In the soft luxury of the high-ceilinged lounge in an ornate south Dublin hotel sits Maria Steen, reflecting on a rollercoaster week in Irish politics.
The first week of the 2025 Irish presidential election was dominated by the one candidate who can’t run in it. Tensions ran high with brickbats flying online.
Asks if she feels she has become a “Disney villain” in people’s minds, she replies: “Absolutely – pantomime villainess.”
In a high-octane political drama, Steen managed to secure 18 of 20 signatures required to be an official candidate on the October 24th ballot, with just hours to go until the close of nominations on Wednesday.
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“I did keep making phone calls. I didn’t give up. I kept making phone calls up to as late as possible, but people just didn’t pick up the phone,” says the campaigner and barrister whose social and political positions stem from Catholic social teaching.
In the aftermath of her failing to get on the ticket, there has been very public rancour from a cohort of anti-establishment voters who now feel they effectively have no candidate in the race.
Her opponents are equally vocal, with some openly suggesting that someone who holds Steen’s views has no place in politics.
Steen herself feels she exists as a caricature in the minds of some because she is a practising Catholic who holds traditional views on social issues.
“There’s an effort by some to make me out to be anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-whatever,” Steen tells The Irish Times in her first lengthy interview since failing to secure enough support for her nomination.
[ Presidential election field thins to three, the shortest ballot paper since 1990Opens in new window ]
“All of these things are completely untrue, and they’re a fairly hamfisted attempt to paint me in a particular light, but I think most ordinary people can see through that and can see what’s going on here.”
Steen came closer than any other non-party candidate to running in the presidential election and some analysis suggests the reason she failed is because she left it too late.
“I don’t accept that,” she says.
While she concedes that starting earlier down the county council route – through which a successful candidate requires the support of four councils to get on the ticket – might have helped her, she points out that fellow unsuccessful hopeful Gareth Sheridan, also an Independent, had been working on his bid for much longer.
She says she delayed running until she knew for sure that Independent Senator Michael McDowell was not running for president.
Her honest belief is that she never could have secured more than 18 signatures from the Oireachtas because some TDs and Senators flat-out refused to talk to her.
“I was over a month trying to contact TDs and Senators, some of whom knew me personally, or were certainly aware of me,” she says.
“And there are some Senators and TDs who just simply never returned my phone calls, refused to meet me or answer any emails or any texts. So that made things difficult.”
Steen is best known as a conservative campaigner, though she rejects the label.
“I certainly have never regarded myself as that,” she says, considering herself a “centrist”.
“But it’s just that everybody else has moved so far left, it makes me look right,” she says.
Formerly a spokeswoman for the Iona Institute, the socially conservative think-tank, she campaigned against the same-sex marriage and abortion referendums in 2015 and 2018 respectively, falling on the losing side in both.
Steen doesn’t believe she was locked out of the Oireachtas because of her views on social issues, but thinks it was being used as an “excuse”.
When she was trying to get through the council route to the presidential ballot, she experienced “quite a lot of hostility” from councillors. The way she was addressed was “quite disrespectful”, she says.
“Because I was pro-life, one female councillor told me that she would be worried for her daughters, that I was dangerous, that the country would be a dangerous place if I were president, despite the fact that my baseline position as a pro-life person is that we should start from a perspective that we shouldn’t kill other human beings.
“I don’t think that’s extreme. I think it’s utterly reasonable,” she says.
And then there were three – the presidential candidates set off on the campaign trail
McDowell, who campaigned alongside Steen during the 2024 family and care referendums (when they were on the winning “No” side), effectively refused to talk to her in the four weeks that she spent trying to get on the ticket.
“He sent one text. He didn’t answer any phone calls – not one phone call,” she says.
McDowell has been experiencing intense abuse from Steen’s allies and supporters online this week, who can’t understand how the man who shared a platform with her during the 2024 referendums would refuse to support her.
He told The Irish Times he reluctantly shared a platform with Steen last year and that he never would have supported her for president.
The acrimony between Steen and McDowell reached boiling point on Friday as each – in separate exchanges with The Irish Times – angrily rejected the other’s account of a phone call between them in the run-up to last year’s referendums when Steen was asked, ahead of McDowell, to represent the “No” side in an RTÉ televised debate.
Steen says she had “hoped” McDowell would support her and is “disappointed” he didn’t.
“In fairness, it wasn’t just McDowell. There were other Independent Senators and TDs as well, some of whom would have aligned with me on almost every issue,” she says.
After Kerry Independent TD Michael Healy-Rae agreed to sign her nomination papers, an intense lobbying effort focused on fellow Government Independents such as Sean Canney, Noel Grealish and Kevin “Boxer” Moran.
Steen says it “took me a long time to reach them”.
When she finally reached them, the Ministers told her they would not back her, “though they didn’t really explain why”.
Steen also claims there was an “attempt to tarnish” her name and her campaign in the Seanad, by asking her to account for abusive tweets sent by people demanding politicians to support Steen.
Independent Senator Gerard Craughwell later blamed the “outrageous online campaign” for his decision not to sign Steen’s papers. In a meeting with Steen this week, Craughwell asked Steen to distance herself publicly from the social media abuse he was receiving.
Steen felt it unfair to expect her to take responsibility for social media posts that had nothing to do with her.
“I can’t even get nasty tweets that are written about myself taken down,” she says, adding: “So how on earth would I have control over what somebody else writes?”
She is critical of RTÉ’s coverage of her, claiming the broadcaster has an agenda against her, as she says was evidenced in the interview with presenter David McCullagh on RTÉ’s Six One news programme on Tuesday.
She felt there was a “clearly an attempt” to link her to rumours circulated by businessman Kieran Kelly about Fianna Fáil candidate Jim Gavin.
Kelly said in an online post he had spoken to Steen on the phone about her presidential bid and that he was supportive of her. Steen says a councillor had asked her if it was okay to give her number to Kelly.
“In the midst of a campaign, I said: ‘Sure.’ I didn’t know anything about him,” she says.
She describes McCullagh’s question – that she wanted to bring Ireland “back to the 1930s” as president – as “an attempt by RTÉ to frame a narrative”.
She felt RTÉ showed bias against her during the 2024 referendum debate, saying the broadcaster set up the debate – now a cause of tensions between Steen and McDowell – “to try to paint me as part of old Ireland”.
“That was what they were hoping. It didn’t work out for them,” Steen says.
She says she was “rushed” in to the studio with a minute to air, while her opponent in the head-to-head debate, then tánaiste Micheál Martin, was settled in his seat getting his make-up done.
A spokesman for RTÉ said that it “stands over the line of questioning” of Steen on the Six One programme: “RTÉ provided Maria Steen with an opportunity to clearly distance herself from the tweets referred to and the question about the 1930s followed Maria Steen’s reference to the role of the president being to bring the nation back to the values that the country was founded on.”
The spokesman said the broadcaster also “does not accept any suggestion of unfair treatment of Maria Steen” in last year’s Prime Time debate.
After the 2018 referendum, Steen decided to take a break after a “very exhausting two years” of intense campaigning. She went back to being a stay-at-home mother. The pandemic hit, and in 2021 she had her fifth child – a girl whose fourth birthday she celebrated on Wednesday after Steen’s presidential hopes ended.
When the family and care referendums were announced for March 2024, Steen felt they would pass but thought it important that somebody should debate the proposals as she felt “very few people” would be willing to come out and oppose them.
“Having been at home with my children, I had a thing or two to say about mothers and the work we do in the home,” she says.
She campaigned for a “No” vote as a stay-at-home mother and lawyer, and not part of any official group such as the Iona Institute, which she says she hasn’t worked for as a spokeswoman since 2018.
She looks back at the campaign as a “healing” experience as she worked alongside people with different perspectives and felt it was different from the “hostility” of previous referendums, which she thinks “were quite damaging to our society”.
Being on the winning side last year motivated her to launch her presidential bid. She believes McDowell got most of the praise for the victorious “No” side, saying “very few women got any credit for it”.
The fallout from her failure to get on the presidential ballot has been fierce.
Online, Steen’s supporters have threatened to punish electorally McDowell, Grealish, Canney, Moran and any other politician who didn’t sign her nomination papers.
“At the end of the day, people feel the way they feel, and if they’re angry, they’re entitled to express their anger, so long as it’s obviously within the boundaries of being respectful and all of that,” she says.
[ Handbag at the Dáil for Maria Steen as her Áras run comes to an endOpens in new window ]
She also believes there is “a kind of righteous anger that people are entitled to express”.
“I think politicians need to listen to that,” she says.
One feature of her final public appearance in the presidential nominations race that generated much comment on traditional and social media was a Hermès handbag on her arm, estimated to cost anywhere between €10,000 and €40,000. Some on the conservative right, reacting to the style she displayed at the moment, went so far as to describe Steen as their “Jackie O”.
She laughs when the subject of the handbag is raised.
“The handbag was deliberate,” she says of its appearance at the most public moment of her failed presidential bid this week.
“I wanted to expose the hypocrisy of the left who don’t love the poor; they just hate the rich,” she says.
Steen argues that it’s hypocritical for feminists to argue that they want more women in public life and then “criticise a woman who happens to have the wrong values for carrying the expensive handbag”.
She also considers it misogynistic.
“Nobody would ever question a man about the price of his car or of his suit – or if he’s wearing an expensive watch – but a woman carries an expensive handbag, and that’s all the news,” she says.
Besides, she argues, if you’re applying for a job, it’s a sign of respect “to look as well as I can”.
Her supporters are already wasting no time; they are already pushing her to run again for the presidency in 2032. Steen doesn’t know if she wants to. In the interim, competing for a Dáil seat would be “too difficult” to contemplate.
“The life of a TD is very difficult, particularly for a woman with a young family,” she says.
“People talk about women who take time out to be at home as lacking ambition. It’s not that I lack ambition, but my ambitions lie elsewhere.”
