Just after 4pm last Wednesday, on a bright September afternoon in Dublin city, Michael Healy-Rae was struck through the open window of his car, leaving him bloodied and in need of stitches.
Gardaí arrested a man in connection with the incident on Thursday, and while it’s too early to say anything about what motivated the incident, politicians were quick to point to a growing atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Healy-Rae himself said a “serious conversation” was needed about the “toxicity directed towards politicians and public representatives”.
The incident happened a day after another man was arrested for an alleged attempted assault on Taoiseach Micheál Martin at the National Ploughing Championships.
These aren’t isolated incidents: many politicians have drawn attention to increased abuse and threats towards people in political office in recent years. There have been protests outside the homes of politicians and, since 2025, gardaí have made 18 arrests in relation to some form of abuse or offence targeted at people in public positions.
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How did we get here? A recent poll by More in Common flew under the radar but its findings should have been a wake-up call. It pointed to a disillusionment and disenfranchisement that suggest Irish politics and society have reached an inflection point. Two thousand adults were polled in April and again in June and asked about their attitudes to our institutions, our place in Europe, our relationship with the US and the issues that matter to them on the eve of the Irish presidency of the Council of Europe.
One of the questions asked whether our social and political institutions were worth preserving and improving or if people could not help thinking “just let them all burn”: 41 per cent leaned towards letting them burn.
Answers to other questions in the survey might give insight into why people want to let the institutions burn: almost two-thirds felt the system was rigged to serve the rich and influential. Almost half said they sometimes felt like strangers in their own country. Forty-three per cent of respondents said the economy was fairly bad or very bad, compared with only a third who felt it was fairly or very good.
The survey shows that a significant percentage of Irish people have the type of disillusionment and lack of trust that leaves Ireland vulnerable to its own Trump or Brexit moment. Populist movements around the world have been fuelled by a sense that society is not working for ordinary people, concerns about a rapidly changing society and a feeling that the current system for expressing this dissatisfaction and defending their interests is not working.
As an experiment, I recreated these surveys on my social media – which is of course far from representative, but I wanted to get a sense of who might feel like this. I was surprised by the breadth of people so disillusioned that they leaned towards letting the institutions burn: they included a tech consultant, a nurse, a landscaper, a poet, a pastor, a physiotherapist, an ecologist, a small business owner, a doctor and an architect. From rural areas, cities, large and small towns.
Conleth Burns, associate director at More in Common who leads its Irish work, pointed out that the proportion of people who lean towards wanting to let our institutions burn is the same in Ireland as it is in the UK and Australia, two countries having very active conversations about the threat from right-wing populism.
This dissatisfaction can be harnessed by both the left and the right, but the right has been more successful at doing so across the world. Ireland’s politics stands on a knife edge, with dissatisfied voters moving both left and right. Those who are dissatisfied are generally voting for Aontú, Sinn Féin or the anti-establishment left, according to the More in Common data.
The organisation also conducted focus groups with electorally interesting groups: voters who spoiled their ballots in the presidential election; Gerry Hutch and Malachy Steenson voters in Dublin’s inner city; Noel Thomas voters in the Galway byelection. One of the main distinctions between anti-establishment voters was who they thought the system was rigged in favour of. On the left, people said the system was rigged to serve landlords and tech companies. For Independent Ireland voters, it’s Ipas centres and asylum seekers. Sinn Féin voters were split between the two, a testament to the party’s split base and the difficult balancing act it is trying to pull off.
What makes Ireland unusual in an international context is how malleable our mainstream political parties are: unwedded to any specific ideology, they have historically been able to adapt to popular opinion, protecting them from the threat of populist parties. Jim O’Callaghan, for example, has managed to adopt sometimes quite extreme anti-immigration policies – such as the cruel new rules on refugee family reunification – without having to found a new party, a testament to the malleability of Fianna Fáil.
However, the political establishment seems not to know how to react to the current dissatisfaction, or even to be talking about it, leaving us vulnerable to our own “Brexit moment”.
What might our Brexit moment look like?
We may already have seen miniature versions of it. Riots in Dublin city centre that caused at least €20 million of damage in a single night. Fuel protests that immobilised the country but enjoyed widespread support. Two referendums that were largely seen as sure bets that were soundly rejected. Tallies from areas such as Dublin’s Cherry Orchard, which had 93-96 per cent No votes, or from Donegal with 84 per cent No votes read to me less like consensus on a substantive issue and more like a protest. The really remarkable thing is how easily we seem to have accepted and moved on from these extraordinary events. If the care and family referendums had been about something more significant – a political stunt about our membership of the EU, for example – can we say with complete confidence that that protest vote couldn’t have been mobilised? I’m not sure we can. And that’s not a comfortable feeling.
Although the More in Common poll shows strong support for the EU, it also shows there is more of a Eurosceptic minority than many of us might think: 17 per cent of people said they would vote to leave the EU if there were a vote tomorrow, and 15 per cent said Ireland’s membership of the EU was a bad thing. This is without any organised anti-EU campaign.
The Brexit and Maga movements took their establishments by surprise. We are lucky to be late to the party – but only if we actually learn the lessons from these countries.
Keire Murphy is a policy researcher and migration expert
