Presidential Alienation
With the establishment still reeling from Catherine Connolly’s landslide victory in the recent presidential election, the establishment media have gone into overdrive trying to produce a palatable counter narrative to the resounding victory of the combined forces of the constitutional left. The record number of spoiled votes seems to fit the bill most closely.
Speaking in Dublin Castle shortly after the result was confirmed, Simon Harris insisted that “we need to look under the hood” to understand the supposed “alienation” at play. All the establishment newspapers ran with versions of this narrative in the immediate aftermath of the election.
This sudden concern for alienated voters is rich. For a month, the establishment media; print, digital, and broadcast warned the electorate of the dangers of a Connolly presidency. Under the guise of “just asking questions,” they hammered the same talking points relentlessly. Their frustration grew as Connolly refused to elaborate on her answers. The media demanded contrition; Connolly gave them obstinacy.
As polls showed Connolly’s support rising week after week, the media pivoted to insisting voters were disinterested, predicting a record low turnout. They were wrong on both counts. When an overwhelming majority of voters rejected the media’s dire warnings that a vote for Connolly was a vote for chaos, a new narrative was urgently required. After all, what use is establishment media if people simply ignore it? So they latched onto “alienation”, alienation from the selection process, alienation in the grassroots of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, alienation supposedly revealed by spoiled ballots. Anything but the obvious: the public stopped listening to them.
But the “alienation” line wasn’t the only rearguard action underway. There’s a second, nastier narrative being pushed by D4 opinion-makers: that Heather Humphreys was rejected not because her party is toxic, not because her ministerial record was underwhelming, and not because she struggled under the spotlight, but because she was a Presbyterian. According to this version of events, the electorate of the 26 counties isn’t mature enough for a United Ireland.
This is an attempt to turn a political failure into a moral indictment of the public. It also collapses under the weight of basic facts. Its worth digging into a bit deeper, ignoring the obvious, that the Twenty-Six County state has already had two presidents from a Protestant background, the implication from sections of the press was that Humphrey’s Presbyterian faith rather than her strong connections to the Orange Order was the sticking point for voters.
That is a form of sleight-of-hand. The Orange Order today has fewer than 30,000 members - around 3% of Protestants in the North. Even at its height in the 1960s, it represented only 10%. Criticising the Orange Order is no more an attack on Protestantism than criticising Israel is an attack on Judaism. However, by fusing religious identity with a political organisation defined by British supremacy, sections of the Irish media are copying a tactic long used elsewhere: equating criticism of an ideology with bigotry against a community.
These same commentators, who shrieked “sectarianism” when Humphreys’ Orange Order links were mentioned, were notably silent when Humphreys repeatedly claimed that Éirígí was trying to “pull down the Good Friday Agreement – an agreement signed eight years before the party even existed. The Orange Order, by contrast, opposed the Agreement outright, and has continued to oppose efforts at parity for Catholics and nationalists. As recently as 2022 it described the GFA as an “appeasement process.” This very summer, it condemned a cross-community children’s summer camp for including members from a GAA club.
The hypocrisy is hard to miss. Humphreys had a motive – she was far behind in the polls and needed a stick to beat Connolly with. But the establishment media had no such excuse. They simply refused to interrogate a candidate’s links to an organisation that fought the Good Friday Agreement tooth and nail, while amplifying a baseless narrative about supposed southern sectarianism.
In the end, the voters weren’t alienated, and they weren’t sectarian. They simply refused to buy into the establishment narrative.