Beyond this protest in the fields, though, what’s really striking about the Dundrum camp are the signs. There’s a Trumpist riff — “Make Dundrum Great Again” — but also splashes of offbeat humour. One poster borrows from Father Ted. “Careful Now!” it says. “Down with this sort of thing.” Another shows the late Richard Harris, in a still from a classic film, advising an interloper to be “a Good Yank and go Home!” The same banner includes two other notes. “Yes to Ukrainians, Golf Club, Gym Venue,” says one. “No to Racism and IPAS Centre,” proclaims the other.

This, then, is Irish populism on the eve of Friday’s election: idiosyncratic, humorous, keen to distinguish anti-migrant fears from straightforward racism. Just like the impromptu camp at Dundrum, meanwhile, this is a movement that’s basically from the grassroots, even as it contains a deep well of historical perspective. And if it’s unlikely to enjoy success in the short term, the bubbling rage at Dundrum is sure to secure concrete expression sooner or later, especially in a country with a robust tradition of political outsiders — and especially if the triumph of populism across the Atlantic destabilises Ireland still further.

For years, Ireland was the great political outlier. Let other countries have Brexit or Le Pen: Éire remained aloof. And if the latest polls are to be believed, populism won’t sweep the Dáil on Friday either. Fine Gael, headed by the incumbent Taoiseach Simon Harris, is currently at 19%. Fianna Fáil, Harris’s coalition partners, are on 21%, just one point ahead of the Sinn Féin opposition. Given, moreover, that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have already announced they’ll stick to their coalition agreement, the political centre will likely hold for now.

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But if the headline results on Friday are likely to indicate business as usual — Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil have been permanent fixtures of Irish government for 100 years — the status quo is hardly stable. That’s clear enough from media coverage in the run-up to the election, with many reports focused on the nation’s simmering discontent, healthy government finances and solid economic growth of 2% notwithstanding. You get the same sense listening to the Irish themselves: according to the European Social Survey, the average Irish voter rates their satisfaction with their country’s democracy at a mere 5.9 out of 10.

How can this unhappiness be explained? One obvious factor is immigration: of both economic migrants and refugees seeking asylum. Having been a net exporter of people for over 150 years, net migration into Ireland now stands at almost 75,000 per year, with a fifth of those now living in Ireland having been born elsewhere. In particular, there has been a notable rise in the number of people seeking asylum, with the rate jumping by 94% in the first six months of 2024 alone.

Worries over migration feed into broader concerns. The Irish economy is booming, after all, but the recent influx has put immense pressure on housing and other services. That’s clear enough somewhere like Dundrum: those 277 migrants are set to be introduced into a community of just 221. Quite aside from the sense that communities are changing, that’s leading to a chronic shortage of housing, with Ireland having the worst record in the EU for accommodation for young people. Dovetailed with shuttered village pubs and community and anger against the political class is tangible.

It’s clear, then, that all the ingredients for Irish populism are there and ready to brew. Yet as the polls so vividly suggest, a shock result remains unlikely: something that’s basically down to the unwillingness of mainstream politicians to move with the voters. For their part, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have generally been reluctant to accept the need for lower numbers. As recently as last December a government minister accused politicians of cloaking themselves in “victimhood” when they claimed that public debate around immigration was being suppressed.

Until recently, anyone looking to give the establishment a bloody nose might have looked to Sinn Féin, what with its heady mix of Irish nationalism and socialist economics. Yet while the party polled as high as 36% two years ago, it’s since fallen away dramatically. Immigration is once again the culprit here, with Sinn Féin’s progressive leaders increasingly out of step with the electorate. According to one poll from May, 63% of all Irish voters wanted a more restrictive immigration policy, a figure that rose to 70% among Sinn Féin supporters. The same poll found that younger, poorer and more urban voters were most worried about Irish migration levels. That’s exactly the demographics Sinn Féin most relies on — even as Sinn Féin leaders like Mary Lou McDonald have, until recently, been extremely reluctant to comment on immigration directly.

Discontent does have some outlets. With the big three parties unwilling to drastically change tack on immigration, some have turned to Aontú, which blends nationalism and conservatism in ways Sinn Féin can’t. Yet with Aontú polling at just 4%, it seems clear that resentful Irish voters are instead putting their hope in independents. Often disaffected members of the mainstream parties — like Mattie McGrath and Malachy Steenson — they’re altogether expected to scoop up some 20% of the vote: roughly the same as each of the three main parties. Included in this grouping is the so-called Independent Party. Like Aontú, it blends republican zeal with immigration scepticism, though has bent to Irish conditions by accepting EU membership.

If, moreover, they’re unlikely to make a breakthrough this time round, the independents do have the electoral system on their side. Because of its proportional nature, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system used in Dáil elections makes it easier for non-affiliated candidates to cause an upset. There are signs, moreover, that sticking it to the mainstream can bear fruit: though it was founded just last year, by a pair of former parliamentarians, the Independent Party already has 24 councillors and a single MEP.

Beyond the electoral calculations, though, the easiest way to measure the potency of Irish populism is through places like Dundrum. What’s happening in County Tipperary, after all, is being shadowed right across the country, with men and women taking the initiative themselves. That’s clearly enough in places like the Finglas area of Dublin, or else Cootehill in County Cavan, both sites of anti-migration protests.

Dundrum is also representative from an ideological standpoint. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a people who long suffered racism from the British, many would-be Irish populists are eager to reject accusations of discrimination themselves. “Skin colour is not the point, and it’s deliberately disingenuous to claim otherwise,” explains one user on a popular political Facebook group, in a striking echo of the “No to Racism” sign at Dundrum. “Talking about ‘white supremacy’ in a country that has suffered as much as Ireland has from ‘white’ people is a particularly sly form of gaslighting.”

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And if that hints vividly at how the tragedies of Irish history shape the country’s populism, there are other examples too. Like at Dundrum, for instance, protests and social media posts are replete with references to “plantation” — explicitly linking the resettlement of refugees to the colonisation of Ireland by English and Scottish settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries. The past echoes elsewhere too: that Richard Harris poster at Dundrum references a rant about the Great Famine. Offbeat humour, too, is something shared between the camp at Dundrum and its cousins elsewhere. At one recent anti-migration rally, one attendee dressed up as St. Patrick.

Beyond history or humour, though, the success of Trumpish populism in Ireland might ultimately depend on the man himself. Though a poll earlier this year found Irish voters preferred Biden to win, the success of Trump in confounding expectations yet again shows that apparent stasis can be overcome in unexpected ways.

Then there’s the question of the President-elect’s economic policies. Right now, more than one in every €8 the Irish government makes comes from corporation tax paid by American multinationals. Last year, meanwhile, Ireland exported €54 billion of goods to the US. That’s 2.5 times the value of exports to the UK, even as Ireland’s trade surplus with the US currently stands at a record €35 billion. Trump’s return poses a serious threat to all this: as well as levying tariffs, he plans to cut corporation tax, just as Dublin plans to raise it.

Given Trump’s erratic style, it’s unclear if he’ll actually follow through with his plans. But if he does, he’ll pose huge risks to the economic model underpinning Ireland’s recent prosperity. That, it goes without saying, could be a boon to the incipient populists — at Dundrum and beyond.

Though the referendums in question were largely symbolic and had little substantial effect on everyday life, scepticism of immigration is now widespread. Recent polling suggests that three-quarters of Irish people think the country is taking too many refugees, a statistic that rises to 80% among Sinn Féin supporters. The modern, secular and multicultural face that Ireland’s government showed to the world for decades has been revealed as a mere patina. And yet, this should not be considered just a spasm from within an otherwise innately progressive Irish character. In many ways, this is the kind of Irishness historically seen abroad; the Irish-American diaspora diverged well to the Right of its mother country long ago — and those values are now travelling back across the Atlantic.

In 1841, 60,000 Irish people signed a petition calling for their compatriots in America to throw their support behind the anti-slavery abolition movement. The petition was organised by Daniel “the Liberator” O’Connell, whose opposition was long-held and steadfast. When O’Connell was first elected to parliament 11 years earlier, a member with an interest in the Caribbean sugar plantations had approached him and offered the support of the 27 pro-slavery members on Irish issues in exchange for his neutrality on the question. O’Connell responded that though “God knows I speak for the saddest people the sun sees”, he was not willing to “forget the negro one single hour” in order to save Ireland. In his public speeches O’Connell attacked American hypocrisy on this issue: “America in the fullness of her pride… wave[s] on high her banner of freedom and its blazing stars” while ignoring “the negro children screaming for their mother from whose bosom they have been torn”.

O’Connell pledged that he would never visit America while slavery continued in that country, and US abolitionists encouraged him to do more to persuade the Irish in America to adopt his stance. One argued that if O’Connell were able to change these opinions, it could be decisive, as “your countrymen among us hold the balance of power”, yet as it stood “three fourths of them at least are Democrats” and opposed slavery abolition. But the Irish in America did not respond as O’Connell hoped. Not only did the majority support the continuation of slavery, but in many cases they were the perpetrators of some of the worst incidences of mob violence against African Americans, such as when an Irish crowd attacked a black temperance parade in Philadelphia in August 1842. And in 1854, it was Irish militia companies who were called on to return runaway slave Anthony Burns from Boston to Virginia, after the native-born companies refused to do so.

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Bishop John Hughes of New York, at that time probably the most influential Irish American leader, said it was “the duty of every naturalized Irishman to resist and repudiate” O’Connell’s implorations “with indignation”. And this vehemence was partially defensive, a product of Hughes’s concern with the successful integration of the Irish into the broader American population — no easy task given the hostility they faced. Leading Irish figures feared that any question of divided loyalties would fatally undermine this process. But another motive was that abolitionism was associated with the British, who had ended their trade in 1807 and emancipated the slaves in their colonies in 1834.

Given the intense opposition to anything associated with Britain, many Irish were opposed to abolition on those grounds alone. It also didn’t help that many abolitionists, drawn as they often were from New England Nonconformist backgrounds, hated Catholics intensely. But, as the historian Noel Ignatiev argued, Irish-American support for the continuation of slavery was necessary as it “eased their assimilation as whites, and more than any other institution, taught them the meaning of whiteness”. For Ignatiev, the Irish were deeply concerned with maintaining their favoured position over those whom they regarded as the principal threat — the free black people of the North — and abolition would have magnified that threat.

This compact between Irish Americans and the Democratic Party, formed in the antebellum United States over slavery, began to erode a few decades ago, through a combination of the former’s increasing affluence and the Democrats’ shift Leftwards on cultural issues. Irish Americans on average have remained firmly on the Right, and are now a key constituency for Donald Trump. And although a liberal evolution over the generations is standard for immigrant groups, the Catholic Church’s conservative position on many issues, particularly on abortion, had the effect of making Irish Americans particularly conservative.

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But in Ireland itself, the opposite process took place, transforming the country from one of the most conservative in Europe, to one of the most progressive, within a single generation. As recently as 1983, Irish voters approved the Eighth Amendment to the constitution, outlawing abortion with 67% support. Just over three decades later, in 2015, 62% of Irish voters approved the legalisation of same-sex marriage, and three years later 66% voted to legalise abortion. This led to the strange situation observed by one bartender working in a New York Irish pub during the 2016 presidential election, whereby “half the patrons were Irish immigrants who considered Mr. Trump a real ‘eejit,’ but the other half, the Irish Americans, thought he was just grand”.

The events of recent months, however, suggest this dichotomy is changing. So far, there has been a void of support for such positions within the mainstream political parties, all of which supported the proposed constitutional changes, and all which have been vocally supportive of increased immigration for years. But politicians might be waking up to the changing reality: despite leading the same party as his predecessor, Leo Varadkar, the new prime minister, Simon Harris, has emphasised supporting farmers and preserving “law and order”. Perhaps he has a better grasp of the situation. But the present unrest is a product of longstanding issues, with rampant inequality, an acute housing crisis and rapid increases in immigration levels all playing their part. The conditions which created the Irish diaspora identity abroad are coming home.

The Irish in America developed this identity through the imperative of protecting their status — against challenges from above by Protestant, Anglo-Saxon Americans, and from below by black people (and then, more recently, by Latino immigrants). For the Irish in Ireland, their historic national identity developed primarily in opposition to Britishness, while in contemporary Ireland this has been considerably defined through opposition to the Catholic Church. One of the main reasons for the health of organised religion in the United States (until the last decade or so anyway), was the lack of an official state Church: with no suppression of dissenting faiths, and with free and healthy competition, American Christians of all stripes maintained religious enthusiasm long after it waned elsewhere. In contrast, while the Republic of Ireland never had an official state religion, its constitution and laws were intimately linked with Catholicism. And given the many wrongdoings of the Church — from the Magdalene laundries and sexual abuse to plain old-fashioned corruption — there was a ready-made enemy for people to fight against.

Today, a nationalist sentiment that was once anti-British has a new focus of antagonism now that Ireland has become, for the first time in its history, a net importer of people. Meanwhile, the conformism and repression than was once enforced by the Catholic Church has been replaced by a new type of conformism enforced by politicians, journalists, academia and NGOs. Ignatiev explained the divergence on slavery between the Irish in Ireland and the Irish in American by arguing that “in becoming white, the Irish ceased to be green”. Today, cosmopolitan Ireland itself has ceased to be “green” — in the stereotypical sense of smoky pubs, pints of Guiness and pederast priests. Instead, its urban centres have embraced the global digital monoculture, which can now be found in Tipperary as much as Toronto and Tel Aviv. The experience of the Irish overseas — economic competition and status anxiety, generating a defensive, oppositional politics — now applies to the Irish in Ireland.

There is not only heightened competition for housing and state services, but also for social prestige. Until recently, Irish culture had common enemies, but now working-class and non-graduate Irish people find they are facing a reduction in their cultural and social status. When the enemy were landlords and the British, it was easy enough to create a shared identity in opposition to those forces. Then, after the great estates were broken up and the British left, that vanished. Ireland’s subsequent transition from one of the most conservative countries in Europe to one of the most liberal could be shaped by collective opposition to the Catholic Church — but now too that opposition is gone, its enemy vanquished.

If the conditions that have traditionally faced the Irish in America are replicated in Ireland itself, then the politics of the Irish diaspora might be a good guide as to what happens next. The split between traditional Republicans and the Trump MAGA movement might be replicated by a split within one of the main Irish parties — and not necessarily one of the traditional Right. The ascent of Sinn Féin, for example, may be halted due to tensions between the social conservatism of much of their voters and their activist vanguard’s liberal internationalism. It is unlikely that the former sentiments will continue to be unrepresented in the Dáil: either new leadership in one of the established parties will follow the voters and shift to the Right on culture, or potentially a new party will emerge, helped by the proportional system used for Irish parliamentary elections. Either way, the next few years will be tumultuous. The global populist insurgency that has changed politics in so many of Ireland’s neighbours has finally arrived.

The rise of this view on the Left has coincided with the decline in support for the Labour Party among those traditionally considered ‘working class’, and an increase in their support for the Conservatives. But if we see housing tenure as the real indicator of class in modern Britain, then we can still claim that the working class has not abandoned Labour. All that was needed was to change its definition.

The first thing to say about this argument is that it’s a little too convenient. Only five years ago, the Labour Left was using ‘working class’ in the traditional sense and upholding the dichotomy between ‘university-educated middle-class professionals’ on the one hand and ‘working-class communities’ on the other. Indeed, this understanding of class, culture and political values held until as recently as the eve of the 2019 general election.

You don’t have to be a cynic to think that this new understanding of class would not be put forward if the traditional class alignment of the post-1945 period still held, and if young people and renters were as supportive of the Tories as they had been in 2015. Certainly, the old concept of ABC1-C2DE is inadequate, as argued by a range of academics. But disregarding the importance of class and insisting on the primacy of housing tenure is politically misguided and empirically unfounded.

Just look at the ten safest Labour seats in the country. Five of them are in Liverpool; two each in London and Birmingham; and one in Manchester. There is, in fairness, a clear disparity between the percentage of people who own their homes outright in these seats and the national average — only 19% on average in those ten constituencies, compared with 30.6% nationwide.

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However, when we look at the percentage of homes with a mortgage, the average across the ten safest Labour seats is 25.6% — just over six points behind the UK as a whole. If you take out the three outliers of Liverpool Riverside, Birmingham Ladywood, and Tottenham, it is 29.3% — barely distinguishable from the UK average of 32.9%.

The idea that Labour can build a ‘coalition of the renters’ is also undermined by the stats. In the ten safest Labour seats the average proportion of private renters is 23.3% — exactly seven points more than the national average of 16.3%. Seven points is not insignificant, but it is not indicative of a massive disparity in housing tenure between Labour’s heartlands and the average UK constituency. What’s more, if you take away the outliers of Liverpool Riverside, Manchester Gorton and Tottenham, the average proportion of private renters in the safest Labour seats is 19% — only 3% more than the national average.

There are some qualifications to this argument: just because these are the ten safest Labour seats, it does not mean they are typical Labour seats. In fact, the five Merseyside seats are demographically very different from Labour heartland seats, with low numbers of university graduates and even fewer immigrants. But if housing tenure truly is the new dividing line in UK politics, we would surely expect to see more significant discrepancies in rates of mortgage-holders and private renters between the ten safest Labour seats and the national average.

And there are other reasons why the Left should not pin its hopes on an alliance of young, graduate, private renters riding to the rescue. As recently as the 2010 election, there was no difference between the proportion of 18-24s and over 65s voting Labour, both at 31%, and the Tories were only one percentage point behind Labour among 18-24s, on 30%. In 2015, while the age alignment that characterised the last two elections began to take shape, the Conservatives actually did slightly better than Labour among university graduates, with 35% voting Tory as opposed to 34% for Labour. (The Tories also had a two-point lead among private renters that year.)

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In the last six years alone, the Conservatives have moved Left on culture and won their first majority in 27 years. Four years later, they moved Right on culture and (somewhat) Left on economics and won an even bigger majority. It is not beyond their wit to pivot once more, moving Left on culture and introducing policies to help renters.

While it seems too politically difficult for the Tories to build millions of new homes, it is not too difficult for them to throw small and medium-landlords under the bus. They have already introduced pro-renter legislation such as the 2019 ban on tenancy fees; further legislation to make life-long renting as desirable as it is in large parts of continental Europe and North America could see the Tories make up lost ground among private renters. And if combined with another about-turn on cultural issues, as after 2005 and 2016, they could quickly catch up on Labour’s lead among young people and graduates.

There is an increasing sense that Boris Johnson’s days are numbered, and his likely successors — currently Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are the safest bets — would represent a move away from the Red Wall-courting strategy of the last five years and a return to economic and cultural liberalism. The cancellation of the HS2 extension from Birmingham to Leeds might be the first sign of this coming pivot.

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But perhaps most importantly, the Left’s new focus on homeownership ignores the importance of geography and cultural capital: there are all kinds of advantages that middle-class and even poor renters in London and other big cities have over homeowners in small towns. As even the ‘It’s homeownership, stupid!’ school concede, the areas where you are least likely to be able to afford a house are those where all the prospects are.

As long as that remains the case, it is unlikely that homeownership will swing an election. In the meantime, the Left ignore the importance of class at their peril.

There is indeed a fine line between support for a cause or respect for a particular culture on the one hand, and fetishisation of a disadvantaged group on the other. And you don’t need to dress up or put on make-up to be guilty of the latter, although the just re-elected Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has certainly taken it to a new level.

Reflecting on the recent “blackfacing” controversy, the Arab-Canadian academic Moustafa Bayoumi speculated that “Trudeau seems to want to play out some deep-level desire to leave his whiteness behind” but nonetheless doubted that “Trudeau wants to be an Arab man or a black man or an Indian man, though he has dressed up as all three”.

Unlike Bayoumi, I’m not so sure. I suspect that a part of Trudeau would like to be a member of another ethnic group, and he certainly believes that certain groups — such as people of colour, women, and LGBT people — are especially and inherently “cool” and worthy of praise; he would dearly like to be one of them, or at least to have some of their cache rub off on him. Hence he has, in the words of one Asian Canadian, so much fun “playing dress-up”. 

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Trudeau has never missed the opportunity to be photographed at gurdwara in a turban, or eating iftar in shalwar kameez. This is despite the criticism it has drawn from the communities he was supposedly paying tribute to; on a visit to India, he wore “traditional” dress while many of the Indians he met wore suits, prompting a wave of eyerolls on Indian social media. When it comes to gender politics, he famously hectored a woman about feminism, correcting her for using the word “mankind” instead of “humankind”. 

While there is nothing wrong with paying tribute to peoples and cultures one admires and respects, still less helping to combat discrimination and prejudice, this can easily fall into essentialising, stereotyping and fetishising people. Alongside this “neo-Orientalism”, many on the Left exhibit an element of self-loathing, believing that white men — or, to give them their full title, middle-class, cis-gender, straight white men — are inherently morally compromised.

This tendency is at its most offensive and absurd in the cases of Rachel Dolezal and Anthony Lennon, who despite their white parents both claim to be black, due to their politics and their love of and respect for black people and culture. Yet you do not have to go to the extreme lengths of Dolezal; for plenty of white leftists, constantly criticising your own demographic group and actively seeking to distance yourself from it is a way of escaping the prison of whiteness, almost itself a form of blackfacing.

In a recent episode of the hit Netflix television programme Queer Eye, one of the stars, Antoni Porowski, responded to being told by a Mexican-American abuela that her secret chilli recipe was “not for white people” by protesting that this shouldn’t apply to him, as he was “Polish-Canadian”.

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This was more than a throwaway joke: Porowski and Trudeau do not literally think they are not white, but they think that they are politically not white: their cultural values and political views preclude them from whiteness. For them, whiteness is inextricably bound up with reactionary values, and even Left-wing whites are still compromised. Hence the claim by journalist Laurie Penny following Trump’s election that she was “truly horrified and ashamed to be white”,  or the actress Rosanna Arquette tweeting her “disgust” at the fact she was “born white”.

This performative wokeness is not merely ridiculous — it does precisely nothing to help victims of systemic and every-day racism. And this behaviour is not restricted to ethnicity: there is a growing trend on the Left that sees structural disadvantage and discrimination — due to, say, ethnicity, class, or gender-identity – as almost a desirable status to be envied.

Laurie Penny has also boasted that she is “about as close as you can get to the trans rights movement without being trans yourself. I’ve been associated with trans activism for years, and while I don’t know what it’s like to be harassed, threatened or abandoned for being transsexual, most of my close friends do”. Substitute “black” or “working-class” for “trans”, and that sentence becomes even more toe-curling and absurd; it indicates less of a concern for ally-ship and solidarity than a desire to emulate and associate oneself with a disadvantaged-but-fashionable group.

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Nor is this trend confined to white people. The journalist Afua Hirsch is of mixed Jewish-Ghanaian heritage, and grew up in a pleasant middle-class neighbourhood in Wimbledon. Her husband’s parents, in contrast, were both Ghanaian, and lived on a rough estate in Tottenham. A theme of her book is how while “he thinks in terms of generating wealth and opportunity, I think in terms of identity and belonging”.

Hirsch’s response to the material deprivation her husband experienced growing up was one of envy: “when it comes to identity, I tell him, he was born with the equivalent of a silver spoon”. Her parents “often joked that I would rather have grown up on a council estate, and this contained a grain of truth”.

Reni Eddo-Lodge, in her best-selling book Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People about Race, explicitly criticises this “wallowing in guilt”. For Eddo-Lodge, support for disadvantaged groups,

looks like financial or administrative assistance to the groups doing vital work. Or intervening when you are needed in bystander situations… Don’t be anti-racist for the sake of an audience. Being white and anti-racist in your private or professional life, where there’s very little praise to be found, is much more difficult.

This is advice Justin Trudeau, Laurie Penny and others should take on board: try to help, not appropriate.

David Swift’s A Left For Itself: Left-wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism is published by Zero Books