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The Republic of Ireland has come to represent the odd one out i Western Europe regarding the developments of the 20th century. It has been set apart from geographically and culturally comparable countries in a number of areas – religiously, demographically, economically, and politically. This created an island nation that has been difficult for outsiders to comprehend, and has resultantly been reluctant to accept foreign influences.
Until recently. Ireland is now starting to homogenise into the globalised European experience of the 21st century, with a growing service sector overtaking the manufacturing sector, increased secularisation, the transfer of political power to Brussels – and of course, increased migration. The Irish invite of the problems that face Europe today is intriguing, and while it does bring this mysterious nation closer to Europe in many ways, it also creates a situation in the country that is in many ways unparallelled in Europe today.
Let us start with the basics; what is it that has actually happened on the Emerald Isle?
From homogeneous to multicultural
The uniqueness of the Irish situation pertains especially to migration. In just the past two decades, Ireland’s population has grown at a pace that puts many other European nations burdened by increased immigration to shame; the growth from just under four million inhabitants in 2003 to 5,3 million in 2023 is twice the growth rate of Sweden in the same period, a country that is a popular example of the consequences of uncontrolled mass immigration. As in the rest of Europe, the population growth is attributable mostly to migration, and less so to the number of births exceeding deaths.
Ireland has in modernity had a fairly frequent migratory exchange with the rest of the British Isles. The idea of the Irish capital of Dublin being a vibrant and dynamic city, perhaps even a “melting pot”, is the result of its proximity to important English and Scottish population centres across the Irish Sea. This has in turn served to normalise Dublin as a recipient of immigrants from the wider Europe, eventually developing into a normalcy for non-European immigrants as well. As of the 2010s, the presence of migrants from all over the world, although perhaps most significantly from the English-speaking Commonwealth countries, is an increasingly common sight in what for a long time used to be Western Europe’s perhaps most homogeneous major city.
This period from the 1990s until the mid-2010s of not only population growth, but vast economic expansion and rising global relevance as a hub for the IT sector in Europe, is when Ireland was called the Celtic Tiger. The country, eager to become a part of the globalised world, attempted, and to a large extent succeeded, to punch above its weight. From being a relative backwater known mostly for sectarian conflict and separatism, Ireland became a true 21st-century European state.
This may have translated into over-commitment, however. The political class of Ireland at the same time decided that the way forward was to encourage more immigration, and in the 2010s they embraced the belief in global internationalism as a net benefit to their country. Intercultural or religious conflicts resulting from immigration from Asia and Africa was either ignored, or believed to be surmountable for the island republic, which was high on self-confidence after its economic boom.
Globalism as the key to relevance
If one is allowed to psychologise the Irish mass migration experiment, the phenomenon resembles that of several other European nations, which were at their peak in the 1970s economically and socially. In Sweden, the belief in the home-grown art of social engineering influenced the embrace of multiculturalism in that country. Cultural conflicts between different groups were trivialised as the opportunities for cultural enrichment were enthusiastically welcomed (or at least passively tolerated) by the political and media establishment.
Both Ireland and Sweden share the general characteristics of being more or less peripheral nations of Europe, suffering greatly and being set back during the 19th century. Having overcome various difficulties since then, one can interpret a sense of revanchism in the countries’ ambitions to return (or perhaps make a debut) on the international stage as relevant players. For Ireland, this occurred mainly in the 2000s, and was likely accelerated when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016. With their historical enemy brought to shame in the continental elite’s eyes, it became Ireland’s time to shine as a ‘constructive global partner’.
Even before the crisis of globalism in the mid-2010s, the Irish establishment underwent a fascinating transformation from conservatism and nationalism to liberalism and progressivism. The country where the two main parties, Fine Gael and Fionna Fáil, both were founded out of a deeply Catholic and frequently violent and insurrectionary republican movement, became a country with little to no political manoeuvre for traditionalism or national conservatism. It seems almost designed in order to shed the country’s associations with backwardness, bigotry, and terrorism (the actions of the IRA are still in living memory in the United Kingdom).
A country a decade behind politically
Due to the later development of the progressive paradigm in Ireland compared to other European countries, the organic political alternatives are yet to fully develop. This, coupled with the particular conviction that progressivism was adopted with in Ireland, makes the internationalist forces still very strong, and mostly unchallenged in the country. As previously outlined, both of the historically big mainstream parties in Ireland are firmly decided that their republic requires immigration in order to advance socially and economically.
The nature of the immigration to Ireland bears witness to the infancy of these issues in the country. While labour immigration is common, so is asylum immigration – something that the government has explicitly welcomed, unlike in most of Europe that has for years suffered the consequences of accepting more refugees than the asylum system is built for. Being an island, most asylum seekers only find their way to Ireland through commercial flights, a method which can easily be subjected to control and restrictions from the side of the government. Too often this control is not exercised, allowing migrants with uncertain backgrounds to enter the country and claim asylum – which in practice mostly leads to the migrants staying indefinitely as they remain in the country while their application is processed.
There is also a recorded phenomenon of migrants coming not directly from the countries they claim to be fleeing from, or even natural transit countries, but instead the United Kingdom, where they may have been living for extended periods of time with various degrees of legality.
In continental Europe, the prevalence of these issues are widely acknowledged across the political spectrum to be structural problems that jeopardise the legitimacy of the right to asylum, and of the free movement of people inside the EU. In Ireland it instead seems to be considered a feature and not a bug, by the political and media establishment. The public debate on migration tends to be very limited and generally reminiscent of continental Europe circa 2014.
That does not mean that anti-immigration or nationalist tendencies don’t exist in the population. In November 2023, Dublin was rocked by anti-immigration riots, occurring following an incident where an Algerian immigrant had stabbed several children and a woman near a preschool. The extent of the violence and the social media activity that supported it shows that there is a degree of discontent with the migration to Ireland that is translating into noticeable political will. It’s just not allowed room into the official public discourse.
Out of the contemporary political topics that dominate the polemics in the West, Ireland has seen the advance of just about all of them, from mass immigration, to intersectional theories about gender and race. This is also where some political energy is generated, as Ireland being traditionally Catholic and in recent memory having had a very religiously coloured public life, has a cultural resistance to many of the progressive ideas that are on the offensive in the West today. One such issue is abortion, which remains controversial in Ireland, only becoming legal in 2019. Another is same-sex marriage, which became recognised in the country in 2015.
On top of that, Ireland also lives under the general cultural zeitgeist where non-traditional gender roles and transgenderism is promoted by politics and the media, which is ubiquitous to all Western countries. These “culture war” topics have been engaging the conservative movement in Ireland for years, and may in fact be more politically charged than mass migration – an issue that for each individual person relies a lot on speculation and extensive knowledge of migration problems in the rest of Europe in order to be politically potent.
Suffice to say, there are many reasons for conservatives in Ireland to be politically engaged. Yet they aren’t. There is no Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, no ‘Ireland Democrats’, or ‘Brothers of Ireland’ in the Irish Republic as of today.
The closest comparison would probably be Conor McGregor – the mixed martial arts champion who has decided to use his platform as a sports celebrity to decry mass immigration, and is running for president of Ireland. But McGregor merely giving national conservatives a voice does not count as them having a functional political platform. In order to become eligible to stand for president (an office practically limited to veto powers) a candidate needs a number of nominations from the Irish Parliament as well as from a number of local councils – which someone without political capital and with non-conforming political views is unlikely to get.
It could perhaps be argued that McGregor being universally framed as the candidate of the right makes it harder for those lesser known parties and politicians on the right that do exist to receive attention. That the “star” of the nationalist movement in Ireland has a background in sports as opposed to politics illustrates a different problem in the country.
Electoral system complicates things further
Part of the reason behind the difficulties for conservatives in Ireland to become a real political force is the electoral system in the country, which while it does have some semblance of proportionality with transferable votes and preference ordering, chiefly works on regional representation just like those in the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world. This system, where the battle for the seats of each electoral district essentially boils down to a showdown between the two largest parties – typically those with the biggest campaign funds or the most well-established candidates – also plays a part in why it has been so hard for nationalists to conquer even an inch in the United Kingdom (until very recently) and Canada. While Ireland is by no practical means even close to being a two-party state, it is evident that the election system, coupled with the history of the country’s democracy, gives advantages to the established parties and makes it harder for challengers unless they stand with exceedingly popular candidates in several constituencies.
Even if one is a nationalist or a conservative in Ireland, one might imagine that one’s vote is best cast on those of the dominating parties that best represents their interests, as opposed to one that perfectly represents them. With a system that centres around the candidates first-hand and the parties second-hand, it is also plausible that those concerned with immigration or with “culture war” topics may already have favoured politicians from the established parties that advocate more conservative positions, even if they are not party policy.
One common hurdle for most populist parties in Europe is the device “better the devil I know than the devil I don’t”. Few voters are interested in casting their only vote on upstarts even with a good agenda, out of distrust of new and unpredictable parties. This penalises populists in candidate-based political systems especially, as the task of representation falls upon the singular politician rather than the party organisation. New parties with a populist profile tend to be plagued by incompetency, internal strife, and meandering into radicalism among their representatives for the first years of their existence, and this is something that most voters are wary of. Even if a party is trying to capitalise on a popular issue, such as mass immigration, they will not provide potent opposition unless they field dependable candidates that can compete with the major parties’ well-routined professional politicians.
Ireland is doubly afflicted by the problems that a candidate-based system produces for small parties. With a population of just over five million, manpower becomes a serious issue that should not be underestimated. How many sufficiently educated, disciplined, and intelligent people with the right political opinions and values are there, really? This is why the biggest of the nationalist parties in Ireland, the Irish Freedom Party, only won under 30 000 votes (1,7 percent) in what was still its most successful election so far, in the 2024 European Parliamentary elections.
In a more party-focused, less geographically deterministic election system, a party with a popular agenda can be staffed by very imperfect candidates without it necessarily breaking their campaign. Subsequent momentum can then be used to attract professionalism and competency from the outside. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats naturally benefitted from this dynamic. Ireland’s nationalists and conservatives instead have the decks stacked against them.
Ireland’s other ticking time bomb
While, as the experiences of the rest of Western Europe show that mass immigration from culturally distant parts of the world constitutes an economic, social, and national security problem, Ireland faces yet another demographic disaster in the making. The country, historically known as an island of emigrants, is seeing its young and productive natives leave at a rate that is not matched by any other European nation. Various economic factors, such as the housing crisis, inflation, and a stagnant job market is compelling Ireland’s youth to look abroad for opportunities. According to some polling, three out of four young Irish are considering leaving the country at some point, purely out of pessimism for where the future is headed. The compounded problems from mass immigration are likely only making the outlook even worse, if one looks at trends from other European countries that are also seeing levels of emigration not seen for a century.
This is and of itself provides a backdrop to the motivations behind the Irish political class’ eagerness to embrace mass immigration. The economic consequences of an even faster-aging population do pose a serious problem, and in a country where the elite has mistaken globalism and neoliberalism for a holistic blessing, they are acting in accordance with their ideological manual: if the Irish are leaving, the rest of the world must enter – or the Celtic Tiger will die.
From the Tudor era up until the 18th century, Ireland was forcibly resettled with English and Scottish colonists, the so-called Plantations of Ireland. This attempt from the English Crown to pacify the land was followed by (allegedly deliberate) English passiveness as half of Ireland’s population left the country for the New World in the wake of the Potato famine in the 1840s. Ireland bears scars from having been subjected to cruel population control from foreign powers, and the similarities between the mass immigration of today and the Irish’ historical mistreatment under the English is played on in nationalist communication.
The difference is that today it is the Irish government itself that treats its citizens as interchangeable. The country is in need of a conservative paradigm shift, that will seek to make Ireland liveable again for the Irish, instead of embracing immigration as a remedy for all its challenges.
Unfortunately it looks as if that shift will not be coming for quite a few years.