IRL Forum, Bannon and the Irish Right’s Closing Window of Opportunity

John Buchan’s Greenmantle is often misread as little more than a period adventure novel. In reality, it is a study in political uncertainty – and in what happens when a moment opens up, but nobody is ready to seize it.

Written just before the First World War, the novel opens with a Europe drowning in information and starving for meaning. The British Foreign Office is flooded with reports, rumours and intelligence from every corner of the map. Everyone knows something significant is coming. Nobody yet knows what form it will take. The atmosphere is one of waiting – for a signal that will cut through the fog and impose direction on events.

Buchan describes it like this:

“The fact is beyond dispute. I have reports from agents everywhere — pedlars in South Russia, Afghan horse-dealers, Turcoman merchants, pilgrims on the road to Mecca, sheikhs in North Africa, sailors on the Black Sea coasters, sheep-skinned Mongols, Hindu fakirs, Greek traders in the Gulf, as well as respectable Consuls who use cyphers. They tell the same story. This realm is waiting for a revelation. It has been promised one. Some star — man, prophecy, or trinket — is coming out of the West. And that is the card with which they are going to astonish the world.”

It is difficult not to see the parallel with the Irish Right today.

There is no shortage of anger or unease. On migration, sovereignty, free speech, and democratic accountability, many voters know the current settlement is unstable. But what is missing is not sentiment — it is structure. The Irish Right is fragmented, reactive, and often reduced to hoping that something will happen: an election shock, a court ruling, a viral moment, a charismatic outsider.

That hope is a mistake.

Political openings do not remain vacant. If they are not filled by organised movements with discipline and leadership, they are filled by the mainstream parties – Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and increasingly Sinn Féin – who are perfectly capable of rebranding themselves as agents of “change” once the pressure becomes uncomfortable. Irish politics is littered with examples of managed dissent being absorbed, neutralised, and sold back to the public as reform.

Buchan understood this dynamic. Periods of confusion are decisive not because they endure, but because they resolve. When clarity finally arrives, it rewards those who prepared for it – not those who waited passively for revelation.

Irish populists should take note. If they do not give shape and direction to the moment now opening before them, that moment will not go to waste. It will simply be claimed – and safely contained – by the very parties that created it.

So why, exactly, have Irish populists failed to organise?

The temptation is to reach for grand explanations – structural forces, media hostility, cultural inertia. But historians often miss what is right in front of them, because they need a narrative that makes sense. Real politics rarely does. Much of what happens is contingent: chance, coincidence, timing, and above all personalities.

Take the Spoil the Vote campaign. It was a genuine grassroots phenomenon. If it owed anything to anyone, it owed it to anonymous posters on Twitter – accounts like teachgruama – articulating and amplifying a mood that already existed. There was no grand strategy, no leadership class, no central committee.

And then, inevitably, a handful of people decided the leadership must be them.

A small group hired a tiny room in Buswells and announced themselves as the leaders of the campaign. The press, grateful for anything they could package into a recognisable story, obligingly went along. The launch itself descended into near farce: a room barely the size of a living room, twenty people at most, a “top table” being loudly called out, licentious Mrs Brown level mockery of the hecklers, resulting in counter threats, all being traded just out of view and everyone attempting to do this discreetly enough that the RTÉ correspondent wouldn’t notice. 

Try putting that into a tidy historical account without writing a comedy.

Spoil the Vote succeeded anyway, and largely for reasons that had nothing to do with its self-appointed leaders. It inherited a reservoir of anger from the collapsed Maria Steen presidential campaign. Had Steen secured the nomination, Spoil the Vote would have been a footnote, regardless of who was lending it their support.

Steen’s campaign itself failed for reasons that were, again, intensely personal and highly contingent. The lack of backing from Michael McDowell and figures around him proved fatal. There is a popular tendency to assign blame here to McDowell in particular – but the more useful lesson is structural rather than moral.

What this episode exposed was the absence of a broad church approach to Irish populism.

In the United States, the Republican coalition managed – over decades – an uneasy accommodation between socially liberal conservatives and the pro-life movement. There was no shared philosophy, just collaboration. It took fifty years to pay off, and the pro-lifers had to swallow a great deal along the way.

No equivalent accommodation has emerged here. Instead of patiently building that understanding in public and bringing different constituencies along, Steen effectively arrived in late summer and said: here I am, vote for me or lump it. In unprepared soil, nothing grew.

Again: not grand historical forces. Personalities.

The same pattern has repeated itself with other political initiatives, many of which collapsed not because of state repression or media conspiracy, but because of unnecessary infighting, alt-right meming, gatekeeping, and endless name-calling. Chance encounters, bad judgement, bruised egos. Not history – soap opera.

And then there is the most recent illustration of how reality is stranger than fiction – because fiction is at least supposed to make sense.

In the quiet week between Christmas and New Year, Steve Bannon announced – with characteristic bombast – that he had devoted hundreds of hours to kickstarting the Irish Right. Cue pearl-clutching journalism, reminiscent of the hens’ reaction to the American rooster in Chicken Run.

Almost simultaneously – and purely coincidentally, since it had been organised since November – Eddie Hobbs held one of his revival-style meetings in a hotel in Ashbourne. The media promptly began connecting dots that did not exist, casting Hobbs as a populist messiah to Bannon’s John the Baptist.

Nonsense? Yes. Coincidence? Also yes.

But this is how politics actually starts in a vacuum. Someone reads an article, throws a few bob someone else’s way, and momentum – real or imagined – begins to form in the absence of anything serious or organised.

The US ambassador was there in Ashbourne, with his wife and an embassy official taking notes. Dougie from GB News was on hand. And once again, all you need for the Irish media is a story neatly tied up with a bow.

This is not destiny. It is drift.

And unless Irish populists learn to distinguish between historical moments and theatrical ones, between organisation and improvisation, they will continue to confuse noise for movement – right up until the mainstream parties step in and tidy them all away.