Who’s afraid of Maria Steen? If you listen to the conservative right, the Irish establishment is.
The failure of the barrister, conservative campaigner and stay-at-home mother to secure enough nominations to run for president last week is portrayed by her supporters as a pyrrhic victory for the powers that be.
In an angry response that has ranged from outraged to downright abusive, those perceived to have blocked Steen are assured by her zealous fans that they have done so at their electoral peril.
[ Michael McDowell: Why I didn’t nominate Maria Steen for the presidencyOpens in new window ]
But, 18 months ago, even some of her closest political bedfellows seemed to be afraid of Steen and the political message she would project.
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When RTÉ invited her to debate the then tánaiste, Micheál Martin, in the days ahead of the March 2024 family and care referendums, Steen’s colleagues on the No side started to panic.
Seasoned conservative campaigners were convinced that the State broadcaster, which they see as “biased”, was laying a trap.
A number of her allies asked Steen to consider standing aside from the debate, assuring her that RTÉ was using her to cast the No side as the old, conservative and profoundly Catholic Ireland.
Conservatives wanted liberals such as like Independent senator Michael McDowell or commentator Brenda Power, who both voted with the public majority in the 2015 and 2018 referendums on marriage equality and abortion respectively, to replace Steen and try to portray the No side as a big, diverse tent.
But Steen stood her ground and was vindicated by a stellar performance in the debate that forced some of her allies to apologise for doubting her.
For this more traditional faction of Irish politics, the momentum behind Steen’s ultimately unsuccessful bid for the Áras was a moment of catharsis after a decade or more of feeling like ostensibly “tolerant” Ireland treats conservatives like pariahs.
But Steen’s failure to get on the presidential ticket for the October 24th election, even with so many Independent TDs and Senators in Leinster House, shows that the “common sense” right might not be so cohesive.
Steen had her apparent grassroots popularity ascribed to multiple different agendas: from a resistance against the perceived intolerance of Catholicism in public life and a backlash against the progressive social change of the 2010s to a desire for an alternative narrative about immigration to people who wanted a conservative voice and a more varied ballot even if they weren’t going to vote for her.
[ The presidential election needs a candidate I wouldn’t vote for: Maria SteenOpens in new window ]
Which one was it?
Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín says he believes it is probably “a mix of all of those things”. He says his party has seen a growth in membership in the past week in the wake of his efforts to get Steen on the ticket.
“If you were to look at the political dynamic in Ireland at the moment, I’d say the biggest dynamic is pro-Government and anti-Government,” says Tóibín.
He argues that anti-Government politics are not necessarily tied to a specific ideology, and that disenchanted people vote and transfer between right- and left-wing candidates.
Steen’s assumed popularity may have represented a general malaise towards that status quo rather than a swing back to conservative values.
Her anti-abortion views could have hampered her presidential bid within the grounds of Leinster House. Democracy is ultimately a popularity contest for ideas and some of Steen’s ideas were just unpopular.
For example, despite the fact that Aontú was founded on the profound principle that there should be freedom of conscience on the issue of abortion, the party was reluctant to talk about the issue during the last general election.
Tóibín says only 2 per cent of people vote based on the issue of abortion.
“To be honest, there are urgent things and there are important things,” he says. “And the truth of the matter is the political system is consumed with urgent issues, as are most people at home, in fairness.”
There seems to be little hope of Steen heralding a revival of social conservatism given that she represents a political cohort that isn’t even comfortable calling itself “conservative”.
Steen, whose politics closely follow the teachings of the Catholic Church, pushed back against the label, claiming she was a “centrist”.
Ken O’Flynn of Independent Ireland said this week that his party was more “common sense” than “conservative”.
Tóibín has said similar, noting that his party’s economic policies are “firmly centre left” and in European terms Aontú is a centrist party.
Catholic commentator David Quinn, who is content with the “conservative” label being applied to himself, believes it’s because the word is most often used as a pejorative in Irish politics. Quinn says the term is associated with “the ties that bind” such as family and religion.
“And they were bound too tightly, for people’s tastes, for a long time, so they got sick of it,” Quinn says.
He sees politics as “a strong and slow boring of hard boards”. But he also sees something in the momentum behind Steen, which may manifest itself in support for more “family”-centred based politics. Quinn believes the case for this kind of politics will become “undeniable” with continually falling birth rates.
It is true that one of Steen’s strongest and broadest platforms would have been her advocacy for women who want to work within the home, and those who feel that socioeconomic pressures are affecting their ability to grow their family.
But it’s also true that the defeat of last year’s so-called “women in the home” referendum is sometimes overclaimed as a victory by conservatives, who may forget there was a progressive, disability rights-based campaign against the constitutional change too.
The febrile expectation about Steen’s prospects among the right last week were almost reminiscent of the left’s view in 1990 that Mary Robinson was “an idea whose time has come”.
Prof Gary Murphy of Dublin City University is less optimistic about her electoral fortunes and suspects Steen may represent “a moment that has already passed”.
He points out that after the 10th president of Ireland is inaugurated this November, there isn’t expected to be another election for a number of years – aside from a possible by-election to replace Catherine Connolly in the event she is successful.
Any progress in conservative, right-wing politics never tends to “come through to electoral politics afterwards”, he says.
“I don’t see any great momentum,” he says, adding that, at the last general election, “these people had their chance.”
