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This is not a protest vote. This is certainly an election that is historic in proportions. This is changing the shape and the mould of Irish politics. In February 2020, just before lockdowns turned the world upside down, a political shock hit Ireland.
Sinn Fein, the party born out of Ireland's nationalist movement, running on a broadly left-wing platform, won the popular vote in the general election, with almost 25% of first preferences, almost double what the party achieved four years earlier.
people who had really not expected this. This was a political system that had seen Phenophol and Finigail, which are centre, centre-right, depending on how you want to judge these things. These two parties had always been the top two parties for the previous hundred or so years, and so this was a real challenge.
Owen O'Malley is a professor of politics at Dublin City University. Sinn Fein, he says, were at the time buoyed by an unusual coalition of voters. The Brits out nationalists, these people who just wanted the Brits out of Ireland, and there was a fairly small group of voters, mainly in rural areas,
probably older people, you also have these sorts of losers of globalization. So these would have been mainly men, possibly younger, more urban, who were, even though the Irish economy was doing pretty well, weren't actually gaining from this. And then a third group were probably young progressives.
Younger people who are financially pretty well off had good jobs, but they could not get out and probably still can't get on the housing ladder. And so rents in Ireland were ridiculously high and still are ridiculously high. And then buying a house seemed out of reach for them. And so in 2020, the surge, I suppose, was a coalition of those three groups.
When Ireland's two major parties, Fina Foyle and Finnigail, went into coalition with each other, preventing Sinn Fein from forming a government, it fueled their narrative that Ireland was run by an elite unchanging establishment. And so that was popular and sustained Sinn Fein's further growth in the polls. They were regularly reaching 36%, 37%.
Sinn Fein's leader, Mary Lou McDonald, proudly claimed that she would be the first female T-Shock or Prime Minister. And yet today, just over a week from Ireland's next election, that result is predicted by practically no one. So what happened? And what does this election tell us about the future for the UK's closest neighbour?
This is Insight from the New Statesman. I'm Kate Lambel. And I want to start with the collapse in Sinn Fein's vote. There have been scandals, including that two party press officers in Northern Ireland, where the party is in government, provided letters of reference for a departing colleague after he'd been arrested for child sexual offences and suspended from the party. Offences which he's since pled guilty to.
But Owen O'Malley doesn't think these scandals are what's keeping Sinn Fein from power. Miriam McDonald's responses to all of this was a little laggard and she didn't seem terribly convincing and terribly on top of her brief. But I think since the election campaign has gone underway, a lot of people have just kind of forgotten about that.
We've moved on to other scandals within other political parties, and so it's almost like they didn't happen, I think. Instead, he suggests there's something else which has shifted opinions. And what's happened in one word is immigration, in the aftermath of the Ukraine war.
In the first year, maybe 30 or 40,000 Ukrainian refugees come to Ireland, mainly women and children. The following year, another 40 or so thousand. And what we had seen was that the Irish state bent over backwards and managed to house these people pretty successfully. But it did
raise a question about the state's response to what had been everybody had agreed was a housing crisis before that, where you had regularly about 10,000 people who were homeless and the state kind of said, oh, we're doing all we can. And then a lot of groups turned around and said, you know, when it was working class Irish people, you said you were doing everything, but you weren't really doing anything and you weren't able to get those homeless figures down. Now that it's Ukrainian refugees,
suddenly we can find space for a hundred thousand people and I think there was probably an element of racism as well because people didn't really have a problem with these kind of white Ukrainian refugees but when the following year in 2023 and 2024 you've seen
large numbers of Middle East North African men, young single men coming in, and there was a big response to that. And again, the state bent over backwards, commandeered hotels, it commandeered old office blocks and repurposed them. And while most people wouldn't want to live in a repurposed office block, there was, again, the question, why didn't you do this for Irish people? How come you're going to the ends of the earth in order to accommodate refugees?
And essentially the elite response was that anybody who was raising issues about migration was far right and we don't want to entertain your problems because you're racist and that is it. Sinn Fein found it difficult to respond. Owen says the party has long been unusual in being a populist nationalist party which has also been consistently for migrant rights. But it didn't know how to
keep its electoral coalition together. It was equivocal on these issues then when it realized it was losing popular support. Then what you saw was those kind of losers from globalization. They were suddenly, you know, Sinn Fein doesn't represent us on this. Why would we want to support this party? You know, you saw kind of flag waving talks about these are party of traitors and sellouts.
banners have been hung up at Sinn Fein party offices accusing them of being traitors. The progressives were also kind of shocked that here's a party that was willing to now entertain far-right ideas because it was suddenly going, how do we deal with this? How do we deal with this?
and it was kind of jumping on both sides of the line and so that was another problem. So you saw this huge decline in its support and it was down to 12% in the local and European elections just in the summer, just past. Owen O'Malley from Dublin City University.
Sinn Fein may not perform quite that badly in next week's election, but on the doorstep it's clear opinion may be moving against them. Finn McDreadman has written for the new statesman this week about what she learnt from speaking to voters about what matters to them.
When I went to Dublin, I focused my efforts on two very distinct constituencies. One of them, the seat of Mary Lee MacDonald, and Schinfane's leader, is an area called Dublin Central. This area is the site of the Dublin riot that happened last November, which was connected to immigration.
is connected to immigration and immigration feels like a very live issue. There, people I spoke to around there mentioned immigration. They mentioned the recent scandals that have beset Sinn Fein as well, more frequently than I was expecting. One or two people I spoke to said that they would be lifelong Sinn Fein voters, but not this time around.
When I moved down to South County Dublin, a very affluent neighbourhood, kind of Finigail, Heartland, the impression that I got from that part of Dublin was, as I described it, in my piece of Bortoisie who thought that the country was basically working for them.
wild. There are some things, some tinkering around the margins that might improve their life. The concerns of these two places are completely anathema to one another. Immigration was not featured on the doorsteps at all in Funigale, Funigale Heartland. I think they're
is still an anxiety among the kind of liberal centrist establishment to talk about immigration for fear that it makes them look racist or not right thinking. And you definitely get that sense in South County Dublin, which you don't get in Dublin Central.
If we're not going to see this big shake-up that we saw in the last election, that that Sinn Féin surge has gone away, that we're going to be pretty much potentially the same as Ireland has been for a while, why does this election matter? It's a good question because on the face of it, you would think probably not really much at all. One thing to say is that it's not impossible for Sinn Féin to form a government. It's very hard to know how the numbers will stack up exactly, but there could be a complicated long-drawn-out process. Most people are suspecting that it will be some kind of combination of Fina Gayle and Fina Fall again.
which is the last government was some combination of finna gale and finna fallen before it was some kind of combination and before it was finna gale and before it was finna fallen. And it has been for the entire history of the modern Irish Free State. There are a few things that are coming down the line for Ireland that should be causing consternation.
The first one, as we've been speaking a lot about on this podcast, is immigration. Ireland's gone through precipitous demographic change, and that is not going to stop, and official statistics are predicting that 90% of future population growth may come from internal migration. It's all well and good to have a huge amount of internal migration while
Ireland is rich, full employment, country actually needs immigrants because there's jobs to be done, but even then there's unhappiness at the fringes with exactly the way that immigration is happening and its interaction with the housing crisis. If you then take Ireland to a place which is not so economically happy and it's not at full employment and it's not a kind of
sitting on a huge fiscal surplus, and it's not sitting on a handsome tax receipt of 13 billion euro. Then you have a very, very different situation, and then you have something that could be a lot more dangerous. The reason why we should be so anxious about this at the moment is because of the specter of a Trump presidency and his project of economic kind of nationalism, as economic isolationism, could really harm the model by which Ireland became so wealthy.
these multinational companies setting up shop in Ireland, giving them their tax receipt. Exactly, exactly. And Ireland's economy is kind of founded upon foreign direct investment, which by the way, Sinn Fein don't have any plans to change. And the confluence of those two factories.
increased demographic change with an economy that isn't necessarily as happy as it is at the moment. There's a lot of ifs to get there, but it's something that should be worrying the voters and the kind of establishment far more than it currently appears to be reflected in their rhetoric. You talked about those two very different constituencies, one very affluent, one much more urban. Is there a vision for the future of Ireland, which speaks to both of those groups?
Neither Finigale nor Finifall are projecting a new vision. As far as they're concerned, the current vision is working. As I just said, the economy is good and social cohesion is, it's fraying, but at the moment it's kind of working. They can, again, do this tinkering at the margins. They could invest more in inner-city Dublin and they can build more houses and kind of chip away at this housing crisis. Sinn Fein aren't
really saying anything radically different. Their future vision for Ireland isn't one that is like big picture thinking enough such that it keeps the South County Dublin and the Inner North coherent. A stop-breaking company called Davey spoke with Sinn Fein behind closed doors and released a memo and they described their
economic outlook is more akin to Tony Blair's than Jeremy Corbyn's. None of these parties are have any kind of radical posture. They are essential cohering around this singular, very centrist economic principles.
I thought it was interesting in your piece you talked about, I can't remember which way round it was, but Fina Foil and Fina Gayle is Cameron Conservative and Blue Labour. And are you talking much in vain as Tony Blair? Right. Are they not different in the grand spectrum of things? Fina Gayle and Fina Foil are very interesting. Ireland doesn't really cleave to left to right politics in a kind of traditional sense that the difference between Fina Gayle and Fina Foil is a cultural one.
But in so far as they are politically distinct, Finigale is a kind of more socially liberal party. More of their TDs or members of Parliament kind of supported the abortion referendum in 2018. Well, fewer in Fina Fall did, which is quite an instructive way of thinking about their kind of social outlook. Fina Gale kind of describes herself as a party of enterprise and Fina Fall is more skeptical of big business and tech. Not that skeptical, because as I said, they don't have any kind of great upheaval vision for the economy.
Yeah, and then the distinction, Finigale, like David Cameron's conservative party in Fina Foul, like blue labor, only once you've dragged them both to the center. They're far less kind of potent in their identities as those two British propositions are. Drag them to the center and then make them get along well enough so that they can run a country and that's what you have. Sinn Fein, you know, I think Sinn Fein would be horrified.
to hear someone describe them as like Tony Blair. I don't think they're like Tony Blair, but they're just not that different to Fina Gal and Fina Fort. And that's because they had to draw themselves to the middle to say we could be a party of government. Right. Well, exactly. And Sinn Fein kind of has kind of like cosmic struggle. It might be an intractable one, which is that they had to gain mainstream respectability after their history. They, you know, they cohered the remnants of an old party into the political wing of the IRA. They appointed Mary Lou MacDonald
Precisely because she wasn't a kind of grizzled republican man. She was supposed to drag the party to mainstream respectability, you know, take the Armilite out of Sinn Fein's politics. And she did that pretty successfully, but what they have to sacrifice by doing that is they have to go to the center. They have to lose those harder edges. And when they lose those harder edges, they lose part of their coalition.
I'm interested that you were talking so much about the Irish economy and how so many people are saying, oh, well, it's working right now. We don't need to worry about, in that situation, what issues are cutting through? You mentioned immigration. What other issues are you hearing on the doorsteps that are cutting through that positive economic outlet?
I think, so cost of living, which people take separately to the economy and cost of living, just like here and just like in America, is hugely important. Within that, childcare costs seem to be really, really resonating on the doors. It's healthcare, it's housing, nothing huge. What I do think is very, very interesting, though, is the decline in interest in the environment and climate.
I had one person describe it to me as the idea that Ireland's become much more practically minded since the pandemic and long-term visionary projects, which is, you know, sustainability has kind of dropped off the roster of interest. And, you know, that could be concerning. It will probably have to come back on the roster of interest, but at the moment, it's just not featuring. It's the daily practical, pragmatic things that matter.
Thank you, Finn. And if you'd like to read more of Finn's analysis for the New Statesmen, we'll put a link in our show notes. Remember, you can subscribe from just £2 for the first two months, which will also give you ad-free podcasts. Just visit newstatesmen.com forward slash save. We'll be back in a few minutes to talk about the security of Ireland's economic future and how this will affect the prospect of a united Ireland.
Welcome back to Insight from the New Statesman with me, Kate Lambel. I am joined now by the Chief Economist at the Institute of International and European Affairs, Dan O'Brien and Bingham Fellow in Constitutional Studies at Bailey Old College, Oxford, Connor Kelly.
I want to start with the economy and with you, Dan, because looking at the manifestos from some of the parties, the optimism on offer from a UK perspective is huge. You've got Finnegal talking about investing 100 billion euros in capital projects, reducing the cost of prescription drugs. You've got Fina Foil increasing the state pension, reducing childcare fees. What is going on with Ireland's economy at the moment? Why is it doing so well? What's this economic windfall about?
It's largely been driven by what's been driving it for decades. And that is having become a hub in the transit landscape economy, particularly in terms of US companies locating their European operations and indeed their wider global operations in the partly in the Irish Republic. That is two sectors of particular pharmaceuticals and tech. And these are perfect industries for an island economy to have. They are high growth. They are generating incredible
employment, they're generating incredible tax returns, which leaves Ireland in a pretty unique position in Europe of being able to give stimulatory budgets rather than looking at cutbacks and austerity. Those industries that it's got at the moment, is that an recipe for long-term economic health? Or is this a short-term windfall that needs to be taken account because those companies can move around the globe as they choose?
Well, they kind of deed, but such as the level of success they've attained over the decades in Ireland as a stable business environment, no question of an IREX, for example, in this country, strongly from being part of the European Union. So they have become so embedded here.
that I think it's unlikely there would be any short-term exodus. I would be concerned for the pharmaceutical industry if Donald Trump imposes tariffs because Ireland exports massive quantities of pharmaceutical products to the United States. That industry could be hit, but don't forget pharmaceuticals have a huge sunk cost. Make pharmaceuticals unique very, very high-level plant to do that. So they've invested tens of billion
millions in plant machinery in Ireland. So even with the tariffs, I don't think it would lead to an exodus, but it would be a very worrying thing for Ireland if Donald Trump puts taxes in poor tariffs on everything that comes into the United States. So that's a big near-term risk for us.
Connor, I mentioned some of those optimistic offers in this election. Those something that, you know, from a UK perspective, I'm sure Rachel Reeves is very jealous of. She'd love to be able to sort of offer those things. Is that optimism being felt by voters, necessarily? To a certain extent, yes. From, you know, I'm living in Oxford, and so I'm kind of looking at it from afar, but I think that there is an acknowledgement that Ireland is doing very well economically compared to
maybe the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, but there is also a couple of hot topic issues that tend to frustrate voters quite significantly. So the two sort of headlines issues tend to be housing and health care. And these are the issues that Sinn Fein have been very successful at mobilizing people.
and mobilizing frustration around. So this is something that many people would argue is driving a lot of the support that Sinn Fein are getting, which is very interesting and distinct from what has typically driven support for Sinn Fein in the past. So in the passion thing, we're very associated with the national question and constitutional politics and the status of Northern Ireland, and whereas now they have this new cohort of voters that are frustrated at some of the economic issues that are playing out in the Republic of Ireland.
What are the different visions of the future that these parties are providing? And particularly with those two main parties. Shinfane, obviously, accuses them of being very, very similar. Are they offering different visions for the future at the moment? No, it's remarkable how similar. Ireland, like many other countries with a proportional representation voting system, has seen a big fragmentation of the vote.
But we've actually haven't seen that much of a divergence on policy. So the big, you know, Sinn Fein has moved to the center as it's as it hoped it could go into government. So it's much less radical on economic policy matters than it used to be.
So there isn't much of a difference between the big parties, and I'd also say there isn't much of a vision kind of thing, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The focus of this campaign has been very much on doling out the record tax receipts that the booming economy is bringing in. So more about buying voters, and votes if you want, rather than giving any grand vision. Connor, is that something you agree with?
Yes, Sinn Fein have definitely moderated on economic questions over the last couple of decades as the party has sort of professionalized, normalized, and moved out of the period of the troubles in Northern Ireland. And as they've gotten closer to government in Dublin, they have opened themselves up to the idea of sort of continuing Ireland's general macro economic model. So they would argue for slightly higher levels of taxation in certain areas. They'd want to go further and probably use the state more in terms of things like housing.
But in terms of Ireland's general approach to multinational companies and foreign direct investment and the kind of macroeconomic model, you can find are basically promising a continuation of what Finifal and Finigale have been doing for the last couple of decades.
It's interesting because around the world we've seen this big incumbent curse with sort of almost every election that the people in power then get pushed out of power by the people who are promising change. And yet you're both telling me that all of the parties are offering a continuation of the current situation, which seems surprising when they've been so many concerns around housing and health and immigration in recent months. Do you find that surprising?
Well, I think the difference is Ireland's increase in consumer prices has been almost identical to the UK's. And in fact, it's remarkable around Western Europe that the jump in prices over the past three years has been very, very similar, about 20%, the price level has risen. Now, for countries that are sort of
you know, stagnating, a 20% increase in the price level really hammers people. So everyone is affected by inflation and inflation is deeply unpopular. So I think the argument that the anti-encompensive trend globally is attributable to inflation, the big burst of inflation over the past three years, is a strong case. The difference with Ireland is government has been in an position to give all sorts of handouts
to ease the pain of that inflation and are promising a lot more handouts. So that makes the sort of dynamic in this election difference. As I say, most countries in Europe are dealing with cutbacks and austerity type government budgets. Governments here are able to promise on the basis that good times continue to help people to increase the size of the state to do more and more.
but kind of though, I mean, you might have less of a pressure on inflation, but you still have a housing issue, rents being particularly high, these issues that do cut through to voters, aren't they?
They are issues that cut sort of voters. And I think on the housing issue, Sinn Fein probably performed quite well and voters recognize that they are the sort of party that put housing at the forefront of their policy offering. They're politically Sinn Fein are in an interesting position as a party of opposition. So the first thing to note, which in vain is that they're a cross-border political party. So they are in government in Northern Ireland. And that doesn't always cut through into Southern politics. But it is worth noting that they have government ministers and have been empowered off and on in Northern Ireland for quite a number of years.
The other thing is that because they did so well in the last general election, and because they've moved closer to phenophyll and phenagal on things like economics, but also on things like Ireland's handling of the sort of migration crisis and migration issues, there's an argument that's been put forward that a lot of voters associate them as sort of a party of government, even though they're not in government yet, and that if there is this sort of anti-establishment backlash,
that you're talking about, that they might not benefit from it in the same way that they might have done a couple of years ago when voters associated them more with change, and that they might have lost some of that sort of change association that they previously had. When you're no longer the outsider, you've got to take on some of the responsibility. I want to change tech for a moment and talk about a united island, because before this election, there seemed to be a significant intervention from Leo Veradka, the Feregale politician, who served as TSOC between 2017 and 2020, and then 2022 to 2024.
In September, he said that a united island should be an objective, not just an aspiration for whoever is in charge after the next general election. Connor, does it seem like that conversation over a united island has changed in recent years? Yeah, and the big thing that has changed the conversation is Brexit, is the 2016 referendum and the decision for the UK to leave the European Union. That undoubtedly raised the salience of the border in Irish politics once again. And since that period, it's now eight years on since the referendum,
There's been a clear dividing line between Sinn Fein, who are advocating for concrete steps towards unification, so citizens' assemblies to be organized to flesh out the constitutional future of Ireland, calling on the Irish Parliament, the Arachts, and the Irish government to do things like set up a dedicated ministry of unification affairs, or to have a senior minister, or even a senior minister,
looking at these sorts of questions and to start sort of concrete plans towards a unification referendum in the next couple of years. The uniformed vinaigail are much more cautious on that front. They don't think that unification is a sort of immediate prospect and they're more focused on sort of delivering the promise of the Good Friday Agreement, which is closer relations north and south, east and west between Ireland and Great Britain and between the government in the south and the executive in the north.
It's interesting because Sinn Fein are not alone in calling for concrete steps towards unification. That's probably a change that's happened slowly since 2016. In Northern Ireland, the other nationalist part of the SDLP are increasingly talking about the need to prepare for a unification referendum.
And you do have politicians in the republic, including the override car, that have sort of stuck their head above the paraffit a little bit and said that something needs to happen on this front. In Veracris case, it's interesting that he wasn't his forefront in his opinions around this while he was Tisha. So it's something he may be as comfortable saying out of office, but wasn't comfortable saying in office. And in any case,
The Brexit referendum definitely raised the salience of the question of a United Ireland and might have perhaps brought it on to the political agenda in a way that it wouldn't have been previously. But there isn't an immediate prospect of a border poll in the next couple of years. So if Sinn Fein do enter government, they're going to be under a lot of pressure to sort of show that they're taking those concrete steps towards unification against the reality on the ground in Northern Ireland that at the moment polls and election results suggest that
People would vote for the maintenance of the union if there was a border pool tomorrow. I mean, we've talked about the economy in the south booming and yet the economy in the north is not booming. It's the poorest region of the UK. How does that impact the conversation here in the sort of extreme differences that we're seeing between the two nations?
I think it's important for British viewers to understand that southern viewers really don't understand Northern Irish politics. They don't watch Northern Ireland shows. They don't read Northern Irish newspapers. They are incredibly ignorant about Northern Ireland, despite us sharing in Ireland and being so close together. It's a small island of 7 billion people. So voters down in the South really don't pay attention to Northern Irish issues. As Commerce says previously, Sinn Fein have been in government for decades now in Northern Ireland.
and you will rarely get political journals making any comparison between its record in government and in Northern Ireland and what it aspires or promises to do down south simply because it's not nobody's paying attention to it. Do you agree with that connet? From an outsider's perspective that seems quite surprising that there wouldn't be this comparison to you are in government over the border and this is your record there.
Yeah, I live in England and I find it remarkable how little Northern Ireland features on the news in terms of coverage of British politics, but I would say that it's maybe not to the same extent, but it is definitely true that a Southern audience doesn't pay attention, and the Southern electorate doesn't pay attention to what's going on in Northern Ireland, and even though it's only a couple of miles up the road.
In terms of the sort of economics of the constitutional debate, it is interesting that in the past Northern Ireland would have been seen as performing better than the Republic of Ireland and for that the Irish Free State. And the debate around unification would have been that Northern Ireland was better off as part of this larger entity of the United Kingdom. Brexit has slightly shifted that now because the Republic of Ireland is doing very well economically and is part of the larger economic union of the
European Union. So if there is a debate around unification that grows over the next couple of years, it will not just be about Northern Ireland joining the Republic of Ireland that's doing well economically, but it will be about returning Northern Ireland to the European Union. And that's a key change that Brexit introduced. Could I just raise something else in terms of that? Northern Ireland is in NATO. The Republic is the only North Atlantic country from Canada to Norway, Iceland, Portugal that is not in NATO.
And I've heard Unionists saying that they don't want to be taken out of NATO if there was a United Ireland, because I say I don't think it's going to happen in my lifetime. But that issue about NATO and NATO membership would arise in the event of a discussion around reunification. And I just make the point that in the current debate around politics, despite the transformed security situation in Europe with Russia's invasion,
of Ukraine and the rearming of the rest of Europe. This is not getting any discussion. Ireland is basically undefended. We're not in NATO. We spend very little on our defence forces. None of the political parties are saying we need to change our posture and be able to defend ourselves better. It's simply we're living in a sort of strategic dream where we haven't woken up to the transformed security situation in Europe and the threats we face.
So, you know, that's another risk for us. We're unprotected and, you know, there was even just yesterday Russian ships in the Irish Sea around cables and we also know the cables in the Baltics were cut and there's suspicious hybrid stuff going on. Ireland's very vulnerable to that. Very, very vulnerable. Roughly how much of its GDP does Ireland spend on defence?
Okay, it's officially about 0.3%, which if you recall, the NATO percentages is at least 2%, which most countries are moving towards now. But Ireland's GDP figures are inflated by the way the multinational corporations work here. So I think that understates, but it's still, even if we account for that, it's still tiny, 1%, less than 1% of GDP. So we're one of the smallest defense spenders in the world probably.
My thanks to Dan O'Brien and Connor Kelly, as well as Finn McRedmond and Owen O'Malley. Remember, if you enjoy our podcasts, make sure you get the latest episodes as soon as they're released by hitting the follow button, or give us a review so others can discover us too. This has been Insight from the New Statesman, the politics team will be back on Thursday with all the latest from Westminster. This programme was produced by Catherine Hughes.
