The Republic of Ireland: The Dog That Hasn’t Barked in the Night?

Abstract

The reader may be somewhat surprised to find a chapter on Ireland in a comparative study of populism in contemporary Western Europe.¹ First of all, for many years, politics in the Republic of Ireland was treated by scholars as exceptional and of little interest to the comparativist. As Peter Mair comments, Ireland was seen as a small peripheral state in which ‘the patterns and structures of mass politics which are evident elsewhere in Europe have little relevance’ (Mair, 1999: 128). In particular, Ireland’s perceived idiosyncrasy lay in the fact that the two parties which generally accounted for over 80 per cent of the vote, Fianna Fáil (FF) and Fine Gael (FG), both seemed to be broadly of the centre/centre-right, while the main party on the Left, Labour, usually came a very distant third at elections.² Second, late twentieth-century Ireland has not produced a populist party akin to the likes of the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria, the Lega Nord (LN) in Italy, or the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) in Holland. Thus, while politics in the Republic in the last two decades has become more similar to that on the continent due to membership of the European Union (EU), economic growth, immigration, secularization and the predominance of coalition governments, it has nonetheless escaped the rise of the type of populist challengers seen in almost every other Western European state.