Why McDowell might be the unlikely hero to rescue our fractured politics

Former minister for justice read the mood of the country on the failed referendums

The Leinster House lobby loves a political earthquake, but as the tremors subside from Leo Varadkar’s abdication, it is the upset of earlier this month — the referendum defeats — that looks more revealing of the faultlines in Irish politics. Simon Harris may be the man of the moment, but it is Michael McDowell who channels the spirit of the age.

That spirit was foreseen more than a decade ago by the Irish political scientist Peter Mair in a book called Ruling The Void: The Hollowing Of Western Democracy. (Mair died, aged 60, in 2011; the book was published posthumously in 2013.)

Western democracy, Mair saw, had fundamentally changed. It had been built on political parties that were mass movements, sustained by ground-level organisations. The cleavages between parties overlapped with, or were reinforced by, other mass-membership institutions such as unions and churches.

In the late 20th century, numerous trends conspired to upend this. The unions and churches were fast losing influence. As the bureaucratic state had grown more complex, political leadership had become more specialised and technocratic. Globalisation and European integration reduced the space for meaningful political competition. Rising wealth lowered the stakes for many. The parties were losing their connection to the base, even as the public was disengaging from politics.

For all the talk of the trust problem in politics, Mair identified the difficulty as growing indifference. And as people grew less interested in politics, politicians themselves claimed to be less political. Simon Harris’s claim to be an “accidental politician” is a close, and canny, echo of Tony Blair’s claim, at the height of his powers in 2000, that he “was never really in politics”.

Mair’s description of emerging trends was also a prediction: citizens would join political parties less, vote less, be less loyal when they did vote and would decide on their preference closer to the time of voting. This helps explain two of the stand-out features of recent Irish politics (as elsewhere): the unreliability of the polls and the unpredictability of the ballot.

“Citizens change from participants into spectators,” Mair wrote, “while the elites win more and more space in which to pursue their own particular interests. The result is the beginning of a new form of democracy, one in which the citizens stay at home while the parties get on with governing.”

Thus there would be a “void” at the heart of politics where popular participation had once been. That void would remain vulnerable to being filled by unpredictable forces.

In Ireland, this trend was initially disguised by the particular form of our reaction to the crisis of 2008. Instead of flocking to new political movements, as in Greece, Italy, Spain or France, Irish voters surged towards the age-old brands of Fine Gael and Labour. Fine Gael’s 36pc vote in 2011 looks increasingly likely to be the last ever large-scale mobilisation of people behind a single party here.

Europe, meanwhile, saw the rise of the populists. But Dutch political scientist Catherine de Vries prefers to speak of “political entrepreneurs” and “challenger parties”. (“Populist”, like “neoliberal” and “woke”, has grown less useful the more it has become a term of abuse.) Because of the decline of political party affiliation, she observes, building on Mair’s work, the voting public is increasingly open to entrepreneurs who are innovating in terms of style and message — like a market in which start-ups are challenging a former monopoly.

Since its sudden rise during the 2020 campaign, Sinn Féin’s success as a challenger party has squeezed the market here for political entrepreneurs. But that “challenger” status was always vulnerable as Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland is also a party of the establishment; as it has readied itself for power in the Republic, it has grown closer to the establishment here.

That has created space in the political market for new entrepreneurs, even as new faultlines — the pandemic, immigration, the culture wars — have presented those entrepreneurs with opportunities to innovate in message.

Which brings us back to the referendums, and the extraordinary development that a proposition supported by every political party in the Oireachtas (bar two micro-parties) suffered the greatest defeat in Irish referendum history.

The principal cause of that defeat was the fundamental disconnect between parties and public; the effect of that disconnect has been to create

This rhetoric comes with much exaggeration and alarmism, a dose of self-delusion and an amount of disingenuousness

opportunities for various entrepreneurs to mobilise around the campaign. As a result, politics here is dividing along new lines: anti-immigration, anti-Green, anti-woke, anti-elite. Alongside these, and overlapping with them, echoes a new rallying cry: for “commonsense” politics.

This rhetoric comes with much exaggeration and alarmism, a dose of self-delusion and not a small amount of disingenuousness. Policy ideas that are half-baked and selfdestructive are being propounded by people who are untested in practical politics and wilfully ignorant of its complexity. And there is also a lot of ordinary, decent people who are afraid of what they see happening around them and feel unrepresented in voicing those fears.

Irish politics is at a fissile, febrile moment. The great irony of this is that one of the central figures in this recent feverishness is a blue-blooded veteran of the Irish establishment: a senior counsel, university senator, former attorney general, former minister for justice, one-time lieutenant to Garret FitzGerald and later tánaiste to Bertie Ahern.

Mair warned that the “hollowing” of democracy that he described could ultimately lead to the emergence of an “opposition of principle” against the democratic system — one that would attack the system in its entirety, as has happened in the US. McDowell, though, is a political entrepreneur who believes in the system, much as he may want to reform it. As a man who has been inside the system for decades, but is also a credible challenger to it, he is uniquely placed to channel dissent towards productive outcomes.

McDowell has answered his country’s call before (perhaps on more occasions than his country actually called). On this occasion, there is both opportunity and need. The opportunity is to create a new, soft-populist, “commonsense” conservative movement. The need is for a political force that will give voice to those who might otherwise be persuaded by more extreme entrepreneurs. They’re calling loudly — and someone else will answer if he doesn’t.