Modern Ireland is relatively resistant to political disruption. The centre holds; even the fringe parties usually end up adopting some centrist tendencies. And in a kind of bland and gentle rhythm, things tick along without much noise at all. This was the expectation heading into November’s election, and it is the obvious conclusion as we head out of it. To the French and Germans, and until recently the Brits, Ireland looks like political Arcadia.
Meanwhile I wonder if, in 2024, the word most frequently used to describe the politics of the Continent was “chaos”. Chaos besets Germany! France in turmoil! Romania? Disarray, I heard. Events of December have only turbocharged the sense of a Europe fully on the brink (though we should be careful to remind ourselves that none of this is entirely unfamiliar. It is hardly as if Europe has only known cloudless harmony until this point.)
Internecine warfare between senior party members looks relatively toothless to anyone used to observing British politics
Olaf Scholz in Germany is currently on track to be the first chancellor voted out of office after only one term. A combination of long-term de-industrialisation, the effects of energy dependency on Russia and “bad management” (so Jörg Lau, a German commentator says) have left the country in economic crisis and headed for a political one. The future of European defence policy is murky as the split over Ukraine deepens (and not just in Germany, of course).
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And then to France, where seven years of the centre’s hegemony ended over the summer. Now, prime minister Michel Barnier will leave office as the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of modern France after a no-confidence vote and the collapse of the French government. And so two countries that account for nearly 50 per cent of the entire economy of the euro zone are in a simultaneously perilous situation and one of them (Germany) has a kind of lame duck leader. The spectre of Donald Trump’s economic isolationism and Vladimir Putin’s encroachment in eastern Ukraine loom, too.
Given all of this – and not to mention the recent election in Romania, the general creep of the far right, and all the cosmic questions that swirl about the future of Ukraine – Ireland is in a rather comfortable spot, for now.
There has been plenty of criticism about the set-up of Ireland’s domestic politics. I have been among these critics and I still think the criticism holds. If the establishment centre is so dominant, almost impossible to break through in any meaningful way, politicians become complacent and distant from their electorate. The two referendums on family and care earlier this year demonstrated precisely this: a government that had completely misunderstood the interests and priorities of its voters. Anti-immigrant agitation – currently on a relative ebb, it appears – coupled with leading politicians’ avoidance of the topic is perhaps another example of this distant elite at odds with an increasingly truculent populace.
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This all strikes me as an entirely fair reading of Irish politics. But amid all the downsides of Ireland’s “same old, same old” system, there are also huge benefits (like the rest of life, nothing is entirely bad or entirely good). There is a stability encoded in the DNA of the political structure that – for now – has allowed the country to weather serious shocks. To indulge in a little bit of counterfactual history for a moment, can you imagine how an Ireland without an embedded and stable centre would have survived the ructions caused by Brexit? There is every reason to suspect it could have suffered political crisis upon political crisis. The electoral stasis helped, not harmed, the island here.
Meanwhile, internecine warfare between senior party members looks relatively toothless to anyone used to observing British politics, for example. Especially to anyone who watched British parliament try to get a Brexit deal over the line. And we shouldn’t readily forget that while Brexit was an expression of a spiritual discomfort with the European Union, the main reason it ended up posed at the ballot box was because of factional warfare in the Conservative Party. Ireland’s stability – stagnant, staid, status-quo, boring as it all may be – ensures things like that don’t happen so easily.
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In Europe, and recently in Britain, I suppose we might argue that frequent turnover of leaders is proof of politics working: this person is doing an unsatisfactory job, so let’s find someone else. The downside of deposing leaders so often is it’s very hard to get anything done when the upper echelons of government are simply a rotating cast of people. In the UK, the role of prime minister became for a short while not the person responsible for guiding Britain at home and abroad through bad political weather, but instead a kind of temporarily held podium for whoever could win a leadership contest.
Ireland is not beyond reproach. And there are deep flaws with a system where new ideas struggle to find mainstream representation. The chasm between the voter and the government may be widening. But the genuine crisis in continental Europe is a gentle reminder that Ireland is blessed with boring politics.