Ireland: Emerging Right-wing Populism

The chapter discusses the political context in Ireland during the 2019 EP elections and introduces the political communication environment of the country. Particular attention is given to the role of Twitter in Irish political communication and populism in the party field during the twenty-first century. The empirical Twitter analysis focuses on 10,446 tweets sent from 582 Twitter accounts by various political actors during a one-month period in May 2019. Local elections and referendum vote overlapped the EP elections, which strongly focused the attention on internal issues. The most frequent tweeters were the mainstream political parties and MEP candidates. However, the new radical-right populist Irish Freedom Party was also highly active. Even if a minor player in Irish party field, it gained significant attention with taking aim at the EU taxations system. Local themes such as housing dominated the Twitter discussion, climate change remaining one of the only European themes in campaign debates. Topic modelling and network analysis demonstrate the high polarisation between political actors often attacking their rivals. The emergence of minor Eurosceptic populist radical-right parties confronted the pro-European discourse of more traditional parties. However, even if populist rhetoric has been rather mainstream in Irish politics, populism as such remained ‘fringe’.