In recent years, schools, the media, and other institutions in Ireland have come to accept a set of transgender-related claims as the new normal. This shift was not the result of careful argument or evidence, but of sustained lobbying.
Teachers and principals accepted this newly sanctioned view largely because journalists amplified it without interrogation. Those of us who expressed doubt were treated as if we were dangerously uninformed. Few were strong enough to withstand such accusations, and most critics fell silent.
Now that these assumptions are finally being examined in the public sphere, the institutions find themselves in a mortifying position.
It turns out that this consensus was not organic, but deliberately manufactured by LGBTQ+ lobby groups. History offers no shortage of such examples; another word for officially sanctioned manufactured consensus is propaganda.
Authoritarian
Treating dissent as ignorance rather than disagreement is a familiar feature of authoritarian cultures. Any journalist who indulges in this should, frankly, hang up his hat and get another job. Marketing or governmental lobbying would be a more honest fit.
The issue of preferred pronouns is a prime example. The term refers to requests that others speak as though a person belongs to the opposite sex, or to newly constructed identity categories such as non-binary or gender fluid. In practice, this has meant girls asking to be called he or him, boys requesting she or her, and others insisting on terms such as they or them or newly coined words like zey or zir.
In the past five years or so, it became an accepted assumption that refusing to comply with this new speech regime was profoundly harmful to children. This radical claim originated with LGBTQ+ lobby groups and was treated by the media as a settled fact. Yet it is unsupported by evidence, and it is intellectually incoherent. How can it suddenly be harmful for adults to decline the use of newly invented terms that did not exist a decade ago? What happened to such children in previous generations? Where are they in literature, in history, or in any record of widespread psychic injury?
On January 16, as I reported in The Irish Catholic last week, The Irish Times published inaccurate guidance from a report by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties”
Instead of applying critical rigour, the media chose to endorse a carefully constructed cultural trend, familiar from other periods in history when conformity was manufactured, and dissent discouraged, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to McCarthy-era America.
On January 16, as I reported in The Irish Catholic last week, The Irish Times published inaccurate guidance from a report by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) on its front page, without examining the accuracy of the claims being made. Pat Leahy, Political Editor of The Irish Times, opened his report with “Schools must use the preferred name and pronouns of transgender students, who should also be allowed to use the bathroom of their preferred gender, according to a new guide on the rights of trans people.”
Scrutiny
He also reported, without scrutiny, that the guide stated that “trans people may be able in many cases to take legal action against them.” Leahy further intensified the pressure on school staff by including this gem from the report: “If you feel that your school is discriminating against you because you are trans or non-binary, you may choose to take a complaint to the Workplace Relations Commission.”
Leahy noted that the guide was written in collaboration with TENI, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and ShoutOut, two well-known LGBTQ+ lobby groups, but chose not to interrogate its legal claims.
In fact, the ICCL was wrong. School staff are under no obligation to use wrong-sex pronouns for children who identify as another gender. Moreover, calling vulnerable children by the wrong-sex pronoun can cause more harm than good.
Serious professionals, myself included, were treated as bigots and blacklisted for raising legitimate concerns about the treatment of young people”
The following week, on January 22, Pat Leahy published another report in The Irish Times, this time in the Education Supplement and behind a paywall. In this second article, he reported that “No guidelines have been issued” by the Department of Education. He also noted that “The guide was produced by the ICCL with €18,500 in support from the IHREC.”
The decision of the Irish media to behave as though the issue of preferred pronouns was already settled has not been benign. Serious professionals, myself included, were treated as bigots and blacklisted for raising legitimate concerns about the treatment of young people who were often same-sex attracted or autistic, and in need of careful, comprehensive support rather than ideology. As a result, many children have gone without the care they needed, a direct consequence of the media’s abdication of responsibility.
Division
By reporting activist guidance as settled law and dismissing dissenters as bigots, the media helped create a needless and corrosive division along with widespread misinformation. As Mick Clifford noted this week in the Irish Examiner, “TENI frequently sends people into media organisations to instruct how matters around gender dysphoria must be reported.”
The chaos and confusion of recent years were produced not by the issue itself, but by institutional deference to lobby groups and a failure of journalistic integrity.
A direct consequence of this negligent reporting is the case of Enoch Burke. By all accounts a dedicated teacher and an evangelical Christian, Burke holds beliefs that make it impossible for him to refer to a child using “they/them” pronouns. He was presented with this demand as a fait accompli by Niamh McShane, then principal of Wilson’s Hospital School, despite her having no legal authority to compel such compliance. The matter was treated as settled and non-negotiable. It was not.
Subsequent legal challenges in the UK have exposed the lack of firm legal foundations beneath many activist claims”
Burke objected and was suspended. What followed has been a grim revolving-door situation, with Burke repeatedly in and out of prison for refusing to accept culpability for an offence never clearly grounded in law.
This was an avoidable mess. The principal should have known she could not impose a diktat on teachers, and the school should have allowed space for objection. They did neither.
This unending legal circus is another consequence of LGBTQ+ lobby groups. As The Spectator noted as far back as 2019, Ireland had been identified as an easy target for the insertion of extremist trans activist ideology. This is reflected in the astronomical funding for LGBTQ+ groups in Ireland. Subsequent legal challenges in the UK have exposed the lack of firm legal foundations beneath many activist claims, while the Cass Review has highlighted the potential harms this ideology can impose on vulnerable minors.
By refusing to interrogate activist claims, and choosing instead to cheer them on, reporters played a central role in this failure. That decision will be remembered not as an error of judgment, but as institutional laziness, moral cowardice, and a dereliction of journalistic duty.
How the Irish media manufactured a moral panic
In recent years, schools, the media, and other institutions in Ireland have come to accept a set of transgender-related claims as the new normal. This shift was not the result of careful argument or evidence, but of sustained lobbying.
Teachers and principals accepted this newly sanctioned view largely because journalists amplified it without interrogation. Those of us who expressed doubt were treated as if we were dangerously uninformed. Few were strong enough to withstand such accusations, and most critics fell silent.
Now that these assumptions are finally being examined in the public sphere, the institutions find themselves in a mortifying position.
It turns out that this consensus was not organic, but deliberately manufactured by LGBTQ+ lobby groups. History offers no shortage of such examples; another word for officially sanctioned manufactured consensus is propaganda.
Authoritarian
Treating dissent as ignorance rather than disagreement is a familiar feature of authoritarian cultures. Any journalist who indulges in this should, frankly, hang up his hat and get another job. Marketing or governmental lobbying would be a more honest fit.
The issue of preferred pronouns is a prime example. The term refers to requests that others speak as though a person belongs to the opposite sex, or to newly constructed identity categories such as non-binary or gender fluid. In practice, this has meant girls asking to be called he or him, boys requesting she or her, and others insisting on terms such as they or them or newly coined words like zey or zir.
In the past five years or so, it became an accepted assumption that refusing to comply with this new speech regime was profoundly harmful to children. This radical claim originated with LGBTQ+ lobby groups and was treated by the media as a settled fact. Yet it is unsupported by evidence, and it is intellectually incoherent. How can it suddenly be harmful for adults to decline the use of newly invented terms that did not exist a decade ago? What happened to such children in previous generations? Where are they in literature, in history, or in any record of widespread psychic injury?
Instead of applying critical rigour, the media chose to endorse a carefully constructed cultural trend, familiar from other periods in history when conformity was manufactured, and dissent discouraged, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to McCarthy-era America.
On January 16, as I reported in The Irish Catholic last week, The Irish Times published inaccurate guidance from a report by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) on its front page, without examining the accuracy of the claims being made. Pat Leahy, Political Editor of The Irish Times, opened his report with “Schools must use the preferred name and pronouns of transgender students, who should also be allowed to use the bathroom of their preferred gender, according to a new guide on the rights of trans people.”
Scrutiny
He also reported, without scrutiny, that the guide stated that “trans people may be able in many cases to take legal action against them.” Leahy further intensified the pressure on school staff by including this gem from the report: “If you feel that your school is discriminating against you because you are trans or non-binary, you may choose to take a complaint to the Workplace Relations Commission.”
Leahy noted that the guide was written in collaboration with TENI, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and ShoutOut, two well-known LGBTQ+ lobby groups, but chose not to interrogate its legal claims.
In fact, the ICCL was wrong. School staff are under no obligation to use wrong-sex pronouns for children who identify as another gender. Moreover, calling vulnerable children by the wrong-sex pronoun can cause more harm than good.
The following week, on January 22, Pat Leahy published another report in The Irish Times, this time in the Education Supplement and behind a paywall. In this second article, he reported that “No guidelines have been issued” by the Department of Education. He also noted that “The guide was produced by the ICCL with €18,500 in support from the IHREC.”
The decision of the Irish media to behave as though the issue of preferred pronouns was already settled has not been benign. Serious professionals, myself included, were treated as bigots and blacklisted for raising legitimate concerns about the treatment of young people who were often same-sex attracted or autistic, and in need of careful, comprehensive support rather than ideology. As a result, many children have gone without the care they needed, a direct consequence of the media’s abdication of responsibility.
Division
By reporting activist guidance as settled law and dismissing dissenters as bigots, the media helped create a needless and corrosive division along with widespread misinformation. As Mick Clifford noted this week in the Irish Examiner, “TENI frequently sends people into media organisations to instruct how matters around gender dysphoria must be reported.”
The chaos and confusion of recent years were produced not by the issue itself, but by institutional deference to lobby groups and a failure of journalistic integrity.
A direct consequence of this negligent reporting is the case of Enoch Burke. By all accounts a dedicated teacher and an evangelical Christian, Burke holds beliefs that make it impossible for him to refer to a child using “they/them” pronouns. He was presented with this demand as a fait accompli by Niamh McShane, then principal of Wilson’s Hospital School, despite her having no legal authority to compel such compliance. The matter was treated as settled and non-negotiable. It was not.
Burke objected and was suspended. What followed has been a grim revolving-door situation, with Burke repeatedly in and out of prison for refusing to accept culpability for an offence never clearly grounded in law.
This was an avoidable mess. The principal should have known she could not impose a diktat on teachers, and the school should have allowed space for objection. They did neither.
This unending legal circus is another consequence of LGBTQ+ lobby groups. As The Spectator noted as far back as 2019, Ireland had been identified as an easy target for the insertion of extremist trans activist ideology. This is reflected in the astronomical funding for LGBTQ+ groups in Ireland. Subsequent legal challenges in the UK have exposed the lack of firm legal foundations beneath many activist claims, while the Cass Review has highlighted the potential harms this ideology can impose on vulnerable minors.
By refusing to interrogate activist claims, and choosing instead to cheer them on, reporters played a central role in this failure. That decision will be remembered not as an error of judgment, but as institutional laziness, moral cowardice, and a dereliction of journalistic duty.
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