A Broad Church for the Irish Right?

I wrote a few days ago about the failure of Irish populists to organise.

The piece was pessimistic because pessimism was the only intellectually honest response to the evidence. Reality, so far, has not been especially generous.

One observation in particular, about the Maria Steen presidential effort, generated some reaction. That reaction mattered, because it revealed something many people would prefer not to confront.

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.

That diagnosis still holds. But if the failure is structural rather than moral, then the response must also be structural. Which means talking about people – not in the abstract, but very specific categories of people – the ones without whom nothing is going to happen.

Before discussing what *could* be done politically, we need to look at who would actually have to do it. These people are not hypothetical. They already exist. While individuals may be named, they are really stand-ins for a type: people occupying certain roles, with certain capacities, without whose involvement the Irish right will go nowhere.

Whether they choose to act is up to them. But there is no substitute class waiting in reserve.

For the most part, these people have carved out comfortable niches for themselves. Comfortable both intellectually – not needing to reach out to those they might disagree with – and also in terms of material comforts. They hold respectable salaried positions. They have platforms that are secure, bounded, and low-risk. Of course there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Until recently, it was the rational choice. Political success was unlikely, while the reputational cost of association with anything labelled “far right” was very real.

That calculation has changed.

Simon Harris now toys openly with populist rhetoric. Jim O’Callaghan does it without apology. Even Mary Lou McDonald no longer treats populist language as radioactive. The enforcement mechanism has weakened. The danger has receded.

The people I am talking about know this. But with a few exceptions, they have not acted on it. The safety blanket remains firmly in place.

Let’s take the pro-life movement.

Whatever one thinks of the cause, it is impossible to deny its organisational competence. Every July it can put five thousand people on the streets. Outside the mainstream consensus, no other organisation comes close.

The logistics are instructive. The audio-visual setup at the Rally for Life is consistently professional and clearly the product of sustained investment. Marchers get to walk up O’Connell Street with Archbishop Eamon Martin, Primate of All Ireland, who is unfailingly personable and accessible. This is not accidental. It is an institutional capacity.

They can mobilise because they maintain contact lists running into the tens of thousands. Those lists are used year-round. There are regular newsletters, in-person meet-ups attended by hundreds – most recently in the Gresham. Among those responsible for getting things done are some recognisable public faces. There is also the Life Institute and the Iona Institute. The Iona Institute outputs research documents and is represented on the ground by people like Angelo Bottone who organises meetings, shows up at others, keeps his ear to the ground. 

How much of this success is due to the cause itself? Probably a great deal. But is there an opportunity to make connections outside the pro life silo? It would be wilfully blind to ignore the organisational skill involved. Fundraising, volunteer retention, message discipline, and growth do not happen by accident. The broader conservative movement would be foolish not to recognise that people like Niamh, Angelo, and others possess skills it badly lacks.

There are also figures who overlap with the pro-life movement without being defined by it.

Maria Steen is the most obvious example. Her move from commentator to would-be candidate is precisely the sort of transition that must occur if frowned upon conservatism or populism is to have any political future in Ireland. The question is whether it marks a beginning or merely another interlude. Does she continue to show the way, or does she, like Cincinnatus, return once again to her plough after a moment of prominence, as she has done after previous referenda?

Perhaps related to Maria’s moment – encouraged by it – has been the renewed public involvement of Declan Ganley in recent months. That, too, is worth noting.

Sharon Keogan has long taken the fight into the public arena. Her electorate is councillors rather than the general public, but she cultivates, organises, and maintains that constituency with a seriousness and discipline that represents one of the few genuinely hopeful developments on the Irish right. The network of councillors that Sharon has grown  is probably, in the absence of much serious competition, the nearest thing to a successful political organisation that anyone has come up with in the last three years.

That is (some of) the pro-life movement and those who overlap with it.

Many of the above have found comfortable niches for themselves. Reliable, dependable material security that acts as a disincentive from stirring themselves and entering the political fray – for example by working overtime to create organisations or run workshops. But for the right in Ireland to push on something else is necessary and this would certainly involve discomfort, the discomfort that comes with having to engage with those who disagree with you on important things. The discomfort of being forced to collaborate with people unlike yourself.

Which brings us to the others – the crucial others – who are not socially conservative at all.

There are fewer recognisable figures here, at least to populists, but recent referenda have shown that this voting cohort is at least as large as the socially conservative one, with significantly more room to grow. Their representatives are far more acceptable to mainstream opinion, have vastly better media access and do not carry anything like the same reputational toxicity, deserved or otherwise.

Independent Ireland is widely despised by many populists. That sentiment may be emotionally satisfying, but it is politically fatal. There is no future for a movement that cannot accommodate Independent Ireland and its supporters — even if that means side-lining or downplaying elements of social conservatism.

As an organisation, Independent Ireland is currently little more than a support structure for four independent TDs. Those leaders occasionally gesture beyond that role, usually in ways aligned with their rural base. The recent anti-Mercosur farmers’ protest in Athlone was a good example – focused, disciplined, and effective.

More importantly, from a populist perspective, Noel Thomas – candidate in the upcoming Galway West bye-election – has thrown his lot in with Independent Ireland. Thomas is a successful, long-serving, former Fianna Fáil county councillor: a canny, experienced operator in local politics whose “far-right” credentials are beyond reproach. How many street-level activists can say their homes were raided, their phones confiscated, and their professional memberships revoked over comments about why an IPAS centre was torched?

If Independent Ireland is good enough for Noel Thomas, then it belongs squarely in the catalogue of actors without whom Irish populism cannot succeed.

There are others in this socially liberal but nationalist and anti-immigration space: Cormac Lucey, Nick Delehanty, and more.

But finally there is one name that towers above all others.

There will be no political future for the Irish right unless a way is found to involve – and more importantly, to accommodate – Michael McDowell and the voters he represents.

McDowell is not a mere commentator. He is a political operator. A former TD, Minister for Justice, and Attorney General who has repeatedly turned opinion pieces into electoral victories. His hands are dirty. He engages.

He represents a vast bloc of voters for whom the pro-life position is a profound turn-off: the middle thirty per cent who voted yes on gay marriage and repeal, but who remain opposed to open borders and birth right citizenship and, by implication, retain an attachment to the tricolour. McDowell represents them and people like them.

Any collaboration with McDowell and his supporters will require, if not ideological compromise, then at least tactical discretion — social conservatism spoken sotto voce, or only when asked. The Mattie McGrath model.

In place of parties exploring cooperation and collaboration all we got in the aftermath of the Maria Steen nomination debacle was both sides fighting a blame game in the national media.

Uncomfortable collaboration with those you would rather be publicly calling a liar is the price of a broad church. It is necessary. The alternative is failure and a wasted opportunity.

Without building that broad church, that big tent, the outcome is already known: plenty of rhetoric, periodic outrage, and no power.

This article is long enough already: next time – Now that we’ve shone a light on these actors we can ask what might they actually do: if they were ready to engage where would the pull of political gravity take them? Imagining Success On The Irish Right.