WHEN DECIDING UPON the most surreal stories of a given year, there are worse points of departure than the identifying the year’s most surreal statement and working backwards from there.

In 2024 there was really no contest, and that unwanted accolade goes to Tom McDonnell, who was elected to Kildare County Council this summer. 

“It’s all about the women of Ireland,” McDonnell told local radio station KFM during the campaign, apparently explaining why people should vote for him. “If we don’t have women breeding, we die out as a breed and we don’t want that to happen.” He went on to say that Irish women are on average “only breeding 1.6 to 1.9 children” and added “if we don’t have more women breeding we will die out as a race.” 

McDonnell went on to justify this visceral and dehumanising perspective by saying that he was from an agricultural background, as though that in some way makes it okay to speak about women as though they are brood mares. McDonnell was elected nevertheless, because apparently there’s a constituency for that kind of thing nowadays.

It was an episode that made DeValera and McQuaid’s vision of an Ireland full of comely maidens tending to their duties in the home read like radical feminism by comparison, though the through-line between Bunreacht na hÉireann and Tom McDonnell is that — 87 years apart — Irish people voted in favour of both. 

Speaking of women in the home, 2024 was the year we finally held a referendum on removing that antiquated passage in our Constitution, though in true Irish fashion we went to the polls and decided not to change anything at all. In truth, the year at large was a dire indictment of the status of women in Ireland. Following the general election, female representation in Dáil Éireann now stands at 25%, a figure that lags well behind most of Europe and much of the world at large.

Many of the most high-profile stories throughout the year boiled down to how Ireland does – or doesn’t – protect women. 24-year-old woman Natasha O’Brien became the face of a national movement in June after Cathal Crotty, the soldier who assaulted her and boasted about it on social media was given an entirely suspended sentence. 

In a separate case later in the year, a jury found that MMA fighter Conor McGregor was liable for a sexual assault against Nikita Hand. Considering the DPP had earlier decided not to pursue criminal charges following Hand’s original criminal complaint, the civil trial result highlighted the different burdens of proof between criminal and civil trials.

If anything, the year was marked by constant reminders of how far Ireland has yet to come in terms of establishing a society where women have as much of a chance to thrive as men. 

Trends across the Atlantic are similarly disturbing. Donald Trump, who was in 2023 found liable by a court for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll, was returned to The White House in an emphatic electoral victory and is more popular than ever amongst the American public. His vice president is JD Vance, whose proclamations about women include the assertion that the US is run by ”a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Trump’s éminence grise is Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who just months ago tweeted at Taylor Swift: “I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” There is no limit to the unpleasant statements Musk has made in the past 12 months, but I will limit it to one because each moment spent talking about him makes me feel precipitously less cool.

Matt Gaetz — Trump’s original pick for Attorney General — recused himself of the nomination ahead of a congressional report that found he paid a 17-year-old girl for sex. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017. Unlike Gaetz, Hegseth is still in the running for a role that would see him take charge of the Pentagon. 

Across the world there appears to be a perceptible shift in the way influential men are thinking and talking about women, and the danger these regressive and restrictive attitudes pose to society cannot be overstated. While Ireland could never match the United States in its extremity, we are clearly already in a vulnerable position when it comes to our attitudes towards women. Given our long history of importing talking points from abroad, Trump’s return to the Oval Office could represent a rather stark omen if we don’t take steps to actively better ourselves.

The results of our own general election, however, suggest that many of us are less interested in bettering ourselves than we are in staying resolutely the same. Despite a decade-long shortage of housing, month after month, record-breaking homelessness figures, the world’s most expensive children’s hospital that never was, to say nothing of a very expensive bike shed, hundreds of thousands of Irish people went to the polls, dusted off their hands and said “Yep, it doesn’t get any better than this”. 

Outgoing Taoiseach Simon Harris, upon becoming leader of Fine Gael in April, told us all: “To anybody who thinks this party is tired, to anyone who thinks this party lacks energy, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Without even getting into the fact that Harris has as much business saying the word ‘ain’t’ as he would the word ‘rizz’ or ‘gyatt’, the warning proved hollow. Fine Gael built their campaign around Harris and faltered because he was tired, lacked energy, and – upon being confronted by a woman in Kanturk over his government’s failure to provide for disability organisations – had seen enough. 

Fine Gael remain the third-largest party in Ireland for the second election running, but Harris will still spend some of the next five years as Taoiseach, which doesn’t seem fair. The rotating Taoiseach system was one thing when the three largest parties were all basically the same size, but it now seems as though we’ve opened a can of worms. If you can be Taoiseach even though you’re not the leader of the most popular party in the country, then on what grounds are the rest of us excluded? If you can be Taoiseach on the basis that any amount of people like you, surely we should all get a go, for a few minutes at least. We should all have the chance to build an expensive bike shed and start a row with a well-meaning constituents asking us questions in good faith. That’s what true democracy looks like.

Unfortunately, Ireland will be forced to vote for change towards the end of 2025, as outgoing president Michael D Higgins legally cannot serve a third term. It’s a shame, because Higgins remains a fine orator, a staunch defender of human rights, and becomes more gnomelike with each passing day. Plus, if he could only have held on a mere 17 years more, he’d become the first Irish president to write himself a big, fat cheque for turning 100. 

Alas, in 2025 we will bid adieu to our tiny poet prince and God only what knows what sort of clown car cavalcade of freaks we’ll have to choose from this time around. One suspects that the 12 months to come will be even stranger again than those we’ve just endured.