans by that group to re-elect Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission do not require the far-right Identity and Democracy block which has seen an increase in support.

However, there is no doubt that the far right is on the march across the union and has now reached, albeit in a relatively miniscule electoral footprint, these shores.

Central to this shift in politics is the issue of immigration.

“There is no country in Europe that has a very significant migrant population that does not have a significant party whose primary issue is that,” said Ronan McCrea of University College London last weekend.

“Every single country that has a lot of migration has a party that is upset about it,” said Prof McCrea.

“So I think in Irish politics going forward this is going to be an issue. We can’t wish it away.”

Ireland certainly qualifies as a country with a significant migrant population, mainly due to the success of the economy.

For instance, in the 2022 Census, 84% of the 5.165m population in the State were Irish-born. In 2023, the European Commission estimates, Ireland’s population grew by another 3.5%. The bulk of the most recent increases has been down to the war in Ukraine as the State is estimated to have taken in up to 100,000 refugees from that conflict.

There is no escaping these realities or that this is occurring at a time of a major housing crisis. In a broader sense, the whole provision of public services has not kept pace with increases in population over the last eight or nine years once the worst of the post-economic collapse recession was over. This increases tensions when there are increases in the population.

It is also the case that for the greater part the economy could not function without a major input of skilled and unskilled labour. Unemployment, for decades the scourge of Irish society, is for all practical purposes hovering around 4%, a historic low below which it would be extremely difficult to go.

While that is the general background in terms of population movements in the country, the main issue that has arisen over the last 18 months has been the accommodation of asylum seekers.

These numbers are pretty tiny compared to general population flows, with around 20,000 asylum seekers expected to apply for international protection this year. This has proven to be the crack in the door against which the far right has been pushing in recent years.

While these challenges do provide red meat for the far right, not all who had concerns around the issues could or should be thus labelled, according to Bryan Fanning, UCD professor of migration and social policy.

“On one level you have a handful of people [who got elected] but they are small in number compared, for instance, to the number of people from ethnic backgrounds who made a breakthrough in these elections,” he said. “Racism does exist in various places. Online, it’s all over the place, when you come off Twitter you feel like having a shower, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality. The right-wing nationalists, those who talk about plantation and wave the tricolour, that’s ethnocentric nationalism but I don’t think they have any great traction.”

Ireland First candidate Derek Blighe in the count centre having been eliminated on the 16th count at Nemo Rangers GAA club in Cork. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA

But what about Blighe’s 25,000 votes in Ireland South? Is that not a sign that there is some appetite out there for the extreme nationalism that is a mainstay of the far right?

“That certainly is a very big number of votes,” said Prof Fanning. “But go back to Peter Casey in the Presidential election in 2018. He got a huge vote in that election on what looks like just having been an anti-Traveller platform. As soon as he went back to Donegal and tried to get elected locally his vote collapsed. So in terms of these kind of people having an impact on national politics I would guess that if Blighe stood for election as a TD he wouldn’t get anything like that kind of vote.”

The elections also saw the rise of Independents and entities standing on a platform highlighting what they would categorise as concern for the system in which international protection applicants are being dealt with.

Independent Ireland, set up late last year by rural TDs, had a good election, electing 20 councillors.

It also had a candidate in all three Euro constituencies with Niall Boylan missing out narrowly on getting a seat in Dublin and former RTÉ reporter Ciarán Mullooly elected in Midlands North-West.

The party is a broad church, but there is certainly an immigration-sceptic element to its platform. Seamus Walsh, a former Fianna Fáil councillor in Galway who left the party over accommodation issues last year, stood for Independent Ireland and was re-elected to the council.

“We have never been right wing,” he said of his new party. “We are not right wing, we love people, we are good people but we are disgusted with the way the Government is mishandling the immigration issue.”

Other councillors around the country who were returned had taken prominent roles in protests in towns over accommodation of asylum seekers but more often than not it was just one of a number of features to an election platform.

Former MEP Mick Wallace, Independents4Change candidate, who lost his seat in the Ireland South constituency, at the count centre in Nemo Rangers, Cork. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

Vigilance is required but the far right in this country is still lacking in a few vital elements were it to harbour ambitions of becoming an electoral force. In the first instance, there is no unity at that end of the spectrum. The election just gone was notable in that the far-right vote was all over the place.

Take the one entity that has a history reaching back more than a few years, the National Party. It split last year and both factions stood candidates under the party banner.

Justin Barrett, the former leader who earlier this year was parading on social media in a Nazi-style uniform, did dismally. Patrick Quinlan, deputy leader of the other faction, did get elected, but his leader James Reynolds got nowhere. Reynolds told local media in Longford that the reason for his dismal showing was the party brand: “What I’m told continuously [by people] was that they like James Reynolds but they didn’t like the National Party.”

Another problem is that there is no single figure around which those who subscribe to far-right philosophy can congregate. 

The other issue that arises is the absence of a figure around which a movement could be built. Barrett is no Le Pen. Pepper is no Wilders. Blighe is no Nigel Farage. 

The loose amalgam that exists has nobody who could present an acceptable face to the media — or social media — that can articulate or propagate the agenda.

None of which is to suggest that either or both of these handicaps cannot be addressed or that a Farage-type figure will not emerge. As of yet there is no sign of it.

The next test as to whether the far-right agenda of hatred and intolerance is going to have any political purchase here will be the general election. We might then get a better idea of whether this country is to embark down the same dark route as many of our European neighbours.