"Nothing to Do With All Your Strength"

It's not inevitable that the undeniable street power of the Irish anti-immigration movement will become political power

There’s a scene in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight where Batman has finally cornered the Joker in an interrogation room, only to discover the latter has his loved ones kidnapped, stashed in a secret location and moments from death. Our hero lashes out at his nemesis, who can barely contain his joy at this ineffectual display. “Look at you!” caws Heath Ledger’s Joker - “nothing to do with all your strength!” What, in other words, does raw power amount to if it can’t be turned towards the ends that are most important to you?

Speaking of demonstrations of power, let’s look at the anti-immigration protest that took place on Saturday in Dublin City Centre. The first thing to say about the march is that it was massive by any standard; the statue-faced slop-harvesters on Twitter claimed 100,000 attendees which is obviously not the case. But the footage was impressive and the attendance was well into the five-figure range, unthinkable even a few years ago.

It’s not just the numbers but the trajectory of these marches that's impressive - the numbers grow each time they're held, whereas the number of counter-protestors does not. The message discipline is impressive too. The march was peppered with the occasional American flag, MAGA hat and weird AI poster but otherwise the symbolism employed was stark and uniform. The protest represented an extension of the effective right wing ownership of the Irish flag that has caused so much consternation and exasperation amongst mainstream political figures in the last few years.

A group of counter-protestors had gathered outside the GPO on O’Connell street. If the march reflected the street power of the anti-immigration movement it also reflected the weakness of their opponents, or at least uncertainty of their position. Tweets outlining the constituent counter-protestors circulated befrore the rally and was notable for the number of groups with expilcit pro-palestinian messaging or purpose. Many on the anti-immigration side will have seen this as evidence of the unitary nature left-wing causes in Ireland and how one cannot be supported without endorsing or fortifying another. But it also lent a slightly forlorn air to the counter-protest, as though it had to be cobbled together from whatever material was lying around at the time.

Adding to this feeling, Sinn Féin signed up as official members of the counter-protest relatively late. This reflected the fact that, notwithstanding the standard rhetoric that anyone attending marches against immigration is a crypto-Brit, SF understands that the marchers are basically their people - or enough like their people to make things uncomfortable.

On the surface, in other words, the anti-immigration movement in Ireland is bristling with strength. The only interesting question one can ask about these protests is how likely it is that this street power will soon be translated into political power, and policy. That is where things become murkier. Certainly the material conditions related to immigration, housing asylum and demographic change mean that there will be more protests of similar size, and bigger, in the future. Decisions around asylum housing particularly means that local protests are happening constantly and are never out of the news.

Occasionally a single incident or figure will push through the national consciousness to suggest that the issue has “flared up”, but that is really just a bubble bursting on the surface of a pot that is always on the boil. In the last few days we’ve had protests against the proposed IPAS centre in Ballyfermot, and the planning and then abandonment of one in the wealthy area of Donnybrook, with occasional mood music interjections from Conor McGregor. It would take a dedicated multi-year policy and rhetoric shift on the part of the entire legitimate public square to neutralise these fundamentals. There is no sign of that happening. But the hard reality on the other side is that there is no obvious route to turn this populist power of marches and protests into a political outcome, and no sign that one is about to become available.

People had the opportunity to vote for many of these candidates and parties in the recent general elections and mostly didn’t, even in areas impacted by IPAS (International Protection Accomodation Servcie) centres. The standard view from the right is that the anti-immigration vote is being split by too many candidates fighting over the same patch - which is certainly true, but insufficient to explain the lack of success. Anti-immigration nationalism is a street movement associated in the mind of its supporters with protesting individual asylum centres, and the joy of direct action, but not with voting, political organising, shaping policy or wielding political power.

The obstacle is the broad swath of middle-class voters in Ireland, who might have reservations about mass migration and asylum they will express in private but so far those have simply not cohered into a willingness to vote for someone other than the legacy parties and their respectable alternatives. From the perspective of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the wild populist power behind the protests is certainly frightening. Marches like the one on saturday will encourage them to continue to temper the most outré rhetoric on social liberalisation and immigration that was a marker of the previous government, though of course that will naturally happen now that the Green Party are no longer in coalition.

But in general the attitude of the Irish establishment towards this movement is becoming one of a zoo patron looking at an enraged lion from the other side of a very secure cage. It’s alarming, and it certainly gives you reason to reflect on what you did to cause this creature to bare its fangs. But multiple elections passing without incident have left them feeling certain that they are not about to be eaten alive. The deciding factor here is the affluent and aspirational middle-class, for whom stability, consensus and respectability are now and have always been the master values. That stance has been coupled with the inability of the anti-immigration movement to produce a leader or party that can shepherd change in an unfrightening way that brings the system along with them (such a thing might not necessarily be possible).

In other words, the final gate of the Irish system’s cordon sanitaire, the one that controls access to the system and to political decision making, is holding - and the people keeping together are not the media or politicians, but the respectable middle class. The result is that the scale and nature of these national marches are undeniably impressive but sort of illusory. Their growth represents a solidification of support amongst a certain type of disagreeable (in the big 5 personality trait sense) working- and lower middle class Irish person - and increasing confidence on their part in expressing dissent. But they are mostly not recruiting respectability-minded middle-class people, and to effect the change they want, they’ll almost certainly need some. The true god of the Irish nation, as ever, remains Holy Consensus, and it is untouched in its tabernacle, safe from their dirty hands.