This is how we win. Probably.
In eighteen months the Government is going to be singing our tune.
If you ever get a chance to engage face to face with People Before Profit - whether at one of their own demonstrations or if they're counter protesting one of ours - grab the opportunity. You're in for something special. They'll speak to you like you're some sort of cartoon villain or a videogame Nazi. They're really in to it. You'll see how important it is to them to have this identifiable embodiment of evil to lash out at. That's you. That's who you are in their eyes.
To what extent do they believe this, or how much of it is just the pleasure of having someone in this day and age that you're allowed to hate? Hard to say.
But the fact that they're treating us like caricatures tells you one thing - they don't really see us as a serious threat. As things currently stand they don't feel they have to deal with us in a serious way. They can indulge.
So what kind of threat would they take seriously? "Far Right" observers across Europe have settled on a model of the kind of threats we're supposed to pose - from low level LARPing ones to high level "Game Over" ones. They worry about parties that look like the National Party, they recognize parties that look like a successful version of the Freedom Party, but neither of those are truly "dangerous". The danger, the thing to be avoided, the great worry, comes from what the Far Right observers call Mainstreaming.
Mainstreaming: Parties of the centre being captured by our ideas. Elected politicians in the centre ground echoing our talking points and adopting them as their own - and then acting on them.
You can read all about this Mainstreaming threat in reports from Maynooth compiled with help from the Far Right Observatory. The reports are mostly cut and paste jobs from the writings of academics like Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist who has made a career out of observing the Far Right and is the go to authority. Cas and his disciples all agree that Mainstreaming is what the real danger looks like - and by extension what success looks like for us.
Are we any way close to achieving this? I think we are.
The vehicle carrying us to victory looks to be Mattie McGrath and his band of Independents, maybe with some help from the Farmers Alliance and not ruling out some other group who may decide to adopt the same template.
The next General Election could be up to two years away. Generally speaking it's a fool’s game trying to predict how politics will look that far in the future - because usually those in power will look at a situation that's getting out of hand and adapt and change. The last three years tell us that this government is not like that; the answer is always just to double down, spend more to buy off any opposition and plough ahead regardless. Is the immigration policy not bad enough for you? Here come some hate speech laws. None of this is how Charlie would have handled it. Bertie would have emptied out the East Wall centre and avoided planting in areas capable of generating protests. That light touch is in the past now. Political cop on seems so twentieth century.
So we can assume that the current political conditions will extend to the next General Election. The conditions that make Mattie and the Independents the right answer will continue until then.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Without getting imaginative, without wish casting, without hoping for changes to happen, what might we expect the current political momentum to lead to.
Mattie and the Independents have the experience, the organization, the knowledge of what it takes to get elected and even the respectability that comes with having been elected. Associate yourself with them and you associate yourself with all of that. There are numerous reasons why it makes sense for them to operate as Independents: the main one being a lot of them have tried party membership already and it didn't work for them. But they also get to present themselves to the electorate as people who can't be ordered around, who won't be whipped into following the consensus. Add to that it won't be easy for the media to tar them all with the same brush or blame all of them for an error committed by one of them. If they're operating as Independents it makes it harder for the media to write them off - they'd have to be picked off one at a time.
More important than all of those reasons though is that if, after an election, an Independent ends up in negotiations with the government for his support he wants to be negotiating for himself and his constituency, not for anyone else. Securing the seat is probably the number one priority for most Independents.
I was lucky enough to speak briefly with both Mattie and Danny Healy-Rae about this last week and each of them repeated how important it was to be an Independent, standing for yourself and for your people ahead of everything else. Mattie blamed a lot of the current mess on the existence of the party whip.
Despite all of that and despite the fact that Mattie refuses to describe the “new movement or organisation" as a party, you still couldn't rule out seeing them contest the next election as... a registered political party.
A little party never hurt nobody.
People Before Profit didn't contest the last General Election as People Before Profit. They contested it as part of a registered political party made up of PBP, Solidarity and RISE. These three groups came together in 2015 for two reasons. First so they would have enhanced speaking rights in the Dail but secondly because as a group they expected they would get more than 2% of all first preferences cast nationally.
Getting over the 2% threshold entitles you to annual Exchequer Funding, which in PBP's case amounts to a quarter of a million a year. That's every year for the lifetime of the Dail. The more first preferences you get the more money you get. Points win prizes. To give an idea of the sums involved, if all the Independents had got together the 12% of first preferences they got in the last election would have entitled them to over a million euros a year between them. Every year.
And here's one other important point about People Before Profit and that political group they formed - there was no whip. PBP, Solidarity and RISE were free to vote as they wished. In practical terms the "party" they formed is a flag of convenience designed to bring in funds and enhanced speaking rights in the Dail. That's all.
Are Mattie and his Independents ready to forego a quarter of a million a year (at least) in Exchequer funding when all that's required is that in the run up to the General Election they announce they will be contesting it under a flag of convenience?
They could be upfront about the cynicism of the exercise - just as People Before Profit were before the last election. Make it clear they will be contesting under a party banner merely to get funding and speaking rights and it won't impinge on candidates independence in any way. Seems like something the public would accept - PBP voters did anyway.
And in that brief conversation last week Mattie did indicate that these advantages of the party option had been recognised and discussed. Danny Healy-Rae seemed less interested in such a novelty.
Would they do it? In the end it probably comes down to their assessment of the likely payoffs. The guaranteed Exchequer funding divvied up between them every year versus how much it would cramp their style when it came to bargaining as individuals if they got lucky and the incoming government needed their support.
When bad men combine, the good must associate
As of now two councillors Shane O'Reilly in Cavan and Frankie Daly in Limerick are officially, publicly on board with Mattie and Michael Collins. There are also 10 Fianna Fail councillors who sound very interested; seasoned, hardened professionals, years in the game, a lot invested. If people like that are up for it, if they see Mattie and this movement as a viable option, you can take that to the bank.
Meanwhile there are some on our side, with no political experience, who have decided that they'll jump straight into Dail politics without wasting time or effort on what they see as the low stakes option of looking for a seat on a Council. This is the equivalent of going into Carroll’s, buying a replica Dublin shirt and announcing you're ready to be selected on the panel for the Championship.
Cute hoorism and knowing how the game is played is something that has been sorely lacking on our side. When Mattie comes out and talks about the World Economic Forum you know he's only doing it to signal to us that he's sympathetic - he has no intention of pinning himself to something as electorally toxic as that. An operator like that is exactly the kind of politician we need.
A happy hunting ground for Independents
Ireland is hands down, far and away, the best place in Europe to stand as an Independent.
That's because of our very rare Single Transferable Vote PR system.
Independents got 12% of the first preference vote in our last general election. They also got 12% of the seats - 19 in total.
Nowhere else in Europe in the last fifty years have Independents standing for the lower lawmaking House got more than 2% of the vote. Or more than 3% of seats.
We're a huge outlier.
Only Ireland elects enough Independents for them to make a difference.
Power is the name given to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. - Foucault
Assuming things continue as they are there's a very good chance that after the next General Election there will be 10, 12, 15 TDs elected having nothing more in common than their knowledge that 75% of the electorate aren't represented and they want to give them a voice. That's not nothing. That's something really powerful.
Say a Fianna Fail/ Fine Gael government need them for a majority. That puts them in the same position as the Greens are now and look what they've been able to do with their twelve seats. Probably even more relevant, the previous Government depended on nine Independents, three of whom were made ministers and three of them junior ministers.
Say a Sinn Fein Government needed the help of Independents to form a majority. That might be even better. Mary Lou could follow the Independents lead on immigration and placate the 83% of SF voters who say we are taking in too many refugees while simultaneously being able to value signal to our new arrivals, her new voters, that she was doing everything she could for immigrants but her hands were tied. SF have been nodding and winking for years to their traditional supporters that they don't actually believe in this open doors policy - and the rest of the Woke stuff - except in a cynical way. It's just about votes. If that's still true then having closed borders Independents in government with them will be a Godsend for an SF leadership trying to paper over the internal contradictions.
There's a chance that when it comes to getting over the line in terms of forming a majority the Independents may be the only game in town. The Greens look transfer toxic and there's hardly a left wing seat in the country that’s safe from Sinn Fein. Lots left on the table the last time by SF - two quotas one candidate all over the country (that's how Brid Smith and Paul Murphy are in the Dail) - and SF will go in to the next election a lot higher in the polls than last time.
There may be no one left for anyone to form deals with in the next Dail except Independents.
And what could such a group of Independents holding the balance of power hope to achieve? Maybe there might be changes to government immigration policy, maybe opt outs under Lisbon about immigration, maybe more efforts to house the Irish, more efforts to signal abroad that Ireland was full, more practical support for the kind of language that Varadkar is already coming out with on immigration, less support for NGOs, less support for trans and LGB stuff and certainly and probably the main one, much less support for the green agenda
Great stuff, but where the presence of these Independents in government would have a truly transformative and disruptive effect is in the reintroduction of debate into the Dail. Remember what that used to be like. The all-party consensus would be broken from the start. The significance of that change can't be overstated. The consensus would be fractured, stymied, undermined and a spanner thrown in the works.
We'd move from a Dail in which parties were trying to out virtue signal one another to earn the approval of the NGOs to a Dail in which positions had to be argued for and the NGOs were only one more voice in the debate - one that had no mandate. It would be the deathknell for groupthink.
The Rural Independents are already voicing a lot of our concerns in the Dail. They're already making our points for us. But their small numbers mean that they're saying these things as some kind of side show. It's almost like their role is to be mocked for it. They make the virtuous look good. Making those same points while in government and holding the balance of power would be fundamentally different. It would inevitably change how the Dail operates and how much influence NGO/ Woke/ Green ideology has.
And it's not just the effect on debate they would have, there's also the effect on other parties. Independents being given a platform, a position of influence, from which to appeal to the unrepresented centre ground of Irish politics would put a lot of pressure on backbenchers. The attraction to a backbencher of following the Independents populist lead would be obvious. Which in turn would shift mainstream parties themselves in our direction.
This ragtag little platoon of self-interested Independents are capable of delivering a lot of what we want and as of now it's hard to see anything that's going to stop them.
Never was so much owed by so many to so few
It's a Far Right observer’s nightmare scenario; the mainstreaming of our ideas, the fracturing of the consensus and our capture of the centre ground in Irish politics
And so maybe this happens and it won't be those of us who marched and protested who will be the ones making the changes. Maybe our time at the front is coming to an end and the professionals are taking over. I'm already starting to feel nostalgia for our time in the sun.
No one will ever tell us we were right. It would cost them too much. We'll always be awful people. But we'll know what we did. How we - and a lousy immigration policy - made people feel they could say the unspeakable about immigration.
And in the end we'll be getting what we wanted.
To quote Martin Luther King:
And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!