Mick Clifford

There could well be some councillors, for instance.

I would have my suspicions about that there are any or maybe one or two TDs are suggesting it's above 10.

They're in hoopla mode because they had a very good protest in terms of how they came out of it.

And Ashley was talking there about, you know, no direction in the country.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the only direction there seems to be in general around Western democracies at the moment that is new is that of the populist or far right.

And the only representative we have of anything that could be described anywhere near that in this country would be independent Ireland.

They might dispute that, and fair enough, but in terms of their politics, if you look at them...

Whether they can grow into an alternative force, I think, is very debatable because generally what we've seen in scenarios like this is that the mainstream parties adapt and shift themselves from where they are exactly in the centre ground to try and head off those type of entities.

We are relatively unusual in Western Europe.

that we don't have that kind of a populist right party.

Oh, definitely.

I mean, they've done that.

The most obvious thing there is after the 24 family in care referendum, which was perceived as, I think it's an awful term, that term wokeness was perceived as a backlash against that.

The three main parties on move to the right in immigration straight away and they shelled a hate speech law on the basis that, and they've consistently done that kind of thing.

But a lot of it depends on if we hit very bad economic straits,

Everything's up for grabs then, you know.

The root causes, though, I mean, you get back to that in America, you're talking about the Rust Belt states who are manufacturing the union jobs are all gone.

People are not being served by the political process.

That the danger that would be here is if you see increasingly a larger constituency that feel they are not being served by the political process.

And that can even involve something like housing, but also a lot of these issues that arose in rural Ireland.