Michael Collins
FOLLOWING A decade in which Sinn Féin assumed leadership of the opposition to the government, is there a right-wing alternative now in gestation in the form of Independent Ireland (II) led by Michael Collins TD? Coming over as paragons of ‘common sense’ (usually an indication of fundamental right-wing politics), Collins and II present as a moderate right-of-centre party with traditional rural values. Their grievances are usually couched in language about the Dublin elite ignoring the concerns of hard-working sons of the soil. But sometimes the restrained, if populist, language of II – and especially that of Collins – is supplanted by a political rhetoric that feeds into the unpleasant tones of Ireland’s new right.
Collins knows that merely importing the politics of the right from the US, UK and EU street activists and social media pugilists of various mosquito groups is not electorally viable in Ireland, especially rural Ireland. But despite this caution, there are too many examples of such politics and outbursts from II’s four TDs – Collins, Michael Fitzmaurice, Richard O’Donoghue and Ken O’Flynn – to avoid the conclusion that II is a parliamentary expression of Ireland’s new right.
The factional disunity of right-wing groups outside the Dáil makes the notoriously fractured left look positively ecumenical but Collins has managed to create a unity of sorts inside the Dáil. For some years, the different Independent TDs jostled and manoeuvred among each other to forge not just a technical or ad-hoc group, à la Shane Ross and Finian McGrath’s Independent Alliance in the 2016-20 Fine Gael-led coalition, but a formal party.
Between the general elections of 2020 and 2024, various personalities – Michael Lowry, Marian Harkin, Michael Fitzmaurice, Mattie McGrath and even senator Michael McDowell – engaged with each other and different TDs in discussions, negotiations, unity proposals, group alliances and so on. Lowry’s group managed the difficult art of creating unity under a hybrid leadership and then successfully negotiated membership of the current coalition Government, much to the envy of those remaining Independents that failed to get on the right political and organisational track navigated by Lowry.
Collins knows that all other things being equal, Fianna Fáil and FG prefer coalition with a tight, more disciplined party than a loose group of Independents and so he formed a proper party in November 2023. First, however, he had to ensure that he became its leader and he did so with a ruthlessness and disloyalty to his former political partner, McGrath.
It was assumed that McGrath was leader of the Rural Independent Group (RIG) formed after the 2020 general election and composed of TDs McGrath, Collins, Carol Nolan, Richard O’Donoghue and the two Healy-Rae brothers, Michael and Danny. McGrath and Collins were like two crusaders, often travelling together to Leinster House from Cork and Tipperary and also to meetings to recruit new members to the RIG as it became clear that a new party was being formed.
But Collins’s leadership coup, when it came, was executed with military precision. While he and McGrath were to meet with a group of new RIG members in November 2023, Collins and O’Donoghue suddenly announced the birth of the new party. That the duo also declared Collins to be leader, with O’Donoghue as general secretary, gives a flavour of the brazen putsch that had taken place.
Collins also recognised that moderation – on the surface – was important, not only in any appeal to the voting public but also to FF when it comes to choosing coalition partners. Neither Micheál Martin nor any other party leader could reasonably persist in boycotting SF while simultaneously choosing to sit down with a party whose principal personalities have political baggage that makes SF look like parliamentary icons.
Collins himself is on record as having some quite lurid political views about how to handle crime and in particular sex crimes, believing that sex criminals and paedophiles should be castrated. He also proposes that criminals should receive a 25-year jail sentence on conviction of a third crime. Showing that he is just as hard on some native souls as he is on immigrants, he does not believe that Travellers should be recognised as an ethnic group. Asylum seekers should, he says, be held in Australian-type “holding bays” and he wants the burqa banned in schools.
TEXAN-STYLE PROPOSAL
Another Texan-style proposal from the west Cork man is that people should be allowed to defend themselves with firearms. But showing a degree of proportion, indeed restraint, Collins told the same media, Hot Press: “I hate to think you’d shoot somebody dead, but certainly there’s plenty of room in the legs, or over the head to frighten the living daylights out of them” (the goddam perp, that is).
A perusal of II’s 2024 election manifesto contains a Law and Order section with the strange title, “Tough on Crime, Protect Free Speech”. This may explain the first demand in the section: “Oppose any hate speech legislation.”
That’s a rather lax attitude to incitement to hatred of immigrants and other vulnerable targets but there is no mention in this electoral manifesto of allowing people weapons to actually shoot criminals. Nor is there a penal proposal for sentencing of ‘three counts and you’re in jail for quarter of a century’ or any of the other measures to deal with immigrants or Travellers as contained in Collins’s list of demands.
Do these contradictions mean Collins wants to join the urban liberal elite he and II members have such contempt for? No. It merely illustrates that II has one brand of Neanderthal political rhetoric for those who might be impressed by competing right-wing groups and another for what II describes as people who want the party to “bring common sense back into politics by delivering common sense solutions”.
Other II personalities let slip their unvarnished views in unguarded moments or situations of dramatic conflict, as when Fitzmaurice spoke in the Dáil within 24 hours of an alleged sexual assault of a 10-year old girl on the grounds of the Citywest Ipas centre last October. The TD acknowledged that the country needs many types of immigrant workers but added: “However, from what we have read last night, we need to have a conversation about illegal immigration.”
Fitzmaurice then argued, as do many on the right, that most people can’t have that conversation for fear of being branded racist.
Becoming more tendentious, he said: “Last night, or this morning, what we read in the newspaper is horrendous. I will not go into that in detail. Unfortunately, over the last year or 18 months, we have seen a huge upsurge in knife crime in this country and a huge upsurge in weapons being wielded that we have never seen in this country. We have seen some cultures treating women as second-class citizens, which is not acceptable.”
Ken O’Flynn
POWELLITE REMARK
Taoiseach Micheál Martin responded in a most emollient manner, saying: “I thank the deputy for raising the issue in a responsible and fair way. I acknowledge that. People are worried and anxious. The deputy made a fair point at the outset that he is not criticising migration generally or the fact that we now have a country and society that have evolved, with many people of different ethnic origins living in the State who are as Irish as sure as the next man is.”
An angry Social Democrats TD, Liam Quaide, became most exercised at this response to Fitzmaurice saying: “There is a very febrile atmosphere out there for refugees and asylum seekers… It was remiss of the Taoiseach, as leader of the country, not to take issue with the narrative that was put to him in some of those questions. He was practically ingratiating in response to deputy Michael Fitzmaurice when the latter made that narrative very clear. That is something the Taoiseach really needs to push back on.”
Collins’s II co-founder, Limerick county TD Richard O’Donoghue, sings from the same hymn sheet and his Powellite remark last July about Ireland needing to protect its culture, lest we “end up in a minority in years to come”, eclipsed an earlier comment in March that year. Then O’Donoghue told the Dáil that “a minority of people have come in, claiming they are from Ukraine. They have bought properties here for over €1m, while living in accommodation supplied by the Government.”
An addition to the three reactionary musketeers came at the 2024 general election when Ken ‘D’Artagnan’ O’Flynn won a Dáil seat in Cork North-Central. Like O’Donoghue, O’Flynn is a former FF member. He left the party when he was not selected to run at the 2020 general election. The flamboyant D’Artagnan is one of the richest men in Leinster House, owning properties in Ireland, Spain and the UK (42 flats in London).
PROTEST BOOST
In 2021 O’Flynn was tripped up by some leftie pedants who objected to his socia media post purporting to show a plane full of Afghan men, which the TD claimed was a “flight coming in from Afghanistan”. It turned out to be a photo taken some years earlier of Afghan men being deported from Turkey to Afghanistan. D’Artagnan said later that he had made an honest mistake.
Outside the Dáil, former RTÉ presenter Ciaran Mullooly took a seat in the EU Parliament in 2024 but his politics are closer to the centre than to the new right (on election he joined the liberal Renew group in Europe) and he joined II because FF would not guarantee him an adequate EU election budget (see The Phoenix 31/5/24).
The party got a boost from its role in the recent fuel protests and it rose to 9% in the last poll, after averaging four to five points in the period since the last election. But the party’s base is confined to a narrow demographic. Its four TDs, 24 councillors and one MEP total 29 elected representatives including just one woman, Linda de Courcy. The latter also happens to be II’s sole Dublin councillor (in Clondalkin) and, other than a Cork city councillor, all the other reps are from rural Ireland’s small to medium-sized towns. Significantly, the party’s Galway West by-election candidate, Noel Thomas, is just one point behind the leading candidate, FG’s Seán Kyne, in a poll of candidates but is not running anyone in Dublin Central.
This is not the basis yet of a challenge to assume the role of a third leg of a centre-right government and, while Collins et al earned some cred during the recent protests, they still have a way to go. The party has an independent status and identity of sorts but there are a lot of ‘independent’ Independents in the house already and more to come at the next election.
It could be that Collins, who has at least proved he can manoeuvre in the bear pit of Leinster House, will make moves to recruit more TDs from the existing or soon-to-be TDs rather than from new II TDs in order to improve his arithmetic prospects of a ministry in the next coalition government.
In the meantime, various personalities on the right, from Maria Steen to Steve Bannon and Collins, circle around the Irish body politic in a quest to create or become the Irish Trump. Does Michael have the necessary charisma for this role?
