There are many people in this country crying out for an alternative political movement. Most of the people in that category are genuinely patriotic, normal people, who just look around at the country in increasing bewilderment, and are crying out for a bit of leadership.
They get some of that leadership, too, from within the political system. Independent TDs and Senators like Carol Nolan, Sharon Keogan, Mattie McGrath, Michael and Danny Healy Rae, Michael Collins, and others, like Aontú have persistently spoken up on the issues that matter to a growing number of people.
But outside of the Dáil, the Irish right is in a bit of a mess.
Surveying the lay of the land in Ireland, we find a country ripe with issues where the present political class is either unable, or, more often, unwilling, to provide representation. If you are concerned about crime, for example, then you will find no major party willing to openly get tough with criminals – because all of them are fully on board with restorative justice and the idea that criminals, in their own special way, are just victims of society.
If you believe immigration levels are reaching an unsustainable point, then not only do you have no party to vote for, but the ones that exist will label you a racist and a bigot.
If you object to the constant laundering of taxpayer funds into the armada of NGOs and watchdog groups, then you have nobody to vote for. If you object to the hate speech bill, and the gradual but inexorable erosion of personal freedoms, ditto. If you thought lockdown went too far, then sorry, there is, yet again, nobody to vote for. If you think perhaps that we are losing the run of ourselves with all this green stuff, and we should not hobble farmers in the name of vague climate goals, then, alas and again, good luck finding a party.
The gap in the Irish political market for a sensible and reasonable alternative to all of these established mantras is enormous. The trouble is, outside of the TDs named above nobody, it seems, wishes to fill it.
The Irish “right”, for want of a better term, is not short of activists. There is energy there, all right. There are any number of facebook groups and Telegram channels full of people loudly sharing their discontent with the Government. But – and since we have no allegiances here at Gript to any party, and we can and will speak freely – these groups are about as effective as a bullock in a field of heifers.
Social media is in many ways a very politically destructive tool. First, in order to get one’s message across to a wide audience, one needs followers. To get followers, one must be distinctive. To be distinctive, one must, of necessity, be loud. Second, it is much easier to become a big fish in a small pond than it is to become a moderately sized fish in the ocean. The net effect of these two facts is that the Irish “far right” has any number of loud voices who are more focused on competing with each other than they are focused on competing with those already in the political system.
And when they compete, they do so by becoming more and more fringe and functionally useless. So it is, for example, that one prominent activist has gone from national journalist and Presidential candidate to a person who hosts endless dreary livestreams on a minor social media site. So it is that, alongside some excellent and detached citizen journalists, we also have endless “youtube” activists parading around the country annoying locals wherever they go. So it is that once respected academics go from questioning lockdown, into rants about medical conspiracies. So it is that we have people sharing false, and obviously false, stories about people dying in tents, just to get themselves some quick clicks and likes and shares, and bugger the facts.
Here’s a secret: Normal people, concerned about the stuff above, are repelled by this sort of thing. Not just uninterested in it: Actively repelled.
Why am I writing this, and, as some would have it, “picking a fight”?
Well, because aside from being the Editor of Gript, I am also a citizen of this country, who, for some godforsaken reason, loves it and wants to see it well governed. But at present, there is no organised alternative political movement that can be supported, in good conscience, other than Peadar Toíbín’s Aontú, which at least tries to construct a serious critique of establishment thought that appeals to a wide audience. And which, at least, is trying to build a serious, national, political movement, with all the challenges that this entails. I might differ from Aontú on many issues – and do – but their efforts, at least, can be respected and taken seriously.
Much of “the right”, though, is anything but serious. I hate to break it to you, but this country, even if it were on fire from one end to another and short of a bucket of water, will never place into power, or even into parliament, a “political party” whose leader’s idea of good PR is to quote Adolf Hitler admiringly. Nobody is going to go back to a “free speech” protest that ends in a rant about freemasons. Voters, looking for a different approach to the one taken by the Irish establishment, are not going to turn to candidates or activists demanding new Nuremburg trials for vaccine manufacturers. The average person in Ireland is not going to take seriously a person yelling at them on Youtube about “the new invasion of Ireland”. They want moderate, sensible, presentable people with tangible, moderate and sensible alternative policies on healthcare, crime, housing, immigration, education, and taxes. They do not want to hear about a masonic conspiracy, or the evils of Pfizer, or how their whole lives are covertly ordered for them by secret meetings at Davos.
None of this – not one single, pitiful element of it – poses any threat to the Irish establishment. If anything, it is a net asset. If the question before the voters is “it’s us, or it’s that lot, the ones who spend their days talking about Klaus Schwaab”, then the establishment will win every time. In a landslide. If poor ol’ Klaus was paying some of these people himself, he could not be doing a better job to discredit them.
Politics is a serious business. And if you are not in it to even make any attempt to win it, then you are wasting your time, and the time of everybody else. This pitiful nonsense has to stop. There are normal people out there in Ireland, who consider themselves reasonable and open to new ideas. And hardly anybody is talking to them. Or even trying to talk to them.