How appropriate at Samhain to turn to some ghouls. A spectre is haunting Ireland, the spectre of Fascism. The Far Right cannot get one of their own onto the ballot paper, but they have managed to make themselves into the story, with the compliance of the Liberal Right more keen to report on empty ballots than on ballot boxes full of votes for Connolly. This Subplot has provided the Elites with something else to talk about, as it was intended to do.

The Right have learnt a new democratic technique: spoiling their vote. Now Macdara is an accustomed vote-spoiler, in particular decorating his Brexit ballot paper with a series of questions and statements. He is always keen on tracking this fascinating form of democratic engagement. And its recent adoption is further evidence—as if the street attacks and house-burnings were insufficient notice—that the Right is organising.

Of course they are not organised enough to have a real electoral campaign. Now Maria Steen is a busy woman, homeschooling all her children, so perhaps she only belatedly became aware of the Presidential election. Surely this is the explanation for expressing an interest in running only a few weeks before the election, compared with, say, Mary Robinson, who campaigned for many months before her run. The massive losses of the campaigns for which Steen acted as a mouthpiece for arch-Catholic interests, have apparently failed to dim their sense that they, and she, represent the real Irish man and woman. 

The presumably doomed combination of the Old Right—the people who enslaved women and sold children—and the New Right—local adjuncts of the Anglo-American Incel and Anti-Vax conglomeration—believes that it could have run a winning candidate if only there were any political representatives who would support one. Now Ireland’s politicians have been elected by the same citizenry who have massively supported Connolly and whom the Right is claiming are hungering and thirsting for a Fascist candidate, so calling this belief questionable is doing a disservice to Questions. 

In fact the spoiled vote share is a little less than Peter Casey’s vote-share two cycles ago, and it cannot be assumed that the variety of motives behind spoiling a vote would lead all of those who did so to support a single candidate, whether Steen, Casey, McGregor or anyone else. So we have not learnt anything new through use of this tactic. But the logic of the Liberal Right asserts itself nevertheless: they must always move to the Right. So at this moment when Connolly has won a huge victory for the Left, while murderous thugs terrorise the people, Simon Harris—taoiseach or táiniste, whichever he is today—has decided to go chasing the spoilers, the incels, the forced-birthers, the thugs, to add to his established voter base of people who have become rich through landlordism and the mass theft of a corrupt property market maintained by and for the Elites. Much easier to be a racist than to build some fucking houses, which would threaten the stability of the Partitionist Party and therefore the State itself!