For years in polite Irish discourse, the word “socialism” has been handled the way one might handle an unexploded device: carefully, nervously, and preferably with gloves. It was the term Michael McDowell liked to reach for when he wanted to suggest fiscal recklessness, Venezuelan grocery shelves, and a sudden shortage of sensible shoes. “Socialism,” in that register, meant state overreach, chaos, and an alarming number of committees.
Then along came Bernie Sanders and, in New York politics, Zohran Mamdani (often misrendered in Irish commentary as “Mansour” Mamdani), and the word began behaving very differently.
Sanders did something almost scandalous: he explained what he meant. Instead of barricades and five-year plans, he talked about healthcare, student debt, wages, and billionaires paying more tax. He described “democratic socialism” less as a revolution and more as a tidy extension of the New Deal. It was socialism with a cardigan. Medicare for All turned out not to involve storming the Winter Palace but filling out a form without going bankrupt.
Mamdani, meanwhile, has deployed the word with cheerful normality in the rough-and-tumble of New York. Rent freezes. Public transport funding. Tenant protections. Hardly the stuff of secret police. He uses “socialism” the way previous generations used “fairness”: as a shorthand for government intervening on behalf of people who don’t own three homes and a lobbying firm.
McDowell, by contrast, still wields the word like a Victorian headmaster brandishing a cane. To him, it suggests confiscation, collapse, and queues for everything except regret. When he says “socialism,” he means: beware. Hide the silver. Lock the wine cellar.
But language evolves. In the United States, younger voters hear “socialism” and think “cheaper insulin.” They think “not being one illness away from ruin.” They do not immediately picture grey apartment blocks and state-issued gloom.
That shift has travelled. Even in Ireland, the term no longer guarantees electoral exile. It has become debatable rather than damning.
Sanders and Mamdani have not nationalised the means of production. They have, however, partially nationalised the conversation. They have taken a word once used primarily as an insult and made it, at minimum, an argument.
McDowell can still hiss it like a warning label. But it no longer detonates on impact.
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