Irish Politics has always had its vagrant cruelties, but the moment sex is invoked as a weapon against women in power, everything grows somewhat darker—something in an Irish context very Catholic, something ancient, something sick. It’s the lazy violence of so-called intellectual men, and the reigning superstition of institutions: why bother arguing policy, when you can mark the female political target with shame? You wouldnt vote for her, but you would sleep with her. It would go against everything you believe in politically, but you’d debase yourself at the altar of her political sexuality.
A sexualised political insult is more than a jibe; it’s the marshalling of a medieval power, a ritual humiliation that drags a woman out of the present and back into the murkiness of a time when a woman’s intellect and political prowess are not worthy of her male colleagues. Suddenly, the debate isn’t about housing, or budgets, or Europe—no, it’s about the curve of a body, the edge of a voice, the imagined bedroom transgression. The effect is the same as it always was: policy eclipsed by anatomy or seduction, a vision clouded by a remark about thighs or what she is wearing. Who could govern with those distractions? Who would bother to try? When men in political commentary or their attendant scribes in the press and podcasts use sex as a cudgel against a woman, they are not merely being vulgar. They are engaging in a kind of dark, sexist magic, an incantation that seeks to unmake her from a political actor into a biological event.
In Ireland, we have a long history of sexualising female politicians. The male-dominated media at the time once accused former EU Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn of “handbagging” the Aer Lingus board. An amusing folksy little term, isn’t it? It made her sound like a scold, a harridan, a woman whose power derives not from intellect or will but from the domestic artillery she wields—a purse as a weapon, a symbol of nagging, of feminine petty tyranny. A man in the same situation would be accused of “taking a firm line”; a woman is just swinging her handbag, all the latent, terrifying power of her sex condensed into a single, absurd accessory. She becomes not a minister wielding power, but a wife, and a disappointed one at that. Some commentators might observe that the Aer Lingus board has not improved much over the years.
Brian Cowen, in the final slow‑motion collapse of his premiership, managed in November 2010 to gift the nation one of those rare moments when the Dáil stops being a serious chamber of governance and briefly resembles a pub at closing time. In the middle of a spitting match across the Dáil floor, Cowen turned to Labour leader Eamon Gilmore with all the oily camaraderie of someone who thinks he’s still in charge and suggested, with a wink you could practically hear, that Gilmore should “rein her in now and again” — “her” being Joan Burton, Labour’s finance spokesperson, and inconveniently, an actual elected representative rather than some errant filly. It was the sort of lazy, boys‑room misogyny that slips out without anyone in power really noticing — except this time, everyone noticed. The moment passed through the chamber like a bad smell, and Cowen, realising he’d detonated the wrong kind of grenade, mumbled an apology. But the damage was done: there it was, in full view, the small, smirking reflex at the heart of Irish politics, where women in the room are still something you can rein in, as if political debate were a horse show and the whole country your paddock.
Former MEP and TD, Mick Wallace, once called Dun Laoighre TD Mary Mitchell-O’Connor “Miss Piggy” in the Dáil — a deliberate lapse so grotesque it would’ve embarrassed a pub bore on his fourth pint, let alone an elected representative. He later apologised, but by then the mask had already slipped: the genial pink-shirted socialist rebel, the unlovable maverick of Irish politics, suddenly revealed himself as something darker and infinitely more banal. Because Wallace isn’t just a man of bad manners — he’s a man whose solidarity extends internationally, to regimes where contempt for women isn’t a gaffe but a principle of governance. He has been pictured standing arm in arm with governments that jail and silence women for speaking, that interpret equality as a Western indulgence — and then he wonders why people recoil when his tongue curls around the same ancient, stupid cruelties.
It’s all part of a pattern with Wallace: the swaggering builder-turned-politician who styled himself as the conscience of the nation but seems most comfortable in the company of those who crush conscience altogether. When he sneers, when he belittles, when he excuses political and religious systems that treat women as inconveniences rather than citizens, he isn’t making a mistake — he’s revealing the amoral political geography he’s chosen to laud. The people of Wexford and the European Ireland South constituency forgave him once, because we love the sound of contrition. But a man who defends tyrants and Middle East dictators has already told you what kind of apology he believes in, and he was duly voted out of office.
Former Senator, David Norris, darling of socially liberal Ireland (I’m guilty of being one), the grand old man of gay rights, turned twinkly raconteur of Seanad Eireann, decided one afternoon to remind us that enlightenment is often only skin-deep. When Fine Gael’s Regina Doherty dared to support abolishing his beloved chamber, Norris dismissed her argument not with wit or reason, but with that smug little flourish of the powerful man: that she was “speaking out of her fanny.”
It was meant to be clever, perhaps. A political jab from a man used to applause. But what came out instead was the archaic foghorn of something ancient — the instinct that women can be shut down with anatomy. Norris withdrew the remark, as one might remove a soiled glove, but never apologised. Because what would that mean, to a man who’s made a hobby out of being untouchable, in the classical Greek sense, of course.
This is the Irish liberal at his most revealing: urbane, self-styled progressive, fond of quoting Joyce, yet still entirely at home in the old boys’ club he pretends to despise. If it’s jarring to see someone who fought for dignity himself deploying humiliation as a weapon, it shouldn’t be. Moral progress in Ireland has always been a theatre piece for some Irish politicians, and Norris has always known his lines.
And then there is the modern digital pogrom. A recent University of Galway study found that 38% of female politicians in Ireland have been threatened with rape or sexual violence. Read that number again. This is not the rough-and-tumble of Irish political life; this is a systematic campaign of terror designed to remind women who want to be politicians that their bodies are, and will always be, a battlefield, a territory to be conquered and violated. The political becomes, quite literally, the gynaecological.