Next year’s local elections will be a test of whether good sense of Irish voters on far-right candidates endures, writes Pat Leahy, via IrishTimesOpEd
Don’t get me wrong, Barrett is not a dictator in waiting. But with his far-fetched pretensions, blood and soil rhetoric and stash of gold bullion, he is more than a little ridiculous.
Anyway, Barrett and the rest of the perishers who make up Ireland’s small but vocal far right have been kept a long way away from elected office by the disinclination of the Irish public to indulge ultra-nationalist rhetoric and divisive tropes. Next year’s local elections, when anti-immigrant candidates will surely stand against a background of clear angst about the arrival of asylum seekers in a few areas, will be a test of whether that good sense endures.
But the political success of the radical left owes more, I suspect, to its efficient constituency work and frequent access to the airwaves than enthusiasm for revolution. It’s an open question whether its deputies will withstand the challenge to their seats in the next election, emanating principally not from the lackeys of the right-wing press nor the ranks of reaction and counterrevolution, but from its allies and potential left-wing coalition partners in Sinn Féin.
On Tuesday, political correspondents ran from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s end-of-term press conference to the Government Buildings courtyard where Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan was delivering his end-of-term thoughts, and there was no mistaking the differences between them. Ryan was talking up his plans for rail investment; Varadkar was saying, yeah
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