Ireland is dreaming of a UK Labour landslide

DUBLIN — For diplomatic purposes, the Irish government takes no public view on who it wants to win the U.K. general election.

But the undiplomatic reality, drawn from POLITICO’s recent conversations with lawmakers and senior civil servants in Dublin’s government quarter, comes across as uncompromising and unanimous: We cannot wait for Keir Starmer.

That eagerness for change is driven, in part, by the knowledge that right at the heart of Starmer’s Labour Party are senior figures with deep roots in Ireland.

It’s fair to say that, for the Irish, the last 14 years of Conservative rule on the other side of the water have been something of a drag.

“At times it’s felt like a nightmare, having this neighbor who gleefully rips up the rulebook over and over and never seems to get how destructive it all has been. We want to have sane, sensible, respectful partners across the Irish Sea again, because that good relationship is so fundamentally important to us,” said a senior government official who, given that the official position on the U.K. election is neutrality, was granted approval to remain anonymous.

A lawmaker for Fianna Fáil, one of the three coalition parties in Ireland’s government, was even more blunt about his desire to see the Conservatives crash out of power in next month’s general election: “July 4 will be our independence day from stupidity. It’ll be gobshites out and adults in, finally. Finally!”   

Such views, shared by government and opposition alike across the political spectrum, reflect both a dim view of the Brexit-era Tory psychodrama, and an excitement about what a Labour government in London might mean for Ireland.

The sentiment is driven by regret over the damage done to Anglo-Irish relations since Brexit, and by what many see as a gulf in competence between Rishi Sunak’s Conservative team in Downing Street and Starmer’s inner Labour Party circle.

For the Irish, having British government counterparts who “get” the political and economic intricacies of Ireland, north and south, would be as invaluable as it has been elusive since the Brexit schism of 2016.

Looking in the mirror

And when the Irish look at Labour’s top echelons, it can feel like glancing in the mirror.

Should Labour take power as every poll makes a dead certainty, British government policy would be guided to an unusual — perhaps unprecedented — degree by people with compelling and wide-ranging ties to Ireland.

This starts with Morgan McSweeney, the Labour campaign director most credited with steering the party away from the hard-left radicalism of Jeremy Corbyn and back toward the political center with Starmer.

When the Irish look at Labour’s top echelons, it can feel like glancing in the mirror. | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

McSweeney, 47, grew up in a village outside the County Cork town of Macroom, population 4,000, where his father ran an accountancy firm and his mother the local bridge club. The family backed Cork’s dominant party of law and order, Fine Gael, a centrist political movement inspired by the great “lost leader” of Ireland, Cork-born IRA rebel commander Michael Collins.

While others in the family tree were involved in Fine Gael, including an aunt on the local council and, much later, a cousin, Clare Mungovan, as a government special adviser, his father said the young McSweeney showed no interest in politics until leaving Ireland to work on London building sites when he was 17.

This was a well-trodden path for decades of Irish emigrants — but for McSweeney, the 1997 election of Labour Leader Tony Blair as prime minister changed everything.

Although Blair had barely campaigned on Irish issues, once in power he supercharged peace talks in Belfast and worked hand in glove with the Irish premier of the day, Bertie Ahern, to deliver the Good Friday Agreement. The pair signed the landmark accord together at Stormont in April 1998.

An inspired McSweeney got a job as a receptionist at Labour HQ and soon worked his way onto Blair strategist Peter Mandelson’s “attack and rebuttal” team. Mandelson had just finished as an unusually canny and effective secretary of state in Northern Ireland, maneuvering to get the region’s first power-sharing coalition of British unionists and Irish nationalists up and running.

Irish at the heart of Labour

Today, McSweeney is seen as central to Labour tactics and strategy — and he’s hardly alone in his circle in having strong Irish connections. Two other senior backroom operators can claim similarly strong ties to the island next door.

Sue Gray of “Partygate” report fame became Starmer’s chief of staff last year after a long career as a senior civil servant in Whitehall and at Stormont in Belfast, where she guided the department of finance but was denied the top job.

Her mother came from County Waterford in Ireland’s southeast, her father from the Northern Ireland border village of Belcoo. Starting her civil service career in Belfast, she even ran a border pub with her County Down country singer husband at the 1980s height of the Troubles — an odd career detour that gives rise to suspicions, never quite knocked down by Gray herself, that she might have been double-jobbing as a spy.

“Sue Gray knows more about the north of Ireland from the inside out than any British prime minister’s chief of staff has ever had. That can only be good for shaping policy on this place. She suffers no fools and there’s plenty enough of them in this place,” a senior Sinn Féin lawmaker who worked with Gray at Stormont told POLITICO.

Gray’s Labour roots will deepen if her son, Liam Conlon, succeeds as Labour’s candidate to become the MP for the new southeast London constituency of Beckenham and Penge. He’s already well versed in Stormont power politics and chairs Labour’s Irish Society.

Completing the Irish triad atop Labour is Pat McFadden, who was once Blair’s political secretary and is now the party’s campaign coordinator and MP for Wolverhampton South East. He grew up in an Irish-speaking household in Glasgow, where tens of thousands of Irish emigrants from the northwest county of Donegal have settled since the Famine.

When he addressed a Donegal political conference on the dangers of Brexit in 2019, McFadden noted how the project threatened to topple the subtle balance of overlapping British and Irish interests in Northern Ireland that had been promoted and protected by joint EU membership and the 1998 peace deal.

Completing the Irish triad atop Labour is Pat McFadden, who was once Blair’s political secretary. | Cameron Smith/Getty Images

“The risk,” McFadden said, “is that the process of Brexit upsets that delicate settlement of allowing people to be British or Irish or both. This is not just about goods crossing the border. It is about identity too.”

On the ground in Ireland

When McSweeney, Gray and McFadden advise Starmer and his Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn on Irish matters, they are preaching to the converted — largely because both Englishmen have already demonstrated an affinity for understanding the lay of the land in Belfast and Dublin alike.

Four years of field work in Belfast started Starmer’s transition from human rights lawyer to politician. Beginning in 2003, he advised the newly founded Policing Board, a cross-community panel overseeing the most sensitive aspect of the complex Good Friday dispensation — the reform of Northern Ireland’s militarized and predominantly Protestant security forces into a more lightly armored police service with preferential recruitment of Catholics.

His annual reports documenting that painstaking process illustrated his ability to navigate a political minefield — and informed his own growing sense that diplomatic engagement could be more effective than lawsuits.

“Some of the things I thought that needed to change in police services we achieved more quickly than we achieved in strategic litigation,” Starmer told The Times’ Patrick Maguire about his time working in Belfast. “I came better to understand how you can change by being inside and getting the trust of people.”

When Starmer addressed Queen’s University Belfast ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday deal, he called it “the greatest achievement of the Labour Party in my lifetime, without question,” and emphasized that its defense required close collaboration with Dublin.

“Nothing has been more self-defeating than the determination of some Conservative ministers, to see our friends in Dublin as adversaries on Brexit,” Starmer said.

When he spoke to The Irish Times shortly after Sunak called the July 4 election, Starmer said he was determined to restore “respectful engagement” with the Irish government over Northern Ireland.

Music to the ears

Bobby McDonagh, Ireland’s ambassador to the U.K. from 2009 to 2013, said that would be music to the ears of a Dublin made weary by the Brexiteer takeover of the Conservatives from 2016.

“Brexit involved a sort of madness — a rejection of expertise, a lack of rationality, and that manifested itself in kicking the best Tories out of the Conservative Party or forcing them to leave,” McDonagh told POLITICO. “Anybody who was sensible and wanted to understand Britain’s real interests in the European Union, they were exactly the same cohort of people who understood Northern Ireland.”

Like his successors at the Department of Foreign Affairs, McDonagh expects to see rapid improvements in British-Irish relations once Starmer enters Downing Street.

If Starmer and Benn follow through on their pledge to revoke the Conservatives’ Legacy Act — a bitterly disputed piece of legislation ending all criminal and civil cases connected to the Troubles — that also would end the Irish government’s European lawsuit challenging the human rights compatibility of the British legislation.

Keir Starmer said he was determined to restore “respectful engagement” with the Irish government over Northern Ireland. | Carl Court/Getty Images

Similarly, if Labour manages to negotiate a bespoke veterinary and sanitary agreement with the EU, as Starmer says would be desirable, that would end the primary need for the so-called Irish Sea border — the EU-mandated checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Britain, the issue that ground Stormont power-sharing to a halt for two long years.

In the longer run, McDonagh said, the most powerful route for improving relations with Ireland, an extremely pro-EU nation, would be for Starmer to repair its relations with Brussels.

“At some point in the next five years, Starmer hopefully will launch more profound ideas about Britain getting a closer relationship with Europe and possibly even rejoining,” said McDonagh, who also held a series of diplomatic posts in Brussels. “He’s right not to talk about that now. He needs to win the election first.”