Catherine Connolly skated in by a landslide. She won every age group by a distance. Turnout was up on the 2018 election.
Many may retain their reservations but no one with a functioning brain cell can deny she is our president.
Yet the soundtrack of the weekend was the gloating masterminds of #spoilthevote. Even combined with the entire vote of Connolly’s opponents, their “vote” wouldn’t have come near her first preference total.
Yet the ferocity of their message, scrawled into a 213,000 ballot pile, was frenetically picked over and analysed. This was the authentic voice of their risen people, the leaders insisted, a claim borne out by data collected by Technological University Dublin (TUD) politics academic Kevin Cunningham.
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Those who spoiled the vote were no random mix of the general population. They were overwhelmingly supporters of Independents, Aontú, Independent Alliance and other right-wing parties. Given a list of hypothetical candidates, two thirds of them said they would have voted for Maria Steen. When asked whether they would vote for a left alliance of Sinn Féin, Social Democrats, Labour and People Before Profit at the next election, nearly three quarters said no.
So #spoilthevote was unquestionably the conservative, nationalist movement it claimed to be, with supporters such as far-right councillors Malachy Steenson, Gavin Pepper and the National Party.
It was led by businessman Declan Ganley, had campaign headquarters strategically located in Co Laois, a slick website, its own posters (featuring the image of Maria Steen) in later days, and the relentlessly promoted hashtag on Elon Musk’s far-right X, to whom Ganley expressed thanks.
Though Steen said she had nothing at all to do with spoilthevote.ie, she expressed gratitude to all who wrote her name into the ballot, without distinction.
One of her fans labelled the three candidates “communist scum”, “pervert” and “EU puppet” and called for mass deportations. Another wrote: “Eat my arse – Traitors! Our ancestors didn’t fight and die to make Ireland a third world shithole.” Another who added Nick Delehanty and Conor McGregor to his Steen “vote” also drew a pretty blue handbag – “bought with her own money” – and across the top “She was only 10!” in reference to the little girl allegedly sexually assaulted by a migrant awaiting deportation.
There were plenty of spoiled votes with no reference to Steen too. One from Donegal wrote “Ireland for the Irish”, lest the swastikas scratched beside each official candidate be misinterpreted.
Meanwhile, Sophie Brady – a young survivor of child sexual abuse at the hands of Irish relatives, who posted on Instagram wondering why Irish women are only worthy of national attention when attacked by a foreign national – said she was rewarded with death threats via direct message and her account was taken offline.
Last week, as violent riots continued outside Citywest, a 44-year-old Dublin man was jailed for 18 years for repeatedly raping his daughter when she was aged between five and eight, and for a violent assault on the child’s mother. Separately, 21-year-old Niamh Kelly described how her life changed after being stabbed 50 times by her ex-boyfriend Josh O’Brien, leaving her blind in one eye.
In Cork, a 34-year-old man pleaded guilty to sexually abusing his two nieces when they were just four and eight. In Limerick, a court heard how Willie Woodland breached the suspended portion of a six-year sentence for a firearms conviction by repeatedly attacking his ex-girlfriend with a knife and biting her on the face, neck and back. A search of his home revealed a loaded machine gun along with cash and drugs. It’s not difficult to imagine the response if any of these perpetrators had been a migrant.
Anti-immigrant voices argue that these cases are “different” because immigrant offenders are here as a result of Government policy. But if the problem is the result of other cultures and backgrounds, as they suggest, surely the patriots should be trebly furious when one of their own commits such an atrocity.
Still, the protests outside the Citywest hub continued this week, with lines of children in the dark photographed for social media, holding banners saying: “She was 10” and “Éirinn go Brách”.
[ How social media drove the Citywest riotsOpens in new window ]
The truly dangerous lesson being imbibed by those small children is that male sexual violence and entitlement is not a white, Irish problem but one entirely related to skin colour. And worse, that no deeper learning is required. This is what happens when the State falls down in its duty, and bad faith actors are allowed to run away with the narrative.
People have every right to be furious about State failures in deportation and child protection. Timely public press conferences, not just statements, from the appropriate authorities in relation to immigration matters should be the norm. Legal and practical complications in such cases (as there often are), along with details of the necessary legal constraints, should be communicated in plain, non-legalistic language. These should then be disseminated in short, accessible clips across social media.
Then let’s talk about such topics as the culturally subservient female relatives of Jozef Puska, Ashling Murphy’s murderer – while taking a closer look at the horrific details of coercion and domestic violence cases spilling out in the Irish courts.
