Immigration and the ‘Far Right’ in the Election

The ongoing protests at asylum accommodation centres in 2023 and 2024, including a riot in Dublin city centre, seemed relevant to the relatively strong electoral performance of conservative ethnonationalist or ‘far right’ candidates in the 2024 local and European Parliament elections. The conditions seemed ripe for a breakthrough for an explicitly anti-immigrant party or candidates. Yet this did not happen. In this chapter we offer some potential explanations for this failure of the ‘far right’ in Ireland in 2024, noting that the political system shifted attention and rhetoric in response to the elections in June, and so by November the issue of immigration was much less potent. However, it is the case that political discussion of immigration is now much more common than it once was, suggesting that the liberal consensus on immigration is broken.