Reflections on the Irish Presidential Election: Spoiling Gender Fluid Lebanon
A pre-election version of this article was first published on Ciarán’s Quarrelsome Life Substack and shared on X. He can no longer be found on X, however, because the day after sharing the article – a piece which adds meat to the bones of what X owner, Elon Musk, recently discussed with Joe Rogan around the alleged Citywest child rape – Ciarán received a permanent suspension. The suspension, in place since October 24th, the day of Ireland’s Presidential election, still stands at the time of writing on November 21st. He has yet to discover why.
The 2024 Referendums on Family and Care were a glorious victory against Ireland’s extremist regime. Rejected by 67 & 73 percent respectively, normal common sense defeated a “Progressive” establishment that cares more about transvestite polygamous surrogacy than it does about normal people who just want to build normal lives in normal Ireland.
Soon after the referendums, I attended an excellent MCC Brussels event in which Ireland’s populist eruption was celebrated by numerous speakers. The rejection and conference were both covered in Common Sense Populism and the Irish Revolt, an essay I published here in the pages of Meon. Now, in the wake of Catherine Connolly being elected as President of Ireland I will explain why, despite being sympathetic to some of Connolly’s positions, I spoiled my vote, and I will do so against the backdrop of the horror story from Citywest.
Just days prior to the election, we had reports of an alleged rape of a 10-year-old girl who was under State care, on the grounds of Citywest asylum hotel, by a 26-year-old man who had been issued a deportation order roughly six months beforehand yet was still here, and who required an Arabic translator in court.
In short, we have a man who should never have been here, whom the State then failed to remove, allegedly raping a child under care of that same State.
None of this is surprising. On the State care side of things, it is long known that Tusla, the State’s Child and Family Agency, is criminally unfit for purpose. A glaring example of this is the unbelievably unprofessional statement issued about the incident involving the 10-year-old girl which many, including myself, have seen as tantamount to victim blaming. Further, Aontú published very troubling data in September of this year: “since 2014 a total of 235 children either in state care or ‘known to Tusla’ have died. Ten of these children were murdered and 51 of them died either by suicide or drug overdoses.” This is to say nothing of missing kids. In May, Ben Scallan reported:
“Figures released to Gript under the Freedom of Information Act show that as of March 27th 2025, 43 children were missing from the care of the State. Of those, 32 were Separated Children Seeking International Protection (SCSIP), and just 11 were from the mainstream care population.”
This data becomes even more troubling when read alongside a 2023 report, Protecting Against Predators, by researchers from University College Dublin. Nick Delehanty summarised the report as follows:
“The report warns that groups of men are targeting children in State care, grooming them via social media & trafficking them to hotels. The report makes a direct comparison to UK’s grooming gang scandals in Rotherham & Rochdale. […] Two years on from publication...Ireland has ignored the red flags. What happened [in Citywest this week] is NOT isolated. This is systematic. This is the Magdalene Laundries or Mother & Baby Home or Church Abuse scandal of our time. Everyone in polite society too afraid to speak up.”
Moving then to the migrant criminality side of things, per capita violent and sex crime data from around Europe, as I have previously outlined in Meon with An Irish Girl’s Plea for a Safer Hometown, paints a perfectly clear picture. So does data on jihadi terrorism which, as I have previously argued in Gript, is ignored or downplayed whenever regime apparatchiks have a meltdown about the quantifiably less worrisome native “far right”.
Speaking of terrorism, the Pakistani-origin lad charged with the knife attack on the Garda during the summer, according to the Irish Times, is set “to be tried in the non-jury Special Criminal Court, which is reserved for terrorism or organised crime-related offences.” This comes as no shock, of course, since remarkable footage had previously emerged of this incident in which the assailant can seemingly be heard shouting “Allahu Akbar”. If this does, in fact, turn out to be an incident of Islamic terror, it will be Ireland’s 2nd in about a year: remember the stabbing of the Defence Forces priest, Father Murphy, in Galway? With two stabbings and two survivors, Ireland has gotten off lightly so far. And thank God for that. However, given the data on jihadi terror worldwide, it is only a matter of time before we see some serious bloodshed. According to French researchers, “between 1979 and May 2021, at least 48,035 Islamist terrorist attacks took place worldwide. They caused the deaths of at least 210,138 people.”
Two other key pieces of data relating to this asylum fiasco. Firstly, the State has already acknowledged that 87.66% of “international protection” applicants arrive through the North. This means they arrived in the Republic through at least one safe country — if not many more, often with the help of human traffickers — and so are merely opportunists responding to the incentives of Ireland’s pull factors. Secondly, many thousands of those who do arrive via airport are likely to have destroyed their documents — which they needed to board the plane at their point of departure — yet are still allowed to remain in our society.
Besides mountains of such sordid data, it is simply common sense that ramming thousands of literally unvetted men from alien cultures into Irish communities, as the State has been doing with Citywest, is obviously stupid and dangerous.
As pictured above, only days prior to the alleged rape of the child, migrants from Citywest were reportedly sitting around drinking in front of a nearby primary school. At one of the protests that began after the alleged rape, a woman named Anne, who claimed to be a mother of a child in a nearby school, said that this was commonplace:
“The guys that are here in this IPAS centre are drinking alcohol and smoking drugs on the steps of the primary school. I had to call the [Gardaí] to remove them. This is an everyday occurrence.”
This all follows August publication by the same Stop Citywest page of what are claimed to be “incident reports” from inside the asylum hotel, showing dozens and dozens of serious anti-social incidents, including violent altercations, across just 6 months. Indeed, as mentioned above, my most recent essay for Meon outlined a speech given by a brave young girl in Monaghan who, due to the IPAS situation in her area, issued a plea for a safer hometown.
Such mayhem is seen up and down the country due to the asylum gold rush: an enormous racket worth billions of euros to crafty rentiers which is adored alike by “international protection” chancers, activist NGOs, human trafficking gangs, and Irish politicians obedient to their Brussels masters.
This whole situation is utterly insane. But how did we get here? In answering this question, I’d like to recommend a new book by Dr Eoin Lenihan, Vandalising Ireland, a no.1 bestselling book on Amazon Ireland for more than a month after publication. Good overviews can be found in interviews Dr Lenihan did with Eddie Hobbs and Marcas Ó Conghaile Muirthemne. I was fortunate enough to have been sent an early review copy and, prior to buying 4 copies as gifts, this is what I wrote on Amazon:
“Timelines for IPAS mayhem and regime hysterics about the “far right”. These are just two of the very useful reference points in this new book.
What Lenihan provides here is a resource for concerned normies who are unhappy with the direction of their nation, are tired of being slandered, and want to make better sense of the madness.
It is also full of interesting cultural commentaries. A good example being Lehihan’s framing of NGOs as a lifestyle leftist clergy which filled a vacuum left by the Church (the supposedly “non” governmental organisations receiving more than 6 billion euros from government each year).
Whether one agrees with this particular argument or not, conceptual framing like this helps to scaffold a bigger picture understanding about what is going on behind the relentless news cycle.
This book can hopefully help to open up what is still an utterly stifled debate.”
The immigration catastrophe — of which the child sex trafficking and IPAS “asylum” scandals are merely two components of a much larger patchwork of Wild West carnage — is the single biggest issue facing Ireland in 2025. This is because the short-term criminality, medium-term destruction of social cohesion and institutional trust, and long-term “multicultural” Balkanisation of our society, all serve to make it harder for Ireland to address any other problems. More alarmingly, we are also copying France and the UK in creating what professor David Betz of Kings College London has described as civil war conditions.
But when it came to the Presidential election, neither of the two establishment approved candidates in the running, Heather Humphreys or Catherine Connolly, had shown any intent on giving voice to the immigration catastrophe. Although I very much align with many of (now President) Connolly’s concerns about Ireland being dragged into the war machine that not only lied through its teeth about WMDs in order to illegally invade Iraq in 2003, but has since lied to us about many other warmongering escapades, I could not vote for someone who is blind to the immigration catastrophe. As Aris Roussinos wrote in a brilliant piece of on-the-ground reporting for Unherd about the violent unrest outside Citywest: “The position of the predicted winner of the election, the Republican socialist Catherine Connolly, is that Ireland’s borders are nowhere near open enough.”
This is why I ignored the three boxes on the ballot paper and, as symbolic protest, wrote in the words “Maria Steen” elsewhere on the page. Apart from Steen’s powerful role in the No side of the 2024 referendum campaign, her obvious intelligence, her principled Catholic stance against the “Progressive” undermining of human dignity, and her genuinely Presidential demeanour, she has spoken out about the immigration situation and the undermining of Irish national identity. For example, in the Sunday Independent on September 7th 2025, Steen wrote:
“The rapidity and extent of inward migration from societies that share few of our social and cultural expectations have left many bewildered and afraid. Yet any who express such concerns are derided and condemned. Even the most basic expression of Irish patriotism, flying our flag, is treated as suspicious at the highest levels of government.”
Spoiling the vote was, of course, just that — a spoil. But the way I saw it was that if enough voters offered such a protest, a message could be sent not only to the extremists who are vandalising our nation, but to fellow Irish men and women who at best feel unrepresented by the regime, and at worst feel despised by it.
Alas, it seems we have had a gargantuan, record breaking, double figure spoil. The final number is 12.9% and, at one point during the count, Dublin Mid West was reportedly at 21%. For perspective, the spoil in 2018’s Presidential election was 1.2% which, apart from a 4.4% spoil in 1945’s election, is typical.
It seems there are a lot of us. Councillor Malachy Steenson was central to the spoil campaign and, during a post-election interview with Ireland Reports, described how “the last time there was a concerted campaign to spoil your vote was I think in 1945 when the Republican movement, in reaction to Fianna Fáil executing Republican prisoners, had a spoil your vote campaign.” (A perhaps lesser known aspect of Ireland’s World War 2 era history are the executions of IRA members, beginning with the September 1940 death by firing squad of Patrick McGrath and Thomas Hart, under the Fianna Fáil government headed by Taoiseach Éamon de Valera.) Steenson continued: “The political establishment, publicly, are not accepting the reality of what happened yesterday, nor is the media class.”
Also included in the spoil was Peadar Tóibín, leader of Aontú, who had been instrumental in the campaign to try and get Maria Steen onto the ballot. The Kildare Nationalist newspaper quoted Tóibín: “In some constituencies, those spoiled votes pushed Heather Humphreys back into third place, that is a major two fingers to the political establishment.”
Just over 18 months on from last year’s referendum fiasco we have scored, if not quite another glorious victory, then at least an energising blow against Ireland’s extremist regime. The question now, of course, is whether or not this anti-establishment energy can finally be harnessed, with discipline and virtue, toward necessarily radical political change. Everything is to play for. Turning Ireland into a gender fluid Lebanon is hardly what our ancestors had in mind when struggling for centuries under the British yoke. The Irish Nation not only has a hard-won Republic to save, we must save ourselves.