Book Offer
This will close in 10 seconds
Students of Irish political history may recall the Labour Party’s infamous battle cry of the late 1960s which screamed that ‘the seventies will be socialist’.
As we all know, (fortunately) the 1970s in Ireland weren’t socialist and neither were the 1980s and 90s either. This was a time when Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil still behaved like centre-right parties and generally believed in things like balancing the national books, a small state and social conservatism.
However, all of that changed with the dawn of the 21st century. Ireland now presents the bizarre spectacle of a western democracy where there is near total consensus between all the main political parties on most issues. This involves cross-party support for everything from a big state to extreme liberal social policies.
There is a lot to suggest that Ireland has effectively been a socialist state of sorts for the last quarter century. The great conjuring trick by the Irish left over the same period has been downplaying this and pretending that they are still some marginalised group of ragged trousered philanthropists outside the citadel of power.
Indeed, when this point is raised in debate your average People Before Profit supporter will parrot the line ‘but sure aren’t all the TDs in Dáil Éireann landlords’ as evidence that Ireland is still ruled by the right. But of course, even this is little more than a piece of modern day leftist mythology.
Talking about landlords in the Dáil, the most recent figure is 35 out of 174 TDs or 20% and, interestingly, that figure also includes TDs from Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats. More importantly, over the last decade Irish governments have passed some of the most restrictive rental laws in the world. Such, anyway, is the view of Prof Ronan Lyons of Trinity College and Daft.ie.
If you want evidence of Ireland’s lurch to the left in the 21st century, then look no further than the unfolding disaster that is Ireland’s rental crisis. In 2016, Fine Gael signalled an ideological u-turn with the introduction of rent controls and Rent Pressure Zones.
All the evidence now shows that these attempts by the state to control the rental market have failed utterly. In 2016, there were 319,000 private rental tenancies in Ireland – a decade later that number had fallen to 246,000. Over the same period, the population increased by 13%.
You don’t need a degree in economics to understand what happens when demand increases and supply collapses – rents increase. In the face of even stricter regulations introduced in 2026, there was a further exodus of small time landlords from the market. In Q1 of 2026 alone, a record 7,000 eviction notices were issued.
It is perfectly reasonable to say that these people now facing eviction are the victims of a failed socialist housing policy. For Ireland’s socialist grandees, the demonisation of small time landlords has been a long standing policy objective. However, this same policy has been a disaster for renters.
In a recent Dáil debate, the record number of evictions was seized on by Sinn Féin and the left to attack the government on their woeful performance on housing. But what no one mentioned was that the policies that have failed are ones based around rent controls and RPZs. These are the policies of the left, not the right.
That Dáil debate said a lot not just about housing but also about Irish politics in the 21st century. It highlighted the intellectual and moral cowardice of parties like Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil who now spend more time trying to placate the left than in asserting the founding core principles of their respective parties.
That same debate produced the bizarre spectacle of the left attacking Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil for implementing its failed socialist housing policies.
The Irish left – much like the left everywhere else – has devoted itself to promoting an alluring, utopian vision of a society without borders where everyone is equal. It’s an unreal, even childlike, narrative which now appears to have a particular resonance with Ireland’s college-educated, middle class.
Indeed, when you look close up at the Irish left today what you see, in the main, is a privileged, middle/upper class who use the narrative of disadvantage to advance their own political agenda.
That now describes the demographic voter profile of parties like Labour, the Social Democrats, the Greens and People Before Profit. It’s also the demographic of the Sinn Féin leadership although its working class voter base now appears increasingly at odds with that leadership.
While the Irish left loves to idealise the working class, it seems, increasingly, that it is the actual working class who are the ones questioning its narratives. Accordingly, the left often like to claim that the working class is being manipulated by outside actors such as the far right. Curiously, the same people will never admit that their own middle class support base might well be the ones who are being manipulated.
Yet for all the talk, the Irish left have never been particularly successful electorally. In the most recent 2024 general election, the combined percentage for Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, Labour, Greens and PBP came to just 34% or one in three voters. Remove the Sinn Fein vote – seen by many on the left as not fully committed socialists anyway – and you’re down to a core vote of about 15%.
Either way, that’s a somewhat underwhelming result given the unrelenting promotion of the socialist narrative in Ireland over the last half century. That saw the effective take over of RTÉ current affairs by the Workers’ Party (a group ideologically aligned with the Politburo in Moscow) in the 1970s and 80s. That has continued in modern times with an increasingly overt ideological bias on display by the Irish media on the great social questions of the 21st century.
Today, those efforts by the Irish left at controlling the narrative see endless hours of studio time and acres of newsprint devoted to questions like vote left/transfer left pacts; whether Holly really is the left’s new messiah, or whether Ireland should play a soccer match with Israel in four months’ time. These are fringe leftist obsessions with little interest for the majority of Irish voters.
In the absence of electoral success, the strategy of the Irish left these days appears to focus more on controlling the narrative. The waning influence of the mainstream media has brought its own challenges in this regard. Increasingly, the left’s response is to deploy an ever expanding list of terms such as racism, homophobia, hate speech etc in an attempt to close down debate.
In today’s quasi-socialist Ireland, it’s the parties of the right who implement the policies of the left. It’s not just that they appear to be increasingly under the spell of a socialist narrative, but also that their desire to be in power outweighs any concerns they might have about the ideology of the left. In this way, the so-called right becomes the perpetual fall guy for the failures of the left.
The Irish left now relies more on controlling the narrative than it does on actually winning electoral support for its policies. That’s perhaps the real vulnerability of a movement that has exercised far more power in Ireland over the last quarter century than its electoral support would suggest.
Indeed, it might well be the case that without that controlling narrative, the left in Ireland might be more paper tiger than electoral tiger.
This will close in 10 seconds