What Does Irish Right-Wing Unity Look Like?

The farmer and the cowman should be friends,

Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.

The cowman ropes a cow with ease, the farmer steals her

butter and cheese,

But that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends

Territory folks should stick together,

Territory folks should all be pals.

Cowboys dance with farmer’s daughters,

Farmers dance with the ranchers’ gals.

-‘Oklahoma’ The Musical

“The farmer and the cowman should be friends.”

It’s a sentimental lyric. But politically, it’s a ruthless truth.

The farmer steals the cowman’s butter. The cowman ropes the farmer’s cattle. They irritate one another. They compete. They suspect motives. And yet – territory folks should stick together. Irish populism and conservatism today look exactly like that uneasy frontier.

The actors are present. The constituencies exist. The grievances are real. The votes are there in potential. What is missing is not talent, nor platforms, nor even money. What is missing is the willingness of the farmer and the cowman to sit in the same room, argue honestly, and hammer out an accommodation.

In an earlier piece we examined the failure of grassroots populists to organise. Then we turned to those who already hold institutional footholds – columnists, senators, councillors, party leaders, media figures – and asked why they remain commentators rather than coalition-builders.

So the obvious question follows: if they did engage, what would that actually look like? And where would it lead?

The Right Already Exists

We are endlessly told that Ireland has no political Right.

That is lazy thinking.

The Right exists. It is recognisable. It writes op-eds. It hosts podcasts. It organises conferences. It wins council seats. It drafts motions. It commands mailing lists. It has public intellectuals and rural power-brokers.

What it does not have is a habit of engaging with itself.

Each faction is comfortably bedded down in a safe niche. Social conservatives talk to social conservatives. Libertarian economists talk to libertarian economists. Rural independents talk to their parish halls. Everyone addresses the Government. Almost nobody seriously addresses each other.

Before electoral vehicles, before party mergers, before grand announcements, there must be something more basic: structured public disagreement. Positions aired. Fears of reputational damage named. Misgivings tested. Compromise and collaboration are explored.

That culture does not yet exist.

Steen, McDowell, and the Missing Conversation

Take Maria Steen and Michael McDowell – not because Irish politics revolves around two people, but because they represent two substantial blocs.

McDowell’s refusal to nominate Steen for the presidency is well rehearsed. But it obscures something more important: two years earlier, during the Family and Care referenda, the same broad camps collaborated and won.

There were scenes of shared jubilation in Dublin Castle. People with profound ideological differences shared credit and success.

What changed?

The referenda were finite. Two No votes. Clear, defined outcomes. Short-term implications. A common, easily understood objective.

The presidential contest was different. It was long-term. Symbolic. Unpredictable. It raised larger questions. McDowell — and others like him — could legitimately ask: what am I endorsing? A candidate? Or a broader ideological platform more closely aligned with the Iona Institute than with my own worldview?

And it was not just McDowell.

There is a decisive 30% of the Irish electorate – middle-ground voters who supported repeal and same-sex marriage but who are uneasy about aspects of the present settlement. They are not culture warriors. They are not doctrinaire progressives. But they are wary of overtly confessional branding. Steen herself recognised this late in the campaign, attempting to put visible distance between her candidacy and the Institute’s label.

That 30% decides elections. Five years before repeal, there was a 60/ 40 majority in favour of the 8th Amendment. Electoral support for progressive causes is shallow. That crucial segment can be moved.

Engage them – or remain politically neutered.

Some things are exhilarating and exciting on their own, but are meh when you put them together. Ladies and Gaelic Football for example.

On the other hand there are things that are inert on their own but put them together and boom. Two small pieces of Uranium do nothing but bring them together and you have Hiroshima.

If social conservatives genuinely want to achieve tangible outcomes – whether on family policy, cultural questions, or life issues – it will not be achieved by consolidating the already-converted 30%. It will be achieved by persuading and accommodating the middle 30%.

That requires trust.

And trust requires engagement before looking for a nomination – not recriminations afterwards.

Comfort Zones

Columnists with national platforms rarely use them to engage their ideological cousins. They speak past each other. Or about each other. Rarely to each other.

McDowell has an Irish Times platform. Cormac Lucey, another conservative outside the pro-life sphere, has a Sunday Times op ed once a week. Maria Steen now does too. Breda O’Brien, Brenda Power, and David Quinn have regular national columns. It’s fair to say that none of them use those platforms to engage with one another. They all talk past each other and at the public, usually to bemoan the lack of power conservatives appear to have to change things – an excusable survival strategy during the lean years when woke was in the ascendant, but very outdated now.

Gript is not immune.

Its editor, John McGuirk, and several of its writers have taken a firm pro-Israel stance over the past year. They are entitled to that view. But where has there been sustained engagement with conservative contributors who profoundly disagree? If the overwhelming mood in Ireland is discomfort with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and dissenting conservative voices are absent from your pages, what message does that send?

It says: this is the line. If you disagree, find another outlet.

Movements built that way shrink.

The paywalling of almost all Gript content, commercially rational though it is, narrows political influence. If serious coalition-building debates happen behind subscription barriers, how are competing supporters brought along?

Influence requires reach. Prudence is understandable. But prudence does not build movements.

Friction Is Healthy

Aontú has experienced public internal friction.

It’s no secret. The last year has seen ructions within Aontu between its leadership, concentrated around the Toibin family, and just about every other member of the party over how vocal Aontu should be on immigration and other populist causes.

Peadar Tóibín has navigated these disputes over immigration tone and populist strategy. Ógra members were expelled. WhatsApp messages made headlines. The Ard Fheis aired tensions.

Messy? Yes.

But at least it was politics.

Although John McGuirk would probably deny it, if there is a party that Gript has given a platform to it is Aontu. When Tóibín sat down with McGuirk to address those divisions around the time of the last Aontu Ard Fheis, it was uncomfortable. But it was engagement. A debate – even if only one side of it was publicly heard. That is closer to how serious movements behave than another panel of unanimous speakers diagnosing national decline.

Similarly, when Tóibín sought Oireachtas nominations for Maria Steen, the public heard recriminations about who contacted whom. What we did not hear was the substance of the debate. What were Independent Ireland’s reservations? Or those of Senators Victor Boyhan, Gerard Craughwell and McDowell (and the surprisingly reluctant Senator Aubrey McCarthy). What did Steen’s supporters believe she offered? What were the endorsements she got conditional on? What would need to change on either side for cooperation to become durable?

Those are precisely the discussions that should be aired – if not beforehand for tactical reasons, then afterwards for strategic clarity.

Parallel Tracks and Missed Opportunities

Independent Ireland remains a loose formation, without whip discipline and with strong local focus (which means it may be about to morph into a completely different beast if Noel Thomas is successful in Galway West). Its leaders appear primarily concerned with retaining their seats. Public meetings in Dublin have sometimes revealed the limits of engagement beyond their constituencies. When advertising for a Dublin Central candidate, at a meeting in a Dublin hotel, Michael Collins claimed not to be able to remember who Malachy Steenson was. In Clondalkin, Nick Delahanty’s plea for IPAS-centre support was rebuffed rather than engaged with constructively.

There are exceptions. Ken O’Flynn appears more open to broader engagement than other of his colleagues.

Meanwhile, Sharon Keogan operates within a network of councillors – councillors are her constituency after all – and she’s not the only leader in that network. They get results: passing immigration-focused motions across multiple councils. Effective, yes – but largely private. A self-help network rather than a debating forum. This suits Sharon and others in it but it’s not where differences with people outside the group are going to be addressed or resolved. There are plenty on the conservative side who rightly or wrongly hesitate at being associated with Sharon. Those fears go unexamined and unremedied because they are never debated publicly.

At Eddie Hobbs’ event in Ashbourne, twelve panels over two days diagnosed decline. All agreed. No one meaningfully disagreed. The country is in a terrible state. Enemies were outside the room. Over the course of the two days no one engaged in an actual debate, no one had a difference of opinion with a fellow panellist or identified another panellist’s weaknesses or any opportunities to overcome them. None of the healthy debate you associate with a healthy political movement.

It was cathartic. It was not strategic.

Populist podcasts suffer the same flaw and are all the less watchable for it: grievance without internal testing. Moaning at a common enemy, no one seeks the discomfort and the rewards of an internal debate that would identify failures and look to forge a more electorally appealing version of the message.

And yet when someone like Malachy Steenson who was on five of the panels in Ashbourne is placed under pressure, he sharpens. Challenge strengthens him. The more pressure he’s under the more eloquent and convincing he gets. In Ashbourne, that energy was squandered in an echo chamber: another missed opportunity.

Why are we afraid of testing each other?

The Bridge-Builders

At the local level, something more serious is emerging.

Gavin Pepper is doing what many commentators merely discuss. Three council committees in a day. Motions passed with cross-party support. Relationships built with left-wing TDs, business figures and establishment politicians. One day, leading a care workers’ march; another at a pro-life event; another networking in the corporate section at a Six Nations match. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are putting him on committees. He’s seen firsthand how effective the professionals in the main parties are and has worked with them.

Testing positions and approaches and messaging isn’t something he’s aspiring to do in the abstract. He’s doing it now, learning what works, finding what appeals. He bridges divides not by rhetoric but by competence.

He’s a year ahead of everyone else on the populist side and in another year he’ll be two years ahead of everyone else.

None of the populist leaders mentioned so far are looking for guidance from Gavin or to learn from what he’s done. He is, after all, only a taxi driver from Finglas. And Michael Healy Rae is only a flat cap hick with a sod of turf in his Dail office. And both would like you to go on underestimating them for as long as they’re able to get away with it.

What Could Common Ground Look Like?

Enough abstraction. What would actual overlap among groups on the Right look like?

• Start with birth rates and family formation.

For the Iona Institute and the pro-life movement, pro-natalism is core territory: strong families, more children, demographic stability.

But ask why young couples are delaying children.

Housing costs. Rental insecurity. Childcare expenses. Stagnant real wages.

Now we are in the realm of economics.

Figures like Michael McDowell and Cormac Lucey may not share confessional language – but they understand planning reform, tax structures, market supply, wage growth.

Frame family policy as structural reform rather than moral exhortation and you have overlap, not tension.

• Take immigration.

For the middle bloc, high inflows raise practical concerns: housing pressure, service strain, wage suppression in some sectors.

For Catholic conservatives, compassion and empathy with immigrants is instinctive. But compassion that ignores labour exploitation and housing scarcity is not compassion — it is sentimentality. Immigration limits can be framed not as hostility towards others, but as protection of social cohesion and working-class wages. Christian solidarity meets economic realism.

• Consider the Green agenda.

For rural constituencies represented by Independent Ireland, it threatens livelihoods. For libertarians, it often represents top-down central planning. Catholic social teaching offers us the idea of “subsidiarity”: decisions should be taken at the lowest effective level (family first, then the community, then the state)

Centralised climate mandates clash with all three instincts.

There is common ground there.

• Then the cost-of-living crisis.

Housing shortages, rent inflation, energy costs, emigration of young adults. Business groups see these as competitiveness problems. Libertarians see them as the result of state distortion. Social conservatives see them leading to family fragmentation.

They are describing different facets of the same problem.

None of this requires ideological surrender. It requires agreement on defined, short- to medium-term objectives with measurable outcomes.

Build more houses. Reform planning. Protect wages. Moderate migration. Defend rural economies. Decentralise power.

These resemble the successful referendum cooperation – limited aims, clear goals – far more than the open-ended presidential bid ever did.

That 30% conservative base combined with the persuadable 30% middle is not a fantasy.

It is a combustible mixture ready to set Irish politics alight.

The Window Will Not Stay Open

If this accommodation does not occur within populism, it will occur elsewhere.

Micheál Martin will not lead forever. When he’s finally taken out and a stake driven through his heart at a crossroads at midnight Jim O’Callaghan could yet consolidate Fianna Fáil’s traditional coalition of rural conservatism and pragmatic urbanism. If he does it’s not impossible that the party recaptures the glories of a FF that was populist through and through and delighted in snubbing the writers of Irish Times editorials.

Fine Gael doesn’t have quite the same broad church or populist history but Simon Harris the arch opportunist has seen the 13% of spoiled ballots left sitting on the table in the presidential election and wants them on board. He’ll keep twisting his opportunists rubik cube until he finds some pattern that will bring in them in.

If populism doesn’t bring those factions together others will. Politics abhors a vacuum. Street activists had excuses. No funding. No platforms. No institutional footholds. Columnists, senators, editors and party leaders do not.

The political temperature has changed. The old excuse – that woke liberal dominance made engagement risky and pointless – is exhausted.

So the question is simple.

Will those comfortably ensconced justify their salaries and platforms by taking risks for something larger?

Or will they remain the dogs in the manger – loud, articulate, and ultimately irrelevant? The farmer and the cowman can continue singing about unity from opposite sides of the fence. Or they can sit down, argue honestly, compromise where necessary, and build something that alters the balance of Irish politics.

If they do not, someone else will. And when that happens, they will not be remembered as the men and women who missed their moment.

They will be remembered as the dogs that didn’t bark.