Joanna Bell

When the Taoiseach Simon Harris called a snap election for 29 November, Ireland’s electricity board asked political parties not to put election posters on telegraph poles. They might as well have asked them to take the time off on holiday. As I drive through the Irish countryside on my way to County Cork, I notice plenty of posters on poles, but the usual suspects – Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Sinn Fein and Labour – are now joined by a new force in Irish politics – a grouping dedicated to a punchier, more populist, anti-immigration and pro-family agenda.

Earlier this week, Ireland’s newly installed Taoiseach, Simon Harris, made an outrageous proposal to deploy 100 policemen to control immigration along the border with Northern Ireland. Harris is trying to prevent an influx of immigrants crossing the border before Rishi Sunak’s plan to deport immigrants to Rwanda is implemented. It doesn’t feel like that long ago that his predecessor Leo Varadkar was stressing to European Union leaders how important it was to avoid a hard border. To make his point Varadkar even went as far as highlighting an old news story about an IRA bomb which went off at a customs post in the 70s, killing nine people. Yet for some reason, the moment it became politically inconvenient to defend the open border, Dublin suddenly changed its tune.