As Europe was ravaged by austerity policies in the past decade, numerous left-wing insurgencies emerged to challenge for government: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise, and, from 2015 to 2019, the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. Each came from outside the traditional center-left and learned, to some degree, from the others. They offered moments of hope for the international left in a time of deep social crisis.

By 2020, it seemed those moments had passed. The much-vaunted “new” parties and movements of Europe’s post-2008 landscape had been defeated, and the forces of the status quo had returned with a vengeance. But in the Irish general election, a far older movement made a breakthrough on more or less the same terms. Sinn Féin, which before the crash had been a party of 6–7 percent, rose to a historic 24.5 percent — and, in the process, defeated the two right-wing parties that had dominated Irish politics since the foundation of the southern state.

North of the border, Sinn Féin had been growing steadily. In 2003, it eclipsed the Social Democratic and Labour Party as the leading nationalist party, and by 2007, Martin McGuinness was elected deputy first minister of Northern Ireland. But its progress in the south was slower. It wasn’t until 2014’s European election, around the time of the mass movement against water charges, that it threatened leading parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael for the first time. This cemented its position as the leading party of the Left and the fight against austerity in the southern Irish state.