Earlier today, Laura asked a pertinent question: Where is the Irish Nigel Farage?
We will stipulate at the beginning that what Laura meant was not that this country needs a carbon copy of Mr. Farage, whose particular brand of ale-swilling, King-adoring, two-world-wars-and-one-world-cup singing English nationalism is unlikely (for better or worse) to go down well in the Irish Republic. Rather, she meant in general that there are no obvious candidates to take public discontent over immigration, housing, law and order, and general Irish Government intertia and turn it into a credible alternative populist political movement that could, like Farage just has in the UK, draw upwards of 20% of the vote.
Except, I submit, that there is one such person: Independent Ireland’s party Chairman, Ken O’Flynn TD.
Last week, Deputy O’Flynn was voted by Oireachtas insiders (apparently a straw poll of cross-party TDs and political staff) as the most impressive political newcomer since the general election. It is an award that has been well-earned. But more on that in a minute.
In her article, Laura makes a point about the Irish electoral system which is objectively true: That proportional representation acts as a disincentive to political unity. You see this on both the left – where the Green Party, Labour, and the Social Democrats manage to be a sort of unholy trinity of one party that believes the same things, divided into three – and on the “right”, where Independent Ireland, Aontu, populist independents and a rag-tag of smaller more hard-line and fringe groups managed to translate about 12% of the votes at the general election into very few seats.
In O’Flynn’s own Cork North Central seat, for example, candidates of the broad populist right (O’Flynn, Aontu’s Finian Toomey, and then-Ireland First leader Derek Blighe) polled a collective 17.5% of all votes cast, essentially a quota. In that case, O’Flynn’s own vote was large enough, and transfers consistent enough, to elect him. But in several other constituencies, such as Dublin North West, a highly competitive combined first preference vote was hopelessly divided between multiple candidates, meaning that slim prospects of a seat died instead of transfer starvation.
The other problem Laura identifies is that because the electoral system encourages factionalism, the various factional groups are subject to perverse incentives. Aontu, for example, spent much of the last election campaign on social media presenting themselves as the only serious option for populist voters, while other campaigns targeted Aontu as watery and weak-willed sell-outs and openly in many cases advised not transferring to them. This dragged all groups into a sort of weird niche side-campaign that restricted all of them from being able to appeal to a wider set of voters.
Back to the question of leadership that Laura asked. She set out a few tests:
The problem for the Irish anti-immigration movement is that they struggle to turn this protest movement into electoral success, first because there is no competent organiser that doesn’t repel the middle ground, and secondly even if there was one the vote gets sliced and diced by the ludicrous voting system of proportional representation with a single transferrable vote….
Also, “Speaking about the party’s by-election victory in Runcorn & Helsby which Reform won by just six votes, Yusuf, smartly dressed in a dark suit and crisp white shirt, says in years gone by the party would have lost. “But the ending was different this time because we have built something quietly in the background, without bigging it up to people, which is supported by real infrastructure and machinery,” he says. “What we have done in the space of ten months is something we’re extremely proud of. One of my jobs as chairman was to professionalise the party. But what does that actually mean? It means turning it into a really formidable election-winning machine and I want to be really clear, we’re just getting started.”
But this is what it takes to run a successful political party – professionalism, organisation, infrastructure and the knowledge that it all must be done while wearing a dark suit and a crisp white shirt and tie. (In all the photographs, it is all suits and ties, not an open neck collar or rolled up sleeves in sight. Praise be to God.)
The bits in bold are really important: A good leader must 1) not repel the middle ground, 2), be an effective organiser and party builder ruthlessly focused on electoral success and 3) be presentable and appealing to voters.
With no disrespect to the only other figure with any qualifications in this area – Aontu’s Peadar Toibin – the only candidate across the broad swathe of Irish populist and discontented opinion who comes close to meeting these qualifications is Deputy O’Flynn.
He is, first and foremost, a gifted and capable communicator who speaks fluently the language of the Irish middle classes whose support is non-negotiable if anybody wants political success in this country. He is capable of going on television and articulating his opposition to widespread immigration, for example, without using the language of street protest and by focusing relentlessly on issues of real difficulty for the Government. This video is a good example:
Second, he is a capable political organiser, having been born, raised, and party to his own family’s long Fianna Fáil dynastic inheritance. Take a look through his Instagram feed and you will find a politician who is rarely at home, and who understands the importance of local issues to the Irish voter. He is as comfortable speaking about the leaky roof of the local GAA club as he is in speaking about national economic strategy, and unlike many on the populist right he genuinely appears to care equally about both.
Third, and this is sort of a summary of points one and two, he understands the importance of presentation, tone, appearance, and normality. He wears well-cut suits with nice ties. If you don’t think this is important, then you should re-consider.
Then there are the ideological points: I have long thought that a major problem for Aontu is that try as you might, it is hard to get a sense that they really care much about the issues that populists find most animating, and that Aontu’s true passions lie elsewhere: In the campaign for the Irish republic to subsume the Northern Irish state, for example, and in their noble commitment to the pro-life cause, which this writer shares. It is very important to Aontu’s sense of identity that they contest Northern Irish elections, for example. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it is not to say that they do not honestly and sincerely seek to represent populists, but it is to say that they are not natural populists. They are natural republicans. Ask an Aontu person if they had to choose between a United Ireland in ten years or solving the Republic’s immigration and housing issues but delaying a United Ireland for another century, and I am fairly sure I know which answer I would get.
O’Flynn, by contrast, is a natural populist, chairman of a party that contains other natural populists like Michael Fitzmaurice and current party leader Michael Collins. But while Collins and Fitzmaurice have a sort of Dublin-voter-unfriendly “mountainy man” image, O’Flynn speaks the language of urban and sub-urban Ireland much more fluently.
I am but a humble scribe and scribbler of sometimes unwanted opinions, and thus this can be discarded, but I would answer Laura’s question by saying that sometimes you have to recognise the talent that is already on the pitch, and back it. It is a lot to ask people like Deputies Collins and Fitzmaurice to recognise this, but for my money O’Flynn is head and shoulders above both of them in terms of raw political talent as a communicator and an ability to appeal to a broader electorate than either of them.
Independent Ireland should make him their party leader, and let him take the wheel. If they do, then I would expect their support to grow substantially. Including at the expense of some of the other populist groups on the right.