Say what you want about the riots and protests that have rocked Ireland in the last 18 months; it’s been cinematic. Of the striking imagery produced notable highlights include this boy on horseback on at a protest in the deprived district of Coolock, hunched over with his hood pulled up, face towards the camera, looking like nothing so much as a Nazgul from Lord of the Rings; the bloody and teary face of a protestor after a baton and pepper-spray enabled encounter with Gardai; large groups various protests marching behind a banners bearing slogans like “Ireland belongs to the Irish”.

The unrest has been a mixed-sex activity and many of the most notable incidents have involved young women, but it’s boys and men who have characterised the most aggressive incidents, leading to one publication to dub the height of this activity in 2023 “Youngfella Summer: Dublin’s Delinquent Renaissance.” (Youngfella means what it sounds like but is a bit more like “hooligan” than “lad”.) The government and its semi-official agents have noticed this pattern too.

The political divergence between men and women has defined recent political turmoil across the west and beyond, particularly in younger age groups. This Financial Times report notes that “Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others… (but) today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter… a broader realignment of young men and women into conservative and liberal camps respectively on other issues”. In turn the changes result in parties adopting messaging styles and values that are repulsive to one sex or the other, resulting in a self-perpetuating cycle of polarisation. Immigration provides the Irish powers with enough to worry about in terms of electoral fractures; As a general election looms, do they need to start worrying about Gender based political polarisation as well?

The results for each of the Irish parties in the 2020 election was notable, if anything, for the lack of a gender divide. As exit polls from the time show, very slightly more women voted for independents, and very slightly more men voted for Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail, but beyond that the sexes were pretty much in lock step. Polling in Ireland is not reliable to say the least as evidenced by their failure to predict the recent Family and Care referendums. But superficially at least, it seems that Ireland has remained immune to a significant international trend. Why is that?

The empowerment of women is the key factor driving the trend and in Ireland that empowerment has happened as part of a transition to cultural liberalism that has been both late and sudden. A person born in Ireland in 1979 will have experienced the legalisation of contraception, abortion and divorce, during their lifetime and some of that quite recently. The marriage ban was only ended in 1973, later than the majority of other anglophone countries. The number of women in the Irish parliament is noticeably behind peer countries and this is a live topic in Irish politics at each successive election. On the other hand, college education has been a key driver of the gender split in other countries and Irish women earn more degrees than men and at a rate higher than the EU average.

In other words, even if Ireland did have the ideological space to allow distinctive separation to grow between men and women on political grounds, it’s not clear that our separation from a more restrictive past, and the history of women’s empowerment, is deep enough to facilitate it.

On the other side Gender-based political polarisation happened in other countries in part because it leveraged existing conservative movements to respond to alienation from the policies but also interactive styles of liberalism. 

The Church might theoretically be a power node in that sense and it’s true that it continues to have a role in hospitals, and schools and rhetorically to function as a national bogeyman whose memory liberalising forces can kick against when they need to feel strong, when they need a placeholder for a true antagonist against whom they can define their struggle. But in reality is that the church is both so discredited and defanged amongst all segments of the population that it does not provide a point of orientation from which the reactionary side of gender split could orient itself.

On the media side, the internet has allowed outlets in other countries to differentiate their products in order to respond to and develop different audiences, then build up a mini-ecosystem focused on the interests of that slice of the population. We’ll call this the Joe Rogan factor.

This process facilitates ideological variation by incubating different ideas, and showing politicians there is a profitable space for them to move into, that if they want to buck the status quo in some way there are people who will reward and support them. But all that requires a market big enough that it can sustain you through that development and Ireland doesn’t have that; any non-consensus publication (or publication, or organisation) is trying to, initially at least, get a thin slice of an already very small pie. That’s not to underrate the success or growth potential of a publication like Gript (for example), easily one of the media stories of the decade. But succeeding with getting any enterprise that swims against the tide in a country where the tide is so strong, is tough.

Ireland’s size and an electoral system that creates “an incentive to focus on local constituency issues above national issues” means that politicians have remained closer to the people who elect them than in other countries. It’s not necessarily a criticism to say that members of the Irish parliament often think and behave more like local councillors with their driving motto being “let me fix that for you”. Ideology exists but it prospers best when it is linked directly to the conditions of local voters rather than being at a national level. 

If these facts make you think that the impacts of gender-based political polarisation will pass Ireland by, you’d be wrong as the immigration unrest has intimated. It has simply adapted itself to the local conditions, much as immigration unrest did.

David McWilliams amongst others has noted that small countries tend to be rule-followers rather than rule-breakers. The largest historic Irish parties, who have ruled uninterrupted since the inception of the state have reasonably concluded that their and Ireland’s best chance to flourish the international system is to be the most ardent rule-followers and the most dedicated exponents of upwardly mobile international values; in ideas terms they therefore see themselves as pure managers of the status quo. In 2024 the status quo cultural ideas they manage are those of Managerial Liberalism.

In transmitting those ideas and setting them as the sole lens through which a normal party sees the world, Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and their representatives function more like a PO Boxes or automated email notifications than political parties – they exist to transmit already developed and successful (in the sense they are espoused by successful people) values to the Irish public; but they themselves don’t think anything, don’t know anything, can’t tell you anything. This is often reflected in the fact they are so poor are defending specific cultural and social policies when the Irish media’s protective shield momentarily lapses and allows them to be pressed lightly on a given point.

In Ireland many of the material conditions for a gender divide are there; and some symptoms of the reality of a gender divide are also present. Characterically, what is missing in Ireland is the bit in the middle, where both impulses of that polarisation get expression within the political system. What we have instead is a cultural underclass that is inchoate and ugly and fully outside the system, while the values of hyper-liberalisation are shared and disseminated by all legitimate parties within the system, but for the most part in a reflexive and brainless way. We can see this in our unusually narrow range of permissible opinion on anything from immigration policy to hate speech laws to responses to covid lockdowns. 

Just because the pressure release isn’t there doesn’t mean there’s no pressure

How this will play beneath the surface of the upcoming elections is uncertain. The locality of Irish politics and aversion of ideological variety on the part of both voters and politicians mean that these contests often dissolve into microscopic knit-picking and around marginal tax rates and scrapping over irrelevant gaffes; that’s certainly how it’s played out so far. Anyone looking at a place to move the Overton window will find nothing promising within the system. An underrated but important observation is that in spite of their complaints Irish people across the country like this system. The country was poor in the recent past and is less so now and people like that, and they understandably conflate liberalisation with comfort and freedom and see anything outside of that as an unnecessary risk for a small and vulnerable society to take. It won’t always be that way.

A Gender divide is most comparable to the immigration debate, and in a variety of ways. Ireland was one of the last countries in Europe to experience mass immigration. It had the opportunity to learn from the difficulties experienced by others and decided not to. Instead it convinced itself that those difficulties simply could not occur. The reason for this is that people misread structural factors that reinforce consensus as an aspect of national virtue. All that meant was when the issue finally did break through, it happened in as explosive ,pathological and uncontrolled a way as possible, a situation that has yet to resolve itself. Gender polarization is more psychological and therefore harder to track. But it’s a similar issue in that our political and cultural system of Ireland seems designed to foster dissatisfaction while simultaneously having no ability or interest in dealing with it once created. Just because the pressure release isn’t there doesn’t mean there’s no pressure. We may come in time to feel about gender-based political polarization in the way we feel about the immigration debate — that it went from nowhere to everywhere; that all of a sudden it’s everywhere and we have no way of getting our arms around it. Why not start today?