Celtic Myths

For some media commentators, the real mystery is not the decline in support for Sinn Féin, but rather the fact that so many people were inclined to vote for the party in the first place. After years of self-congratulatory hype about the “Celtic Comeback,” the Irish political establishment could scarcely believe it when Sinn Féin won the biggest vote share in 2020. Writing later that year, the economist Terry McDonough explained why sustained economic growth had not dispelled a mood of popular disaffection with the status quo:

Employment and working conditions for younger workers have not recovered from the financial crisis. Unemployment for those under thirty-five is higher in 2019 than it was in 2006. This is despite the fact that labor force participation rates for those under thirty-five are down substantially. Young people are also more likely to be in some form of precarious employment. About 30 percent of workers under thirty worked part-time in 2019, almost twice the percentage in 2006. More than one in four workers under thirty are on temporary contracts.

Average weekly wages since the financial crisis have risen by less than 8 percent in real terms, while average rents were 36 percent higher over the same period (and 44 percent higher in Dublin). The young are disproportionately renters and few young workers make enough to afford even a modest mortgage in the Irish housing market. Those without a permanent contract are unlikely to qualify for any mortgage. It’s not surprising, then, that nearly half of all twenty-five- to twenty-nine-year-olds lived with their parents in 2017.

As Aidan Regan has noted, the headline figures for GDP per capita that Irish governments have trumpeted so proudly tell us very little about living standards for their citizens:

A more accurate measure is Actual Individual Consumption (AIC) per person. This adjusts for local purchasing power. It takes into account how far money travels in Ireland. In 2022, and using this measure of prosperity, Ireland scores 13 percent below the EU average. We tumble from 2nd to 15th in the EU27 class. Ireland even scores lower than Romania.

This observation has understandably caused a bit of bewilderment. Does it mean that incomes, wages and job opportunities are better in Romania than Ireland? No. But it does suggest that, adjusted for local purchasing power, money travels further in Romania. The main reason why Ireland tumbles down the AIC rankings is because it is so damn expensive. Prices in Ireland are 42 percent above the EU average, whereas they are 54 percent below the EU average in Romania.

This wider context explains why Sinn Féin has been able to win support on the basis of a social democratic program. Housing in particular has been a key factor generating discontent among those locked out of homeownership by soaring prices and trapped in a private rental sector where eviction is an ever-present threat.

We should not exaggerate the radicalism of Sinn Féin’s agenda, as some of the party’s opponents tend to do. Its goal is to carry out reforms within the framework of a capitalist economy. Of course, we could say the same about every party or alliance that has come within shouting distance of exercising power in Europe over the last decade, from Syriza in Greece to the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership or the French Nouveau Front Populaire created earlier this year. But Sinn Féin’s would-be program for government is less ambitious than the election platforms that the Left has put forward in Britain and France.

Its most important pledges are to address the housing crisis by delivering 300,000 new homes in five years, with a mixture of public and private accommodation, and to begin constructing a single-tier national health service in place of the existing hybrid structure. In itself, this would be a far-reaching blueprint for reform in a state that has never elected a social democratic government.

Partners for Power

If Sinn Féin had not suffered any attrition in the polls over the last year, there would still have been no guarantee that it could take the helm after the next election. The last time Ireland had a single-party government was in the 1980s: every administration since then has been a coalition of one kind or another. That was the scenario confronting Sinn Féin, unless it could pull off an electoral miracle.

Broadly speaking, there were two options for Sinn Féin to choose between. One was to form a government of the Left, if the numbers allowed for it. On paper, this seemed like a feasible goal. There were nearly seventy left-of-center TDs elected in 2020, using the term in the broadest possible sense. With eighty-four seats needed for a majority, it would not require a colossal swing to make a progressive coalition possible.

In practice, things were much less straightforward than these figures might suggest, as a closer look at the forces comprising the Irish left will indicate. On the one hand, we have those who occupy a more radical position than Sinn Féin on the political spectrum: chiefly two Trotskyist groups, People Before Profit and Solidarity, along with a few independent TDs like Joan Collins and Thomas Pringle.

People Before Profit has declared its willingness to discuss the formation of a left government that would exclude Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. In this scenario, socialist TDs would most likely prefer to back a Sinn Féin–led coalition from the outside instead of accepting ministerial positions, even if those positions were on offer. They would seek to use their (relatively modest) leverage to shift the government’s program further to the left.

The same can certainly not be said of the Labour Party or the Greens. These parties have taken turns in office for all but four years since 2007 as junior partners of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, or both. Labour and Green politicians were happy to carry out austerity programs in the wake of the 2008 crash and betray no impatience to break the conservative mold of Irish politics. They are always receptive to sermons from media commentators who tell them it is their duty to prop up the right-wing parties in government (all in the name of the national interest, of course).

At best, Labour and the Greens would be there to make up the numbers in a progressive alliance. At worst, they would be an outright liability — and a convenient pressure point for those who wanted to obstruct the new government’s policy agenda. That leaves the Social Democrats, a group formed after the Great Recession by two defectors from the Labour Party. The majority of the party’s current TDs, including its leader, Holly Cairns, were first elected to the Dáil in 2020.

In terms of formal ideology, there is not much to separate the Social Democrats from Labour or the Greens. But the fact that the party has taken shape amid the turbulence of the last fifteen years seems to have reduced its willingness to play the role of footstool for the conservative establishment. This is a source of considerable irritation for members of the Irish commentariat, who would like the Social Democrats to merge or ally with Labour so they can be properly house-trained.

If parliamentary arithmetic made it impossible to put together a left-wing government of any variety, the other course available to Sinn Féin would be to form an alliance with one of the center-right parties. Of course, that would only be on the agenda if either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil was willing to break bread with Sinn Féin.

Fianna Fáil’s average polling score in 2023 was 18.5 percent — a little over half the equivalent figure for Sinn Féin. In terms of narrow political advantage, there would have been no compelling reason for Fianna Fáil to swap its current arrangement as an equal partner with Fine Gael for a subordinate relationship with Sinn Féin. But the main obstacles to such a deal lay beyond the parliamentary field in the realm of class power.

Barbarians at the Gates

After its surprising electoral breakthrough in 2020, Sinn Féin launched a diplomatic offensive to reassure the business interests that do not have to rely on votes to influence the political process. The party leader, Mary Lou McDonald, and its finance spokesman, Pearse Doherty, held a series of meetings with company executives and lobbying groups to explain that they had no desire to undermine the current economic model, which relies heavily on foreign direct investment (FDI), in particular from US companies.

As McDonald assured the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland in 2023: “Winning FDI and strengthening our business relationship with the US will continue as a key component of Ireland’s economic strategy.” A public relations executive who arranged some of the meetings with corporate figures told Joe Brennan of the Irish Times that the effort was starting to bear fruit for Sinn Féin: “Many would initially have feared that these guys were the barbarians at the gates. But the feedback is that they are much more pragmatic behind closed doors than they appear in public, even if we are not going to see any let up on populist rhetoric come the next election.”

Another source familiar with the ongoing dialogue informed Brennan that some companies operating on Irish soil were more receptive to Sinn Féin’s message than others:

US multinational corporates generally aren’t political outside their own countries and work with regime changes all the time overseas. But Irish SME-land is very different. It’s quite political, and people would have strong ideological views. Larger corporates are more about the policy; Irish SMEs are more about ideology. I’m not sure they’ve been won over yet.

“SME” is an acronym for small and medium enterprises — those with fewer than 250 employees and an annual turnover below €50 million. While these firms may look puny in comparison with Google or Facebook, both of which have their European headquarters in Ireland’s tech quarter, collectively, they draw a lot of water. They also have more to lose than the US giants if a progressive government manages to implement a successful reform program.

Sinn Féin has ruled out interfering with Ireland’s corporation tax regime, and the party gave one influential wealth management firm the impression that its economic agenda placed it closer to Tony Blair than Jeremy Corbyn. But there are some areas in which Sinn Féin would simply have to make a serious effort to carry out reforms, or else face the certainty of defeat at the next election. The prime example is the housing crisis.

This helps explain why the dwellers of SME-land would be more hostile to the party than those inhabiting FDI-land. It’s not simply a question of the former being more ideological — they are also much more deeply invested in the current housing system. US tech firms might have no particular interest in obstructing policies that would increase the supply of public housing or strengthen the rights of tenants; after all, the soaring cost of accommodation has made it harder for them to recruit qualified workers.

The same can certainly not be said of domestic capitalist forces, which have a major stake in property and its various spin-offs. The point also applies to foreign-owned vulture funds that have been buying up houses and apartments to rent. It is not a question of domestic versus foreign capital as such; the main issue is what sectors they derive their profits from.

In his 2018 book Money, Conor McCabe gave an excellent summary of the relevant actors and their entrenched positions within the Irish state:

We are not just dealing with the relationship between property speculators and political parties; we are also talking about banks, land-hoarders, estate agents, insurance companies, the Department of Finance, the Central Bank, the Revenue Commissioners, tax lawyers, the Housing Agency, Real Estate Investment Trusts (Reits), the Department of the Taoiseach, and the Department of Housing and Local Government. . . . These economic class interests have an institutional form; they are supported and maintained by the state apparatus and by the way the state operates. They are deeply embedded in our legal and taxation systems, both of which proritise the interests of speculators and financiers over the common good. They are imbedded throughout our banks as well as in the regulators and the policy units of our government departments.

Writing before the prospect of a Sinn Féin–led government had crystallized, McCabe warned that any serious reform of housing would encounter strong resistance:

There has been in Ireland a forty-year move to shut down social housing, and the class that has benefited from this will not allow any crisis for ordinary people to reverse the trend. In fact, the selling-off of our public housing stock, the almost complete privatisation of the rental sector, and the creation of the myth that home ownership “is in our DNA” has been one of the great ideological successes of that class. They are not going to give that up for anyone.

This was the most significant barrier to the formation of a stable coalition between Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil (or Fine Gael for that matter). Even if Sinn Féin kept its reforming ambitions strictly limited to the field of housing, it would clash with social interests that have strong organic connections to the conservative parties. We should keep this in mind when we look at how those parties have dealt with the question of immigration and the emergence of a far-right protest movement over the past two years.

Siren Calls

North of the Irish border, the Belfast Telegraph commissioned a poll this summer on attitudes to immigration, shortly after the riots that spread across the Irish Sea from British towns and cities. There was a stark divergence between nationalists and unionists on the question: just 13 percent of nationalists believe that the current level of immigration is too high, compared with 82 percent of unionists.

This does not mean that Irish nationalists are blissfully immune to racism or xenophobia. In the context of Northern Irish politics, there is currently a strong association between anti-immigrant sentiment and British nationalism, which helps explain why popular opinion would bifurcate along communal lines. But the poll serves as a useful reminder that hostility to immigration is not simply a function of how many people are arriving in the country at any given time. It requires the intervention of political forces and ideologies to present immigrants as an economic or even civilizational threat.

Between 2013 and 2023, Ireland’s level of population growth — 14.4 percent — was the third-highest in the EU, behind Malta and Luxembourg. From 2021 onward, there was a significant uptick in immigration from outside the EU, with a little under 76,000 people arriving in 2023. (That is still less than 1.5 percent of the state’s population.) This was a period during which approximately 100,000 Ukrainian refugees came to Ireland after the Russian invasion.

These statistics provide an opening for political agitators who want to blame immigrants for the housing crisis, brandishing the slogan “Ireland Is Full.” In reality, the problem lies with the structure of the property market and the profit margins deriving from it. But Ireland’s far-right activists certainly have no desire to see the kind of effective reforms in this field that would transform the social conditions upon which they feed.

The forces challenging the political mainstream from the right fall into three broad camps. First of all, we have a loose cohort of independent TDs and councillors with a right-wing profile, many of whom came together under the banner of Independent Ireland for the local and European elections. Secondly, there are two established far-right groups: the Irish Freedom Party, whose leader, Hermann Kelly, once worked as a press officer for Nigel Farage in Britain, and the overtly neofascist National Party, currently divided into two hostile factions, both of which lay claim to the party’s brand and assets. The third element consists of far-right influencers who use social media channels to promote racist propaganda and disinformation.

This is a broad political milieu rather than a structured movement, and the lines of division can sometimes be hazy. Its various components have yet to achieve the sort of electoral breakthrough we have seen for the far right in other European countries. But they have already had a clear impact on the terms of political debate.

The social media influencers played an important role in publicizing the call for protests against emergency accommodation for asylum seekers whose claims were being processed. The protests began in Dublin’s north inner city toward the end of 2022 and quickly spread to other parts of the country. Far-right propaganda networks were awash with lurid claims that refugees were responsible for an upsurge of crime. Meanwhile, the agitational wave attracted enthusiastic support and participation from hardened members of the Irish criminal underworld.

The response of Ireland’s police force, the Gardaí, was to give the protesters free rein as they blocked roads and other public spaces. The Garda commissioner Drew Harris explained that this was a matter of policy and claimed that it was a clever stratagem to avoid giving the far right what they wanted: “Confrontation, which plays into their hands, is a trap we’re not falling into.”

In November 2023, several prominent far-right activists seized upon a ghastly incident in Dublin’s city center where a number of children were stabbed in broad daylight; the alleged perpetrator, a man who came to Ireland from Algeria in 2003 and later received Irish citizenship, is still awaiting trial. Widely circulated posts on social media, which contained false information about the stabbing, urged people to mobilize near the scene of the crime. By 7:30 p.m., a full-scale riot was in progress on one of Dublin’s main thoroughfares, with buses and trams set on fire, attracting the attention of the international media (including the likes of Tucker Carlson, who could scarcely conceal his state of excitement).

Harris subsequently insisted that “no one could have anticipated” the outbreak of violence. This was a claim that Cianan Brennan of the Irish Examiner curtly dismissed as he set out the timeline of the disturbances:

To reporters on the scene, it was clear there was major trouble afoot from just after 6pm, and the siren call had been out on social media since 2.30pm. Yet there were hardly any Gardaí to be seen. Where were they? They can’t claim to have been taken by surprise; the atmosphere at the scene had been nasty for hours.

A Civil Matter

One might have expected the soft-touch policing approach to wind down after the Dublin riot, but there was little sign of that happening. The Sunday Times quoted a landlord who had made one of their properties available to house refugees as part of a government scheme:

You would have to be off your head to lease a building to the International Protection Accommodation Services agency. The government won’t protect you. We have provided Gardaí with CCTV footage of unmasked people smashing the windows of our building. When workmen tried to repair the damage, they got harassed. The Gardaí said it’s a civil matter when we sought help.

The property owner in this case felt obliged to speak off the record. Such reticence was hardly surprising, with a wave of arson attacks now targeting buildings in various parts of the country, sometimes on the basis of false rumors that refugees were going to be housed there.

Needless to say, the idea that smashing windows and harassing workers would qualify as a “civil matter” is arrant nonsense, in Ireland as much as anywhere else. If such incidents took place in the course of a mobilization against energy-guzzling data centers, for example, the response of the Irish state would be anything but civil.

Over the past two decades, faced with campaigns in which socialists, republicans, or environmentalists played a leading role, the Gardaí and the Irish prosecution service have always been willing to stretch the law in order to facilitate a clampdown — hurling people into ditches when they blocked roads in Mayo so as to avoid having to make arrests, or bringing absurd and draconian charges of false imprisonment against the organizers of a sit-down protest. When it comes to the far right, on the other hand, they are conspicuously reluctant to enforce the law in the most rudimentary fashion.

We need not posit the existence of an overarching plan decided upon at the highest levels to explain what we have witnessed over the past two years. Several overlapping forms of malign indifference and neglect on the part of the government, the police, and other public bodies would account for the pattern of events just as well.

So far as the government parties are concerned, the rise of the far right has been a gift that keeps giving, creating a dynamic that rewards them for their own failings. The more chaotic their handling of immigration appears to be, the higher the issue rises on the political agenda, at the expense of the social concerns upon which Sinn Féin and other critics of the status quo have built their support.

Ireland’s far-right movement concentrates its fire on Sinn Féin and the radical left rather than the politicians who are actually in power, denouncing these political forces as traitors in the service of a globalist cabal. In reality, their own subculture is a particularly craven off-shoot of Anglo-American cultural imperialism. Local far-right ideologues have borrowed the Great Replacement conspiracy theory wholesale from their foreign counterparts, while using the term “Plantation” — a reference to British colonial settlement during the seventeenth century — to make it sound more authentically Irish. One cannot help thinking of the McDonald’s franchises in Dublin and Cork that sell green milkshakes on St Patrick’s Day every year.

The far right in Britain and the United States has enthusiastically latched on to the Irish movement and boosted its messaging on social media. At one point, two-thirds of all posts on Twitter/X using the phrase #IrelandBelongsToTheIrish came from British and American accounts. This interest in Irish affairs on Elon Musk’s platform reached its nadir in May of this year with a typically foolish exchange between Musk and one of his ideological confederates:

IAN MILES CHEONG: Ireland got big mad with the English for coming in some decades ago but now their government invites Africans by the tens of thousands to fill up all the small towns and replace the locals. How does that make sense?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. The Irish Republic [sic] Army was so hardcore, but now they’re as scary as a plush toy.

Musk’s purported admiration for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in previous years is difficult to credit. When he was a child in apartheid South Africa, members of the IRA traveled to the country at the request of uMkhonto weSizwe to carry out reconnaissance for the bombing of a Sasol oil refinery. We do not have any record of what Musk now thinks about this operation, but it is safe to assume that he would not use the word “hardcore” to describe it.

This brings us to a notable point about Ireland’s far-right militants. If these individuals had wanted to show us how virile and super-patriotic they were, they always had the opportunity to join republican groups involved in carrying out attacks on members of the British security forces in the North. Although those attacks have been much less frequent since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, they have never stopped altogether. But that form of activity would have been too dangerous, it seems, and too much like hard work — much better to display your machismo by screaming abuse at women and children.

On the other hand, the Irish far right seems entirely comfortable with forms of British nationalism that are traditionally associated with virulent anti-Irish chauvinism. We have already noted the ties between Hermann Kelly and Nigel Farage, who refers affectionately to his former employee as “a big strong strapping Paddy.” Some of those involved in organizing protests against immigrants in Dublin traveled to Belfast this summer to march alongside (and socialize with) loyalist paramilitaries involved in the sectarian murder of Catholics.

Grand Gestures

Sinn Féin’s initial response to the protests was to keep its head down and say very little, seemingly in the hope that it would all blow over. But there was a clear shift in the party’s rhetoric from the end of 2023, with Mary Lou McDonald declaring that “there has to be space for people to ask questions” about immigration. A careful, well-sourced article on Sinn Féin’s immigration policy in January this year carried a double-edged headline: “The Right Turn?”

The article quoted one party activist who described the nature of Sinn Féin’s internal discussions on the subject:

The top table were feeling pressure from their core voters on immigration. There were talks about what we were going to do, because a lot of our core voters were turning on this issue. We were losing ground in the polls, so it was felt among some party members that if they made a grand gesture on immigration, it would bring back people who aren’t too happy about our stance on immigration to begin with. Some of us think it might have a counter effect though.

Sinn Féin election leaflets in June contained the following section:

The government has no plan for immigration. Their approach has been shambolic. Sinn Féin is opposed to open borders — Ireland like every other country must have control over its borders. Sinn Féin will ensure a rules-based system that is fair, efficient and enforced with proper communication with communities.

Since the leaflet did not say what aspect of the government’s approach was “shambolic,” one could read it as suggesting that immigration levels were simply too high.

The party’s stated opposition to “open borders” was the same position it had expressed in the 2020 general election manifesto. In the lexicon of the far right, however, the phrase “open borders” does not refer to a genuinely open regime where anyone can live and work where they please — it is their usual way of describing the status quo, or indeed any situation where levels of immigration are significantly higher than zero. Above all, there was no explicit challenge from Sinn Féin to the premise that immigrants are causing the housing crisis, along with many other social problems for which they have been scapegoated.

While we should not exaggerate the ability of one party to shift the focus of public debate, it is well worth comparing Sinn Féin’s approach with the platform of the Nouveau Front Populaire in France. The manifesto of the left-wing alliance promised to roll back Emmanuel Macron’s restrictive immigration laws and grant asylum seekers the right to work. It also pledged to create “safe and legal” pathways for immigration and to broaden access to French nationality, along with other measures that would liberalize the current system.

Nobody could argue that the French left has an easier task than Sinn Féin on this political battleground — it faces an established far-right party with a serious prospect of taking power, not to mention a centrist bloc grouped around Macron that is engaged in a race to the bottom with Marine Le Pen over questions of race and identity. Yet its combined forces still managed to stake out a braver position and won the largest number of seats in the French parliament this summer. Sinn Féin’s approach to date has more in common with the European center-left parties that have drifted further and further to the right over immigration.

This speaks to a wider point about Sinn Féin’s modus operandi. Although it was once the political wing of a movement engaged in a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the British state, the party’s current style of politics tends to be rather cautious, passively responding to external developments instead of seeking to shape them. Sinn Féin kept its distance from the two biggest social movements that emerged in the post-crisis decade, the campaign against water charges and the struggle for abortion rights, leaving others to make the political running.

After a disappointing election result in 2016, the party leadership changed its policy on coalition so that it could enter government as a junior partner of Fianna Fáil. It was Fianna Fáil that rejected this overture, inadvertently clearing the way for Sinn Féin to make big gains in 2020. Over the last two years, with right-wing campaigners now grasping the banner of street politics and working to shift the balance of forces, Sinn Féin has once again been strikingly passive.

The sense that Sinn Féin had to present itself as a government-in-waiting no doubt reinforced this tendency to avoid taking risks. After the June elections, one Sinn Féin councillor, John Hearne from Waterford, publicly criticized the leadership for “doing a lap on the pitch” as if they had already taken power. Hearne urged his party to “get back to basics . . . back to our republican ethos” instead of “trying to be all things to all people” and “trying to be new Fianna Fáil.”

In the wake of the election setback, Sinn Féin published a new document on the system for handling claims to refugee status. It combined words of sympathy for those who have been “forced from their countries by war, famine, escalating climate crisis and persistent inequality” with a call for “greater following up on deportation orders” and “the partial designation of some countries as safe.” The party did not give any examples of countries it deemed to be “partially safe,” although it suggested that Ukraine might belong in this category by 2026 (the point at which the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive for Ukrainian refugees is due to expire).

Searching for Scapegoats

There can be little doubt that Sinn Féin’s polling decline is linked to the focus on immigration in public debate over the last eighteen months. Even if we assume that some of the party’s support at its high point in 2022 and 2023 was relatively soft and unreliable, there have been no other developments during this period that would account for such a significant drop.

A challenge like this can affect a political party in several different ways. Sinn Féin may have lost support in both directions at once, with some of its new supporters alienated by its right turn over immigration, while others felt that the turn didn’t go far enough. The focus on immigration levels has also diverted people’s attention from the social problems that underpinned the rise of Sinn Féin — problems that the government has done nothing to address in the meantime.

On top of this, the violence stoked up by anti-immigration zealots may have assisted the government parties by enabling them to strike a pose as the stern guardians of public order. This is a role that Fine Gael in particular likes to play. The history of the republican movement makes it very difficult for Sinn Féin to compete on this political terrain, and an attempt by McDonald to do so after the Dublin riot quickly backfired.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil now see a clear path toward reelection, even if that means they have to persist with their grand-coalition deal for another five years. They may even find a new coalition partner emerging from the right-wing fringe. Openly far-right elements achieved marginal gains in the local elections, with five councillors elected out of 949 across the country (including three out of sixty-three on Dublin City Council). They will struggle to win seats in a national election and would probably be too extreme to form part of a governing alliance in any case. But a more respectable force could well make itself available.

Independent Ireland ran two high-profile candidates in the European election and now has a seat for the Midlands–North West constituency. The successful candidate, Ciaran Mullooly, projected a softer image than Niall Boylan, his running mate in Dublin, which helped him to get over the line. Mullooly subsequently decided to join the liberal Renew group of MEPs instead of the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists, which generated a mini-crisis for the new party. If Independent Ireland holds together and develops a more coherent platform, it has a much better chance of establishing a foothold in national politics than groups that position themselves further to the right.

This would be a welcome development for Fine Gael, which has found itself out of step with its bigger partners in the European People’s Party (EPP) as mainstream conservatives in countries like Germany take up ideas from the far right on immigration and environmental questions. The EPP president, Manfred Weber, was reportedly infuriated when Fine Gael MEPs voted to support a Nature Restoration law that he was determined to block. The Fine Gael leadership would no doubt be very happy to see Irish politics shift to the right in a way that makes it easier for them to follow their European allies down this path.

Simon Harris, who took over from Leo Varadkar as Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach earlier this year, made his intentions absolutely clear when he used a recent interview with the Sunday Times to propagate false claims about the relationship between homelessness and the number of people making asylum claims. When you have no plan to address the housing crisis, other than to offer more tax breaks and subsidies for private landlords, the search for scapegoats is inevitable. We will soon know how effective these diversionary tactics prove to be at the ballot box.