Ireland’s Leaders Grandstand Overseas While Reality Crumbles at Home

Last year in Ireland, a ten-year-old girl in state care was raped by a man the government had already ordered to deport. The government brushed it off as a “regrettable oversight.” The apology was so rehearsed it could have been written weeks before the crime.

There was no national outrage. No emergency debate. No resignations.

The public was told to stay calm. The reaction was labelled “far-right hysteria.” The government called it “misinformation.” This came as a surprise to no one, because in Ireland, the apology always arrives quicker than the accountability.

But that case did something the political class didn’t expect. It cracked the surface. It made people ask what else is being buried under government PR, staged compassion and fear of saying the obvious.

The truth is, this wasn’t an isolated failure; it was the latest entry in a pattern Ireland has perfected.

We apologise to children after the damage is done. 

For years the state has known about grooming, trafficking, and sexual exploitation happening in its care system. Almost nothing changed.

When the Church fell, Ireland didn’t build something better. It built Tusla, a secular version of the same machinery of neglect, just with progressive language. Five thousand Irish children now grow up in hotel rooms and car parks. Some disappear. Some are trafficked. Some die waiting for basic medical care.

A nine-year-old boy died waiting for scoliosis surgery, not because we lack doctors or the funds to send a child in need abroad for medical care, but because the system has learned to tolerate preventable suffering.

Dozens of children go missing every year from state care. Kyran Durnin was six when he vanished in 2022. The murder inquiry began two years later, with no body ever found. Another girl disappeared within an hour of entering care; she was found a year later locked inside a brothel.

This isn’t mismanagement. It’s structural. Ireland built a child protection system designed to look compassionate from the outside and function as neglect on the inside.

Performance is more important than protection.

Ireland presents itself as a humanitarian success story, a nation stitched together by compassion and progress. We lecture other countries about human rights. We light buildings in solidarity with foreign causes. Our politicians speak fluently in the language of international virtue.

But at home, the same institutions cannot keep their own children safe. Arguably, they never have. And when the public finally says enough, the government doesn’t engage with the outrage. It dismisses it. Calling ordinary anger ‘hate.’

What we’re watching isn’t new. It’s the oldest story in the world. The people who live close to consequences and the people who live close to microphones.

In Ireland, every failed policy from housing, migration, addiction, and crime all gets dumped into the same neglected postcodes. Then the media arrive to photograph the wreckage, never the cause, and call the whole thing ‘far right.’ Before, the media labelled the working class ‘scumbags’ or ‘gurriers,’ they called every cry of despair ‘ignorant.’ But now there’s a more effective phrase to dismiss these struggles: far-right. 

From the outside, Ireland looks clean and well governed, the ‘good pupil’ of Europe. But if you were raised here, you’d know better.

Scandals are reframed and health failures are buried. The careerists apologise and carry on drinking taxpayer-funded pints in our parliament. We live in a quiet kind of corruption, the kind that has long become normal.

And as always, it’s children who end up bleeding for it.

So when Dublin erupted in riots after a child was stabbed, and again after another was raped, the government didn’t ask why so many people felt that something had snapped. It asked how to shift blame onto someone else.

Most people who protest aren’t interested in fighting. They show up with banners, not bricks. But the state treats them all the same. Guilty for daring to stand there. The cameras only focus on the one young man who decided to pick up a bottle, never the mothers, the grandmothers, the teachers. 

Violence, when it happens, becomes useful to those in charge. It lets them dismiss every legitimate grievance as ‘extremism’ and bury their own failures.

In Citywest, Coolock and Newtownmountkennedy, instead of listening to communities, the police were sent in with batons and pepper spray. International reporters from outlets like GB News and UnHerd were sprayed too, something that would have prompted outrage if it happened in Russia or Israel. But because it’s Ireland, silence.

The people breaking windows aren’t ideologues. They’re the children of the children the state already broke and keeps breaking.

The real hate in Ireland isn’t on the street. It’s bureaucratic. It’s the calm, polite indifference that loses children, keeps families on the streets, and brands moral outrage as extremism.

Nothing is more tragic than watching the future burn its own future. The children of Éire picking up bricks instead of banners because they’ve run out of ways to be heard.

The presidential election made this clearer than any riot.

Catherine Connolly won with 63% of first preference votes. On paper, a landslide. In reality, one of the hollowest victories in modern Irish politics.

Less than half the country showed up. And of those who did, over 213,000 spoiled their ballots, the highest number ever recorded.

That’s not apathy. It’s revolt. It’s the refusal to play along with a system that performs compassion while abandoning accountability.

Spoiling a vote isn’t withdrawal from democracy. It’s a demand for its return. It’s the mark you can’t spin, censor or gaslight away.

Ireland’s ‘far right’ isn’t the army of bigots our leaders like to perform against on foreign stages. It’s a mirror, showing a political class terrified of its own people and a nation sick of being talked down to.

A country obsessed with looking good cannot do good. A political class trained to fear embarrassment will always choose optics over responsibility. And a system built on apology instead of accountability will always abandon the most vulnerable first.

Ireland doesn’t need new values. It needs courage.

Courage to tell the truth. Courage to face consequences. Courage to protect those the image makers would rather ignore. Courage to stop performing compassion and start practising it.

Until then, the gap between the Ireland we advertise and the Ireland we live in will keep widening, and the cost will keep landing on the same shoulders. The poorest, the youngest, and the least protected.

A country that cannot protect its children is not compassionate; it is breaking. And Ireland is running out of ways to hide the cracks.