Will Irish Conservatives ever find a voice?

In this month's Magill, Richard Waghorne, director of the Freedom Institute and author of Sicilian Notes , has a very interesting if rather too brief article entitled "The Silenced Majority".  His premise is that there is a sizable chunk of the electorate of a conservative disposition whose views do not find a voice within the political establishment.  He identifies this segment of opinion by its support for small government and low taxation, its defence of the Christian concept of marriage as we know it, support of friendly relations with the USA and for being uncomfortable with the soft line taken towards "the Sinn Féin crime conspiracy".  He wonders whether "Ireland's quiescent conservative majority will lose patience with a political elite that pretends that right of centre voters don't count".  Such voters have been left ideologically homeless "by the crash in the conservative ideas market". 

Richard is right about the potential electorate that could be reached by a coherent conservative programme, though I doubt if it would constitute a "majority", silent or otherwise.  I'm also highly doubtful if an unambiguously conservative political movement could ever have delivered the market reforms and other programmes that Richard believes have turned this country into "a global beacon of the power of the markets".  Like most conservatives, Richard is impatient with talk about equality and social justice, especially if its purpose is merely to assuage middle class guilt:

When the reform agenda was ticking along, Irish supporters of broadly free market policies were prepared to put up with hypocritical socialist rhetoric in exchange for the desired action.  But the Ireland of 2006 is not the Ireland of 1999.  Through sneaky rises, our government now takes in as much tax as as average continental government does.  Spending has grown greatly since the last election, for little gain.

Like it or loath it, social partnership was a crucial element in forging the Irish model of social and economic governance.  The Irish model can be best characterised as "social liberalism" and is characterised by low taxation, deregulation and creating a climate favourable to enterprise.  But it also contains elements that necessarily go against the grain, at least to some extent, of economic liberalism or what Richard would define as conservatism.  It was considered necessary that a national consensus be generated to aid economic recovery from the fiscal crisis of the state and so business, trade union and government elites begat social partnership.  Thus Irish-style corporatism had elements of both economic liberalism and social democracy.  The hypocrisy that Richard dislikes is a product, at the rhetorical level, of a concrete mode of governance.  What I'm saying is that a full blown conservative government would probably not have been able to build the consensus that created the successful Irish model in the first place. 

You'd think after reading Richard's piece that the political left had huge influence over government policy.  This isn't the case.  There is a deliberate rhetorical ambiguity that is part of Irish statecraft and this explains why the Taoiseach can call himelf a socialist.  As I've said before, nobody wants to be labelled as right-wing.  There are other factors that explain why Conservatives lack a distinct voice of their own.  Historically, the conservative versus liberal/progressive divide in Irish politics cut through all the major political parties, even Labour.  Conservatism, in the sense of respect for the rule of law, the sanctity of private property and the defence of traditional Catholicism was the default setting for most politicians in all the parties.  Over time, a certain reform-minded liberalism began to assert itself, especially in Fine Gael and Labour.  Eventually, by the 1990s even Fianna Fáil ministers were able to steer legislation like decriminalising homosexuality through the Oireachtas without any difficulty. 

Every so often small parties with the word "christian" in their name would appear on the scene offering an option for true conservatives in a handful of constituencies and were ignored by all but a tiny fragment of the electorate.  Such micro parties were almost wholly motivated by moral and religious issues.  Such economic policies as they professed were usually welfarist or else downright eccentric. Since the victory of the No vote in the 2002 abortion referendum Irish conservatives lost their one great, emotive rallying cause.  Anti-abortion politics can have the potential to mobilise people in a popular conservative cause but this has run out of steam in Ireland.  There is still potential for immigration to play a similar role in the future but any political movement mobilised on that issue would be populist and demagogic and not the more civilised type of conservatism that Richard espouses.

Comments

[Badman]

You're taking Richard too seriously. All arguments that are premised on the existance of a "silent" majority are generally without basis in reality. I mean, you could substitute "no evidence for the existence of" for "silent" as a qualifier without changing the meaning.

Furthermore claiming the existance of "a political elite that pretends that right of centre voters don't count" really, really ignores reality. We live in a country where every single political party agrees that tax rates on profits should be a fraction of tax rates on wages.

[EWI]

Eventually, by the 1990s even Fianna Fáil ministers were able to steer legislation like decriminalising homosexuality through the Oireachtas without any difficulty.

I find it quite highly amusing that Richard can claim to bemoan the liberal/progressive agenda of recent years. As anyone who knows him is aware, an undoubtedly important part of his own life has been decriminalised by this political movement, so he really should know better.

[Ciarán]

It's a strange one alright. Apart from - as Badman pointed out - the silent majority being the refuge of unpopular people everywhere, I would have thought that Ireland did have small government, low taxation and conservative moral policies.

The reason Irish people wouldn't vote for a hypothetical conservative party has more to do with the clientalism that accompanies their conservatism. In other words, they prefer the old favourites to anyone new.