Daniel Finn

It’s unusual for a defeated candidate in an Irish parliamentary by-election to make headlines outside the country. But Gerry Hutch, whose second bid to represent Dublin Central ended in failure last weekend, is best known for his suspected involvement in two of the country’s biggest armed robberies (although he has never been tried or convicted for those alleged offences, committed in the 1980s and 1990s). Hutch was also embroiled in Ireland’s most notorious criminal feud over the last decade. Though he didn’t make it over the line on election day, he outpolled the candidates of both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, Ireland’s traditional parties of government.

By shifting the focus of public debate away from the housing crisis and towards immigration – or by presenting the housing crisis as the consequence of immigration, which amounts to the same thing – Ireland’s far right has performed a valuable service for the government parties. 

The big mistake that Jeffrey Donaldson’s party made was misdiagnosing the political moment of 2016 and after. They saw it as an opportunity for their brand of unionism, which would bring it closer to the British political mainstream. Instead it has proved to be a wedge between Northern Ireland and Britain, as was always likely with a project that rested on a specifically English nationalism.

The British government has faced strong criticism in recent years for its unseemly partisanship in dealing with Northern Ireland’s political actors, as manifested in the confidence-and-supply agreement between Theresa May and the Democratic Unionist Party after the 2017 election. But Boris Johnson and his Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, have now united all of the region’s main parties, from Sinn Féin to the DUP, in opposition to their amnesty plan for Troubles-related killings.

In trying to make sense of the worst disturbances in Northern Ireland for years, there are two symmetrical pitfalls to be avoided. One is to present the recent violence as a simple reflex of Brexit, drawing a straight line between Boris Johnson’s campaign bus and a burning bus on the Shankill Road, while ignoring the local factors at work. The other is to overlook the many ways in which choices made at the highest levels of the British state have unsettled the region and added to the stock of combustible material.