The Irish presidential election is due to take place on October 18th and at this point the story is all about someone who isn’t a candidate at all. That is Maria Steen, a well qualified, highly capable and well known conservative Catholic commentator and campaigner who failed to get enough nominations to launch her campaign for the presidency. To be nominated, a candidate needed the support of twenty members of the Irish Parliament or four local government authorities. There were a number of other independent candidates in search of a nomination but only Maria Steen came close to securing the necessary support. She garnered 18 of the 20 required nominations.

Yes, rules are rules and there has to be a selection process and few have any issues with that.  There is nevertheless major anger and outcry against “the establishment” for undermining democracy. This reaction is not just from Maria Steen’s supporters but also from others who feel she should have been given an opportunity to run, whether they agree with her views or not. It’s not about her coming tantalizingly close, it’s about her unquestioned eligibility and the fact that all three candidates, already in the field, who were nominated by the two major parliamentary parties and the combined block of left and far left parties do not represent the very large swathe of the Irish electorate who are socially conservative. The decision of the two large parties in government, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, to block, rather than abstain, in local government authority voting closed the second route to Steen and indeed all other independent bidders too.

Recent referendums to change the Irish Constitution to allow legislation on abortion, same sex marriage, the removal of special constitutional recognition for mothers in the home and for “the family based on marriage” have shown a strong cohort of conservative voters in Ireland. While the referendums to introduce abortion and same sex marriage succeeded, close to 40% and just under 33% of voters respectively opposed the amendments. However, the referendums on motherhood and the family in 2024, the most recent two, were defeated by majorities of 70% and 66% respectively.

Irish political dynamics fall into the pattern that marks western cultural wars. There is the same underlying assumption that progressiveness is uniformly not just good but unstoppable, on “the side of history” and that naysayers must be blocked, cancelled and dismissed like those regarded as benighted, obstinate, religious recusants in the religious wars of old. While there is no longer a threat of judicial execution for today’s heretics, that does not mean, as we too well know, they might not pay the ultimate price for their resistance. The shape of politics in Ireland is in line with what’s happening in the US and UK but there is this difference; Ireland shows how far progressiveness, even in the absence of any significant, organized opposition, can push before some of its smarter cheerleaders become queasy to the point of shifting the direction of travel or at least slowing its pace.

In the UK, despite the emergence of voices like J.K.Rowling, Professor Richard Dawkins and a Supreme Court ruling on the dangers and delusion behind trans theory, the clamorous, multi-colored, slogan brandishing bandwagon of woke progressiveness trundles on, even if it looks more and more like a clown car. The British Prime Minister can’t answer the simple question “what is a woman?”. The US offers a similar picture. In Ireland however, it took an attempt to replace “the family founded on marriage” with an amorphous concept termed “durable relationships” before an important figure in Irish public life, prominent lawyer, and former politician, Michael McDowell, felt obliged to map out the legal incoherence and the fraught scenarios in which judicial challenges would inevitably arise if the amendment passed. His arguments were erudite but clear. While grounding his opposition in legal rather than values arguments, the inseparability of both was tacit. Michael McDowell joined with Maria Steen and others who would not normally be his political bedfellows to lead a successful campaign and defeat both proposals.

When the dust settled, the result was widely presented as a victory for traditional family values. Michael McDowell as a secular, social progressive would have been uncomfortable with this representation. He would also, rightly I think, feel that such a representation was inaccurate. It was his argument that shifted enough people from the progressive camp to take the opposition over the line to victory. Without his intervention, the result would most likely be again a very creditable defeat for the conservatives. While it’s true that Maria Steen is a very fine legal brain and argued on legal as well as values grounds, her social conservatism and Catholicism would have muted those arguments for many especially if she and like-minded people were the only ones headlining the campaign.

Michael McDowell went against his long-held principles of natural justice and fairness, his commitment to democratic values when he declined to support the nomination of Maria Steen last week. He has been quoted as saying, “if I support her, she’ll win.” In a defense of his refusal to nominate her in The Irish Times (1/10/25) he confirms that his position was grounded in his ‘liberal’ politics which precluded him from supporting her or even being associated with her nomination.  He claimed she would be ‘divisive’ while conceding that ‘she could win’. Effectively, he disenfranchised a large cohort of voters by removing their right to vote for and possibly elect Maria Steen.

It’s true that some candidates, irrespective of their strong democratic mandate, can be described as divisive. What McDowell overlooks is that the politics of social liberalism he so fervently espouses are just as ‘divisive’ to those who hold Maria Steen’s views on issues around family and marriage. In fact, this large cohort of the population is hugely underrepresented in the national parliament largely because the mainstream parties have long bought into the politics of secular progressivism. Growing misgivings about the direction of ideological travel find expression in occasional ballots like referendums and presidential elections when there can be a meaningful choice for conservative voters That is no longer so, as explained, in presidential elections because “liberals” like Michael McDowell don’t want “divisive” politics to stall or potentially derail their progressive agenda.

Divisive debate is the stuff of politics. The new “iberals” don’t have a problem with divisiveness on the occasions when their views clash with the engineered consensus. If Michael McDowell denies an opportunity to social conservatives to find their true level of support in the polling booth, the follow-up question is what objections can he have to a “liberal” newspaper or any media editor for denying it as well? Currently, most Irish news outlets are in receipt of state support so it’s arguable how much freedom any editor enjoys whatever his convictions. We may even ask if dissenters should even be facilitated on social media if their views can be defined as counter to the “community values” or ethos of the provider? Michael McDowell rejects the title of “gatekeeper”. In fact, elected politicians are quite literally the gatekeepers when it comes to deciding which candidates can come before the electorate in a presidential election.

Democratic structures have rail guards and it’s right that they do. There has to be some criteria of eligibility in the selection of candidates. The exclusion of Maria Steen in this election had nothing to do with her lack of suitability and eligibility. There was nothing at all in her background and history that could remotely suggest she would undermine the democratic institutions of the State. The problem for Michael McDowell and other independent parliamentarians who could have nominated her was that she had a distinct chance of winning. Michael McDowell in his Irish Times article acknowledges that and that in turn is a tacit acknowledgement that it is he who cannot be trusted with the free workings of democracy.

Michael McDowell describes himself as a “liberal” which most people would accept as a fair description of his politics to date. However, in terms of “left” and “right” he would be described as “centrist”. So much so, Maria Steen said she would have supported him had he declared an interest in the presidency. She of course has serious disagreements with him on key questions but there are others where her views and his would align. This attitude as much as anything else in Maria Steen’s record shows her to be more democratic and inclusive in her politics than he is. He had nothing to fear from her possible victory other than that it could be a setback for what he sees as the arc of progress.

In effect, Michael McDowell and the political establishment in general are turning their backs on democracy and replacing it with a bureaucratic and technocratic paradigm overseen by elites. What has been happening in Ireland in recent years is that a thick interface of expert groups, a myriad of tax funded NGOs and so called citizens’ assemblies (a “representative” group of 100 citizens convened under government appointed experts to be manipulated into endorsing policies that have never featured in their electoral manifestos) has pushed the people further and further from their elected representatives. This interface is destroying both transparency and accountability. It’s a power grab by a thousand small strikes, a coup by stealth. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, according to Thomas Jefferson but in Ireland we have been so asleep that a respected elder statesman of outstanding intellectual heft, the very kind of public figure we might expect to be to the fore in defending liberty, has become part of the conspiracy to throw over democracy. It’s a wake-up call that might well prove to be on the right side of midnight.

How did we get here? For the self-regarding elite, even though they won’t admit it, they don’t know what is best for them. They could elect someone like Maria Steen just like they elected Donald Trump, twice, Georgia Meloni, Gert Wilders and may even make Nigel Farage the next Prime Minister of Britain. What they don’t want to see is that these trends reflect the failure of the socially engineered and socially rupturing politics they are pursuing under the influence of globalist overlords who profit from  societal disintegration

The electorate is poised to send them a loud warning in what is hoped will be an avalanche of spoiled votes bearing Maria Steen’s name on October 18th. The world needs to watch this space.