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Investigates Investigates Money Diaries The Journal TV Climate Crisis Cost of Living Road Safety Newsletters Temperature Check Inside the Newsroom The Journal Investigates Daft.ie Property Allianz Home The 42 Sport TG4 Entertainment The Explainer A deep dive into one big news story Sport meets news, current affairs, society & pop culture have your say Or create a free account to join the discussion Advertisement More Stories Alamy Stock Photo Surrealing in the Years Surrealing in the Years Sorry Simon, maybe Ireland doesn't want to be a 'centrist' country Hey, I didn’t make the rules. 9.01am, 1 Nov 2025 Share options LAST WEEK MARKED the culmination of something that the entire country has been anticipating, discussing and debating for what feels like months now. That’s right, my bestselling book, At Least It Looks Good From Space by Carl Kinsella (me), finally hit the shelves. Oh, and there was something about a presidential election as well. It’s over, I guess? But seriously, folks. It’s been a week now since Catherine Connolly was elected Ireland’s tenth president in a landslide that just about everybody had seen coming as we hurtled down the home stretch. Have the results told us anything new about the country we share? Let’s see. In a Hail Mary plea to an electorate that subsequently ignored him, Simon Harris put it thus on the eve of the election: “Tomorrow it’s important that middle Ireland comes out and says ‘we don’t want to send out a message about this country being far-left’. This country is not far-left. This is a centrist country with lots of middle-ground people, and Heather Humphreys epitomises that.” Well, if that’s how you, too, see Ireland, then yes, Catherine Connolly’s record-high first preference tally probably did come as a bit of a shock to you. But where does the Fine Gael leader stand on the matter now? If this was, as he framed it, a referendum on Ireland’s proud history of better-things-aren’t-possible centrism, then surely he must accept that his conceptualisation of Ireland is actually… wrong. The presidential election is the only election we hold on a national level, and three times in a row between 2011 and 2025, we have returned what Simon Harris would class as a far-left candidate. And in 2004 we didn’t even have an election! Now, if you’re someone who has never paid one minute of attention to how people like Simon Harris behave when they get things wrong, you might have expected the Fine Gael leader to feign humility for even a week, to consider reaching out on some level to the demonstrable majority of voters in Ireland who actively like the sound of Catherine Connolly’s politics. Naturally, that’s not what happened. Harris has instead pivoted immediately to bashing immigration at a time when Ipas centres are frequent targets of vitriol and violence, with demonstrations outside Citywest last week resulting in the hospitalisation of several Gardaí and the depletion of enormous public resources. You see, those are the kind of brave choices you need to make after the country has rejected your presidential nominee in such emphatic terms. You puff out your chest, you breeze right past the fact that Irish people are voting for compassion, and inclusion, and togetherness, and instead you blame people whose children are too afraid to leave Citywest to go to school. Unfortunately, rather than realising that Irish people — when they vote as a nation — overwhelmingly favour soundness over the weird, bitter, culture war politics that have brought the likes of the United States, United Kingdom and France into periods of sustained political chaos, Harris has made it clear that he intends to chase the comparatively few people who spoiled their ballots. Either that, or he assumes that those who stayed home on election day will rally to his cause once he adds the final piece of the puzzle. “Yes, we’ve tried not building houses, not building children’s hospitals and not tackling the cost of living, but maybe, just maybe, if we tell people that immigration is to blame, we can finally bring those apathetic voters into the Fine Gael tent.” Advertisement But back to the spoiled votes for a moment. Spoiling your vote is a perfectly valid choice. There are those who would tell you that you should always use your vote since someone fought and died for your right to do so, but people fought and died for our right to do all sorts of stuff we don’t want to do. The fact of the matter is, sometimes there is no option on the ballot that speaks to you. With only three nominees on the presidential ballot, it is not especially mysterious that some voters felt that way this time around. It is, however, not a new phenomenon in Ireland. For decades, there have been all sorts of cohorts in this country that have lacked appropriate representation in Dáil Éireann. What is new, of course, is the number of people who spoiled their ballots, and the nature of their grievance. Anecdotally, talliers at count centres this year reported a notable increase in ballots that had racist messaging written on them. Separately, there were also a significant number of voters who wrote in the name of Maria Steen, a campaigner who didn’t have enough Oireachtas support to get on the ballot. Micheál Martin, for his part, has suggested that this may necessitate a referendum on how candidates make it onto the presidential ballot. Do we think there’s any chance he would be calling for such a thing if his candidate had won, let alone in the resounding fashion that Connolly did? If we’re being very honest with ourselves, had the Fianna Fáil candidate won this election by 0.01% while spoiled ballots made up 49%, you’d have a much harder time getting Micheál Martin to suggest ripping up the system that’s been in place since our very first presidential election in 1938. It makes sense that Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael would want to frame these election results as a rebuke of the system as a whole, seeing as how, on the face of it, the results are much more clearly a rebuke of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. After all, neither Fine Gael nor Fianna Fáil have ever seemed especially worried about the range of candidates available to the public before. Until now, they have never made it their business to rewrite the rules of Irish elections so that we can see more socialists, more green candidates, more candidates from diverse backgrounds on posters. No, for some reason, this only seems to be a problem now that we have more Catherine Connolly voters than we have Humphreys, Gavin and spoiled voters combined. That’s not to say that the system is perfect. We know, for example, that in 2015 a quarter of the voting population favoured a reduction in the age of eligibility down to 21. And before you say, hey, that’s not that many, I’d remind you that it is more than twice as many people who just spoiled their ballot in the presidential election, so if we’re taking that seriously, then we might need to give a fair hearing to the Kid President people, too. Hey, I didn’t make the rules. The displeasure of those who spoiled their ballots is Catherine Connolly’s concern as President of Ireland, but it is not especially a problem for the likes of Sinn Féin, Labour, Soc Dems, PBP and the Roderic O’Gorman Last Man Standin’ One Man Band. Those parties can take heart that they have demonstrated a viable left alternative in this country, capable of accomplishing significant goals. It further helped that the movement was helmed by a candidate who, despite occasionally being maligned as gaff-prone, campaigned tirelessly for months without ever really tripping up. Now, a kind of unspoken thing here is that the office of the presidency is obviously pretty limited in the direct effect it can have on, like, basically anything in the world. However, Catherine Connolly’s historically successful campaign has certainly proved something about Ireland in 2025. The left can win in Ireland, and we may, at last, not be quite so centrist as those in the centre would like to believe. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Support The Journal Carl Kinsella Send Tip or Correction Embed this post To embed this post, copy the code below on your site Email “Surrealing in the Years: Sorry Simon, maybe Ireland doesn't want to be a 'centrist' country”. Recipient's Email Feedback on “Surrealing in the Years: Sorry Simon, maybe Ireland doesn't want to be a 'centrist' country”. Your Feedback Your Email (optional) Report a Comment Please select the reason for reporting this comment. Please give full details of the problem with the comment... 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