The Autonomy of the Political: The Development of the Irish Party System

Abstract

It is generally accepted that Irish party politics represent a rather incongruous strain within the relatively clear-cut patterns which exist throughout the rest of Western Europe. While some recent research demonstrates a certain limited scope for usefully including Ireland in cross-national comparative frameworks,1 the ultimate uniqueness of the Irish party system in relation to other Western European countries has not been substantially disputed. Much of the difficulty encountered in trying to situate the development of Irish parties within a comparative perspective lies in the problem of definition, in that the two largest parties, Fianna Fdil and Fine Gael, seem incapable of other than sui generis classification, their initial momentum deriving from the positions they adopted in, or as a result of, the civil war.2 The only other major party in Ireland is the Labour party, and while it is classifiable within the cross-national social-democratic tradition, its relative weakness vis-a-vis its larger opponents, and its inability as yet to develop a level of voting support equivalent to most of its European counterparts, simply seem to confirm Ireland's anomalous position.