Councillor Gavin Pepper is arguably the top political performer out of the crop of nationalist candidates that were elected in 2024.
As the implications of his Somali housing expose still rings in the ears of housing officials, left-wing politicians, and the Tom and Mary Public, it is entirely conceivable that the former taxi driver from Finglas makes it into the Oireachtas within the next decade.
He does this not out of any novel political strategy of his but simply by immersing himself in the normal humdrum of community politics, all the while flying the flag on migration control politics that has and will continue to win hearts and minds. A stable family man in a political ecosystem on the right that prioritises ragebait and myopic thinking, part of the Pepper formula, has been his involvement in the day-to-day charity and advocacy work that make up a surprising bulk of an Irish councillor’s working life.
In fact it is the Finglas-Ballymun’s attendance at a Tourette’s charity event, taking a sneaky picture with Michelle O’Neill in particular that has sparked a mild but intriguing pseudo-controversy on the online right.
Lambasted as a ‘sell-out’ merely for appearing shoulder to shoulder with the SF leader in a friendly setting, the most vocal of the Pepper detractors is online mouth Mick O’Keefe. Effectively branding Pepper a turncoat for the snap, the predictable purity spiral has yet again marked the men from the terminally online boys within the discourse in our quarters.
The storm in a teacup vindicates multiple things at once. One that Pepper despite his humble appearances is lightyears ahead of the online commentariat when it comes to not just electability but also sociability but also that a bulk of our numbers crave only to be asocial cranky weirdos.
Normalisation whatever one’s flavour of nationalist politics is an essential ingredient to what ever civic, vanguardist or electoral strategy one wishes to pursue. To that end it is the hardest requiring a meatspace presence and above all else normal socialised personnel and candidates able to press the flesh on the parochial circuits that make up our body politics.
The left, even the extreme left has made their name in this country by mastering that circuit, transforming fringe trotskyists to household names and trusted community figures by their social work on the ground.
In mounting any type of sustained populist fightback any right has this simple but life changing hurdle to jump. Simply gathering enough functional, socially rooted and stable characters willing to put their name and careers on the line by advancing nationalist politics at to direct them at the charity events, social work and community advocacy required to elected office.
Most on the right will not make it, collapsing instead into contrarian fantasy politics of all descriptions (national socialist, traditional Catholicism, ragebait propaganda, etc). Whatever the merits and demerits of Pepper’s banal electoral approach it can achieve results (and is exactly what the ideological left does not want the right to do) relative to the fantasyland of his detractors.
In that sense, the left does have merit in their arguments. The right in Ireland as it has manifested in the post-COVID period, is chock full of weirdos, freaks, online faddists able to tilt national debate on the algorithms but hopeless at anything further.
By moving away from these chancers, Pepper is setting himself up to make actual change in the localist bloodstream of our politics.
The future of the political right in Ireland, if there is one, will look like the Councillor from Finglas, with the former taximan far ahead of the learning curve than those who will never learn or care why they are perennial failures.
It’s Pepper’s world now; you just live in it.
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