Why Ireland is So Left-Wing

Those who have lived in Ireland for any length of time will have noticed that the political consensus here is extremely left-wing.

First and most obviously, Ireland has no large right-wing populist party. There is not one elected member of parliament who could really be described as a nationalist or a right-wing populist. The two historically dominant parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, were traditionally considered centrist or nonideological parties, with Fine Gael leaning more right of center. Today, no one seems to know what the difference is between them or why they exist as distinct parties. Both have embraced a progressive consensus that is decidedly left of center. 

There is no alternative to be found in the four main opposition parties. Sinn Féin, Labour, the Green Party, and the Social Democrats are even further left than Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Members of these hard-left blocs make up 20 percent of Ireland’s representatives in the European Parliament (EP)—the highest percentage of any EP member. 

And Ireland just elected as president Catherine Connolly, a former Labour Party politician and long-time advocate of leftist causes. Though her campaign celebrated her landslide as a victory for a “new Ireland,” in reality, Connolly is just a continuity candidate who succeeds another ideological leftist and former Labour Party politician. Moreover, she has praised communist experiments in Cuba and elsewhere.

When I first began following politics in Ireland in 2010, a common criticism of our political system was that we had moved closer to Washington than Berlin in how we approached welfare and taxation—in other words, toward fiscal conservatism—which left our welfare state underfunded because voters were wooed by parties offering tax cuts.

Fifteen years later, that situation has been flipped on its head. Ireland’s share of spending on welfare and wealth redistribution programs is 58 percent, the highest among the 38 member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A single person with average earnings in Ireland pays a marginal tax rate of 49.5 per cent: the third-highest rate in the OECD.

So, what happened to Ireland? What was once the “Celtic Tiger,” renowned for financial deregulation, has become the West’s quintessential social-liberal managerial state. Ireland’s small size and its administrative centralization around Dublin have enabled its bureaucratic elite to dominate all of the country’s institutions and to punish or suppress dissenters. As a result, Ireland offers a sobering picture of what’s in store for other Western countries as their still incomplete takeovers by managerial elites continue.

The failure of the nationalist right or any kind of populist force to make inroads in modern Ireland has been well noted. No doubt, a lot of this is due to the lack of cohesion on the right and the failure of its leadership. But the fact is, the Irish public has been given populist alternatives, and rejected them time and again.

Polls of voter attitudes show Irish voters ranking very high in left-wing political views, yet even countries that ranked above Ireland in leftism, such as Germany and Spain, have large, electorally successful populist parties that have mounted viable challenges to the reigning governments. In Ireland, a right-wing populist party with the policies of Germany’s AfD or Spain’s Vox would be considered on the furthest fringe of the political spectrum.

The Irish right tends to collectively roll its eyes whenever outsiders in the Anglosphere try to diagnose Ireland’s ills. They typically blame Ireland’s leftism on the history of its anti-British nationalist tradition or its “third-worldist” solidarity with other peoples victimized by “the West,” such as the Palestinians and Arab nations.

But, as I’ve previously documented, previous generations of Irish nationalists had no problem believing in national self-determination alongside social conservative and even racial hierarchical views. Even groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its political wing, Sinn Féin, didn’t go in a hard-left, Marxist political direction until the 1980s.

People making such critiques usually seem so ignorant about Irish affairs as to believe the IRA runs the government here. In fact, Sinn Féin has never been in government, and the most radical leftist social changes in Ireland—abortion, gay marriage, the embrace of transgenderism, and the massive expansion in inward migration—happened under the centrist Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael-led governments. Those were the same parties that vehemently opposed IRA violence during the Troubles and only entered coalition together because of their commitment to keeping Sinn Féin out of government at all costs. 

These were the same “third-worldist” governments that allowed the United States to violate Ireland’s official neutrality for the past two decades by using Shannon Airport to transit troops and weapons to the Middle East.

Another explanation common on the right is that Ireland is the victim of the mostly American multinational corporations that have flooded into the country to take advantage of its generous corporate tax regime. According to this perspective, Ireland is a victim of Googlefication, its wokeism only emerging under American corporate influence. The problem with this argument is that its proponents rarely explain how these corporations supposedly reshaped Ireland in this way. Irish journalist John Waters, for instance, has claimed that these corporations for a time “remained quiet, content to milk the system,” until the 2008 economic downturn. Since then, according to Waters, they:

Have started to let it be known that there are things about Ireland that will need improving if we expect them to remain. And the type of leaders our historical situation has thrown up are, unlike even their predecessors of the 1980s and 1990s, definitively not the types to tell these interlopers where to jump off…. This is fundamentally the context of the new and utterly changed Ireland, explaining the upsurge in naked propaganda, the ceaseless bullying of dissenters, the mysterious new laws that almost nobody was heard to ask for, and the sequence of constitutional amendment after constitutional amendment until there is almost nothing left.

This explanation collapses under scrutiny. Waters never presents a case in which  American corporations demanded a specific policy change from the government, or made an effort themselves to influence Irish public opinion. If these American corporations began flexing their muscle only after 2008, then we can’t blame them for the many other steps toward liberalization that came in the 1990s. These include the normalization of contraception and homosexuality, the high-profile scandals that undermined the influence of the Catholic Church, and the successive moves toward further integration with the European Union (Ireland has consistently ranked as one of the most pro-EU countries in Europe).

The vast majority of Irish politicians governing during the 1990s, a period of supposed normalcy, supported Ireland’s further embrace of progressivism after 2008. In the case of the legalization of abortion and gay marriage, they were ratified by a majority of the Irish people in popular referendums. 

In truth, Irish elite opinion was already in sync with its cosmopolitan European counterparts by the turn of the millennium, and everything that followed after that was just a case of normalizing the values of the new Ireland for the ever-shrinking minority holding onto traditional social beliefs. 

Decades ago, Ireland’s renegade nationalist intellectuals diagnosed a stark disconnect between the power elite in Ireland and the rest of the country. Desmond Fennell often wrote about what he called Ireland’s “state class,” the wealthy, liberal, and cosmopolitan urbanites concentrated in South Dublin suburbs, who viewed the Catholic, nationalist majority of Ireland with distrust and disdain. For these people, Fennell argued, Ireland’s fundamental division was not so much between left and right as it was between the “nice people” and the “rednecks.”

The nice people are the Dublin liberal middle class and their allies and supporters throughout the country. The rednecks are everyone else, but especially Fianna Fáil under Charles Haughey, the great majority of Catholics and their bishops, all Catholic organizations, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the IRA, Sinn Féin, and the Fine Gael dissidents who frustrate Garret FitzGerald’s good intentions. The criteria that define people as “nice, reasonable, decent, etc.” are a displayed distaste for those excrescences and noises in our public life that prevent the Republic from fitting unnoticeably into the British Isles, like a sort of larger Isle of Man. 

The Irish elite is not a ruling class as Marxists would imagine, defined by capital ownership and control. Many of its members are salaried public servants. Its membership is defined more by a shared moral orthodoxy rooted in aspiration and openness. 

What was true in the 1980s is no less true today, as Ireland’s ruling class remains one of the smallest and most tightly knit in the Western world. Ireland’s elite—politicians, bankers, journalists, civil servants, and nongovernmental organization chiefs—pass through the same schools, live in the same districts of south Dublin, and share the same professional and social networks. The Irish elite is not a ruling class as Marxists would imagine, defined by capital ownership and control. Many of its members are salaried public servants. Its membership is defined more by a shared moral orthodoxy rooted in aspiration and openness. 

To be a member of Ireland’s state class is to be credentialed, status-conscious, and obsessed with moral respectability. Because the state class is far more economically comfortable than the rest of the country, they can afford to embrace all the luxury beliefs of Western liberal progressivism. And because this has historically differentiated them from the rest of the country, it becomes an even more important marker of status than in other Western countries. Their orientation is progressive and their members share a worldview shaped by European integration, professional managerial culture, and the moral vocabulary of human rights and equality. It is a worldview that flatters their self-image: cosmopolitan, educated, and benevolent.

The small size of the country gives this class an unusual degree of coherence, but it also means its social consensus can be imposed very easily on the middle class, which is inherently status-conscious and conformist. Because Dublin is the only real political and cultural center of gravity, dissent anywhere in Ireland ultimately runs up against the same small network of institutions: Ireland’s public broadcaster RTÉ, The Irish Times and Irish Independent newspapers, the major government departments, and the universities. There is no competing provincial power base, no alternative capital, no independent press. The same faces circulate through government departments, think tanks, public broadcasters, and multinational boardrooms. To some extent, there is a revolving door between elite positions in the public and private sector throughout the West, but this is especially true in Ireland. 

A good example is Alan Dukes, a former leader of Fine Gael. Born in the Dublin suburb of Drimnagh, Dukes was educated at University College Dublin and served as an economist for the Irish Farmers Association, working in both Dublin and Brussels. He entered politics and became Minister for Finance and leader of Fine Gael. After leaving politics, he was appointed to a string of state and other regime positions. In 2008, he was selected to serve as a public-interest director on the board of the recently nationalized Anglo Irish Bank—showing just how interchangeable the political and financial classes are  in Ireland. Most recently, he was appointed to the board of the Press Council of Ireland, which regulates the media. 

Dukes is the prototypical Irish establishment technocrat, but there are plenty of other prominent names in Irish public life with a similar record serving across elite sectors. Someone like Dukes might have been considered center-right in his political heyday. Yet, like most others of his generation, he evolved smoothly from the Christian-Democrat center-right consensus of 1980s Ireland to the NGO-led moral-managerial center of New Ireland: liberal, pluralist, managerial—and bitterly hostile to populism in any form. 

Dublin’s dominance within Ireland is almost without parallel in Europe. According to the last census, 2.1 million Irish people live in the Greater Dublin metropolitan area—about 40 percent of the country’s population. Most of the remainder live within a short drive of it. Unlike most other Western European countries, where political and financial power is distributed across several major cities, Ireland has only one real center of gravity. Dublin is at once the country’s political capital, financial hub, and cultural metropolis. This extreme centralization of power and prestige has allowed the outlook of a few square miles of South Dublin to define the national consensus.

The geographic and institutional concentration of Ireland’s elite means the social costs of dissent are unusually high compared with other Western countries. Ireland’s elite culture is small enough that every public figure operates within a single social ecosystem. Ireland has rather good employment protection laws, but openly opposing the liberal consensus carries a strong social penalty. And though you are less likely to be fired for your politics in Ireland than in the U.S., diverging from the managerial consensus can have severe professional consequences if one travels in the circles of the state class. Formerly very popular journalists like Eddie Hobbs and John Waters became locked out of the columns of the major newspapers as soon as they became dissenters. Fine Gael’s expulsion of one of its more conservative members, Lucinda Creighton, over the legalization of abortion in 2013 led eventually to her irrelevance in national politics. 

This extreme ideological self-policing has meant that when unease has emerged over issues like immigration, it is often spearheaded by Dublin’s traditional working class or “undesirable” elements of society, which has in turn allowed the state class to reify further the old division between the aspirational and successful “nice people” of new Ireland and the backward-looking rednecks caping for a return to religious and racial bigotry. 

As Fennell predicted long before the nice people achieved complete cultural hegemony over the country, the result in modern Ireland is a kind of polite totality where every respectable institution speaks the same moral language and deviates from it only within permitted bounds. Ireland might seem like a highly ideological country from the outside, but its oppressive leftism is experienced socially as a very respectable code of manners. With some exceptions, as in the case of a Enoch Burke—a schoolteacher who refused to pay fines and even braved imprisonment over his refusal to use the preferred pronouns of a trans student—its coercion is invisible because it has attached its universalism to the middle-class desire to be seen as decent and humane.

Ireland’s political evolution is not an isolated story. It is a microcosm of the wider transformation I described in my Substack essay “The Triumph of Social Liberalism”: the replacement of ideological politics with progressive technocracy.

To restate the crux of that essay, Social Liberalism triumphed because of the structural conditions created by global capitalism and the decline of the traditional Western working class, combined with the governing failures of both traditional social democracy and the neoliberal right, leaving only the self-justifying ethic of the managerial class. This new ethic fuses the economic logic of global capitalism with the moral language of egalitarianism. In so doing, it promises to deliver through   economic liberalization the mass affluence and eradication of want that have fueled the left for decades.

Ireland was ideal for demonstrating the success of this fusion because so much of its economic success has come directly from the direct investment of some of the world’s largest foreign corporations, attracted by low corporate tax rates and other means to avoid tax liabilities, which made Ireland an effective tax haven.

This is what distinguishes Ireland from the populist democracies of continental Europe. In larger European states, elite culture is fragmented across distinct historical, regional, and institutional lines, which act as internal checks on elite consensus. In France, the rivalry between Parisian technocrats, provincial notables, and the Catholic right preserves a lingering ideological pluralism, even within the ruling class. Italy retains a substantial division between its industrial north and more agrarian, populist south, each with its own political tradition and patronage networks.

Despite its Catholic history, Ireland has none of these competing power centers. Its small scale, historical concentration of elites in Dublin, and its integration into global markets have created an almost perfectly homogeneous ruling stratum. 

Ireland is probably the most interesting case study of the social liberal transformation I’ve discussed, because it is the social-liberal state par excellence. It is small enough for the new elite consensus to be total; prosperous enough for the social aspects of social liberalism to appear costless, thus lessening populist backlash from the more market-oriented right; and it emerges from a political culture that historically prized moral conformity over ideological conflict. Nowhere more than in Ireland has the social-liberal project achieved its dream: a state whose legitimacy does not depend on tradition or popular sovereignty, but only on the promise of economic abundance and adherence to human rights universalism.

Ireland’s story is the clearest demonstration of what happens when liberalism completes its long march through the institutions and encounters no organized opposition. The result is a country whose institutions pursue humanitarian universalism even as its native population withers. Ireland’s long struggle for self-rule has culminated not in national renewal, but in a state class presiding over the demographic erasure of the Irish themselves.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/correspondence/why-ireland-is-so-left-wing