A Stirring of Backbone in Ireland

Late in 2025, I noticed a small development that made me think that our key public services, and our health service in particular, are no longer deferring to trans demands quite as much as they used to. I’ll explain

Hope in Public Services

THE HEALTH SERVICE

The Irish health service has long been captured by transgender ideology. For our medical profession, biology takes second place to the demands of trans activists. Thus, Ireland’s Health Protection Surveillance Centre records sexually transmitted diseases among men and women not according to whether those infected are men or women but according to what the HPSC calls their gender. In its 2024 report on Mpox (formerly known as Monkeypox), the HPSC explains: “Gender is based on gender identity where it is provided; otherwise, sex at birth is used. Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense of themselves (how they feel inside) as being male, female, transgender, non-binary, or something else. This may be different or the same as a person’s assigned sex at birth. Further information and resources can be found at the website of Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI).”

So sex in our health statistics is based not on biology but on how people “feel inside”. Thus, men infected with Mpox are being recorded as women infected with Mpox (Mpox in Ireland is overwhelmingly a disease of men). Likewise, men infected with HIV are being recorded as women infected with HIV. Health data is being falsified. And this data is presented using activist language like “sex assigned at birth” when everyone knows that your sex at birth is no more “assigned” to you than is your date of birth. Then, if you want more information, HPSC provides a link to TENI.

What is TENI doing in there? TENI is not a medical organisation. It’s a lobby group of transgender activists. The views of a lobby group should have no place in the recording and presentation of medical data. And yet our medical profession defers to TENI as if it were an authority of some sort. As I keep finding out.

THE BLOOD TRANSFUSION SERVICE

In 2022, I sought to donate blood, which I first did in 1978, when I was 21. But this time, something weird and disturbing happened. When I logged on to the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) website, I was faced with a donor questionnaire the like of which I had never seen before. It was full of confusing, trans-inclusive language. This question was the one I found the most incomprehensible of all: “For females (cis and transgender) and transgender males: are you pregnant or have you have you (sic) been pregnant in the past 12 months? YES/NO.” (The typographical error therein is, I think, significant in its own right, on which more shortly.)

What was that supposed to mean? Biology matters in medicine. Sex matters when giving blood. There are different criteria regarding the quantity and permitted haemoglobin range of blood that may be donated, depending on whether the donor is male or female. And it matters very much for the safety of a potential recipient of blood that it be known whether a donor might recently have been pregnant. All of this is explained by IBTS on its own website, so does IBTS not understand the need to use clear language when asking vital questions of potential donors?

I wrote to the IBTS and asked: “What is a pregnant transgender male, what is a pregnant transgender female, and what is the difference between them?” In reply, IBTS referred me to various sources of information but didn’t answer my question.

So I wrote back again. This time, IBTS answered, bizarrely, that no such question as I quoted was in their donor quiz. “Could you please advise where you have seen it?” they asked, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was there on their website, being asked of everyone who might seek to give blood. And IBTS had this further advice for me: “I would suggest contacting some of Ireland’s transgender supports such as TENI”.

There’s TENI again. So I still had no answer to my query, and now I was being referred to a trans activist group for an answer. Why? It was the Irish Blood Transfusion Service, not TENI, to whom I sought to donate my blood.

So I asked my question for a third time, this time cut-and-pasting from the IBTS website: “For females (cis and transgender) and transgender males; are you pregnant or have you have you been pregnant in the past 12 months? YES/NO.”

That had the desired effect. I got the following response from a Clinical Nurse Manager: “Dear Paddy, I have reviewed the Regular Donor Blood Eligibility Quiz and can confirm this is an error in Question 10 re. pregnancy. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I have notified the relevant department, and this error has been corrected on the website… Please accept my apologies for the confusion caused.”

And what confusion! We gender critical people have long argued that what is called trans-inclusive language is confusing and misleading, and, especially, should not be used by doctors when talking to patients. But what IBTS showed is that there are times the doctors themselves don’t understand what they are saying. This brings me back to that typographical error in which they asked “have you have you been pregnant?”. That such a gross typo could remain unnoticed in a questionnaire aimed at the public shows that the doctors didn’t carefully consider what they were saying while striving to be inclusive and so on. That typo, I think, shows that the doctors simply handed over communication to a trans lobby group, and after that, they were too cowardly to challenge whatever nonsense that trans lobby group might have come up with.

I posted the apology I got from IBTS on social media, and this led to some welcome press coverage, and, of course, I was pleased to see IBTS change its donor quiz at my behest. But still, today, nearly four years later, much of the language used by IBTS remains ugly, confusing, and dangerous.

Here is the current question five for people who wish to give blood: “For females (including transgender females) and transgender males only: Are you a first-time donor, under 26, or have you not donated in 5 years?”

What sort of question is that? Decode it, and you will see that it makes no medical sense. Why should there be a category of donors that includes men who say they are women but excludes men who don’t say they are women? It would be nice if our Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, were to show some good authority here and get the IBTS to stop speaking to the public in riddles. But recent events make it seem unlikely that she will do that.

In September 2025, it was reported that potential blood donors are, in some cases, being deterred by being asked by the IBTS: “Is your current gender different from that assigned to you at birth?” Health Minister Carroll MacNeill defends the use of this question thus: “Certain blood components — such as blood for intrauterine transfusion — are only made from donations taken from cis-gender male donors, as female donors who have had a pregnancy may have antibodies in their blood that could cause potential harm to the foetus. A transgender male donor may have been pregnant prior to transitioning, therefore this must be established, so that the donation is not used for intrauterine transfusion.”

What the Minister is saying here is that men can’t get pregnant but women can, so it is necessary, for compelling medical reasons, to ask women, but not men, if they have ever been pregnant. No reasonable person, I believe, would object to necessary questions being asked of them in plain language. But a few unreasonable people, that is, transgender activists, do so object. So our Minister for Health responds by giving in to those unreasonable people. (Health Minister Carroll MacNeill is a keen advocate for the trans agenda, of which more later in this article.)

HOMELESS SERVICES

Trans ideology infects not only our health services but other parts of our public services, too.

In April of 2023, I was making a podcast from outside a social welfare office for homeless people in Dublin when women I met there shocked me when they told me that they were being forced to share accommodation with trans-identified men. “He dresses like a woman, he hits women like a man”, said one woman of one of those men. Many of the women I met there had suffered violence at the hands of men, and they understand that men punch harder than women do.

In one incident, they told me, a woman had been assaulted by a man in the domestic violence refuge known as the Novas Hostel, in Rathmines in Dublin, leading to the expulsion of that man from that hostel. After hearing that story, I wrote to Novas and to the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive (DRHE), which is the section of Dublin City Council responsible for placing homeless people in accommodation. While neither Novas nor DRHE would comment on an individual case, their responses were revealing.

Novas told me, “We are committed to providing temporary accommodation for women experiencing homelessness in Dublin and, sometimes, these women are part of the LGBTQI+ community. They are one of many vulnerable groups that we work with. All referrals to our services are made by the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive, and a risk assessment is carried out when any new client comes to stay in our services… From time to time, due to the congregated nature of homeless services, issues can arise between clients.”

But “issues” in which women are assaulted by men would not arise in women’s homeless shelters if men were not in those shelters in the first place. Which is why women’s shelters used to be for women only.

DRHE would not comment on their having put a trans-identified man in a women’s hostel, but they were able to assure me that their “staff have undertaken training with the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI).”

There’s TENI again. So the decision to place a man in a women’s refuge was made by DRHE staff who had undergone training from TENI. No wonder a bad decision was made. But it was some months later that I came to realise just how stupid and callous that decision had been.

In September of 2023, the man who assaulted the woman in the hostel was up in court for what he did. I realised then that I knew who he was. He was a man who had a series of previous convictions for assault, for which he had just served a year in the women’s prison in Limerick. And yet, forewarned with this knowledge, DRHE still decided that the appropriate place to accommodate this man would be with women. At his trial, the court heard how he had beaten his victim to the ground, where he punched her repeatedly and ripped clumps from her hair (the victim was a 60-year-old woman of slight stature, I’m told). He pleaded guilty and got a suspended sentence. DRHE has never been held to account for their appalling decision to place that man in a women’s shelter because our media pretended that that man was a woman.

I said at the outset of this article that I had noticed a development late last year that gave me some grounds for hope that transgenderism’s grip on our public services was at last beginning to loosen, so I’ll tell you now why I said that. Previously, when I went to give blood, I was referred to TENI; when I consulted recorded health data, I was referred to TENI; when I had a query on homeless services, I was referred to TENI. I keep encountering a lobby group which, although it has no relevant expertise, has been elevated to a position of authority in many and diverse areas of our public services. So what has made me optimistic now? It’s because the HPSC, in its most recent annual report on HIV, has dropped its citing of TENI as an authority to be consulted. I think that’s progress.

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Politicians On Trans

In the rest of this article, I’ll tell you about current political developments in Ireland.

THE HEALTH MINISTER

Even though, in recent years, we have seen our government abandon much of its previous trans agenda, there are still those in government who want to abolish women-only spaces. This is what Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill had to say in the Dáil (the Irish parliament) in December 2025:

“We all know the sheer nonsense that a man would dress up as a woman and come into a changing room for the purposes of attacking me… Did you ever hear such nonsense? Did you ever have examples of it from any time since the Gender Recognition Act was passed?”

Actually, yes, Minister. We have had plenty of examples of men in dresses, since the Gender Recognition Act was passed, getting into women’s spaces and attacking women. We have had men in women’s hostels physically and sexually assault women therein. We have had Barbie Kardashian, who threatened to rape the women he was in prison with, using all kinds of implements in all sorts of inventive ways. Barbie boasted under oath about making those threats, and he has repeated them since he got out of prison.

And, anyway, why should women have to establish, to Jennifer Carroll MacNeill’s satisfaction, that men who want to come into places where women undress might be dangerous? Why can’t women just say “no” to any man, in any garb, who wants to come into women’s spaces? Why are women’s concerns “such nonsense” to our Health Minister?

Sadly, we know from her past form that Carroll MacNeill is unlikely to listen to the voices of women whose views don’t match her own. In 2023, she gave us this lofty solipsism: “Since the gender recognition change in 2015, neither I nor any woman with whom I am personally acquainted has raised the spectre or fact of men coming into women’s places in order to attack them”. I wrote then to Carroll MacNeill to suggest to her that she should widen the circle of women with whom she is personally acquainted and perhaps speak to women who have been in prison or homeless hostels. She ignored me.

THE JUNIOR HEALTH MINISTER

The Junior Minister for Health, with responsibility for mental health services, is Mary Butler TD. Butler appears to be even more committed to the trans agenda than is her boss. Recently, Butler visited Iceland, which the Department of Health stated was a “knowledge exchange” in which she met people from the Icelandic gender healthcare service and people who had “lived experience” of using that service. Iceland is widely regarded as having one of the world’s most unquestioning, affirmative models of trans healthcare. Any Icelander aged over 15 can change their name and legal gender without a medical diagnosis, while children of any age may do so with parental consent. Junior Minister Butler’s “learning” from the visit will, according to the Department of Health statement, “inform the development of a new model of care for gender healthcare in Ireland”.

Butler’s enthusiasm for transing teenagers puzzled me for a long time, as it seemed out of keeping with a previous cause she had championed. In 2018, as a backbench TD (member of the Irish parliament), Mary Butler brought forward a private member’s bill that would have made it illegal to give a tattoo to anyone under 18 (the bill failed for lack of support). Butler’s reasoning was that a person under a certain age is incapable of consenting to a permanent, body-altering procedure, even if that procedure is only skin-deep.

I think Butler is right about tattoos. I have done plenty of broadcast stories in my time with people who have come to regret, in later life, a tattoo they got when they were young and foolish. So how can Butler now support giving teenagers permanent body-altering procedures that go far beyond what is skin-deep?

It turns out that Butler has a trans-identified teenage daughter, or, as she puts it, a son. Butler has fully supported her child’s wish to change sex and says we “damage” such children when we don’t use the pronouns they want. And now Butler, as Junior Health Minister, seeks to extend the same approach she has taken with her own child to all other children in Ireland who might come to think that they are not the sex into which they were born.

Butler often talks about her own child when she speaks publicly on trans. In a tearful address to the Dáil in June 2025, Butler told us “there is no replacing lived and living experience in the crafting of good policy”. So the fact that Butler has such experience enables her, to her own satisfaction at least, to trump any argument put up against policy crafted by her.

Butler’s immediate boss, Health Minister Carroll MacNeill, has declared her approval of her junior minister’s trans healthcare plans, but getting approval for those plans at cabinet level will be harder. The present government is less amenable to trans demands than was its predecessor. The coalition in power now includes an alliance of a dozen or so rural-based TDs. Rural Ireland is less credulous of transgenderism than is young, urban, middle-class Ireland. Farmers know you need a bull and a cow to make a calf, and no animal changes sex. So I think if Carroll MacNeill and Butler take their plans to the cabinet for an Icelandic-type, transgender healthcare model for Ireland, they will be frustrated.

But that’s not the end of the story. In October 2025, Butler said that she was “working behind the scenes to deliver healthcare support for young trans people”, adding that this was “very hard to speak openly about”. What’s Butler up to? Much of the advance of transgenderism in Ireland has been achieved “behind the scenes” with little or no prior public scrutiny having taken place. Whatever Butler might be planning, we won’t let that happen this time.

THE OPPOSITION

The main opposition party in Ireland is Sinn Féin. Like the Government, Sinn Féin has ditched large parts of its trans agenda in recent years. It has had to.

Sinn Féin is in a complicated position: it is a party in power in Northern Ireland, part of a devolved, power-sharing government within the United Kingdom, while it is in opposition in the Republic of Ireland. When, in 2024, the British Government banned the use of puberty blockers for teenagers, following the damning findings of the Cass report, Sinn Féin immediately caved and supported the extension of that ban to Northern Ireland, even though this directly contradicted Sinn Féin’s policy. The reason Sinn Féin did this is that they knew that most of their voters in Northern Ireland would support the ban, so Sinn Féin weren’t going to fight the British on that one. Sinn Féin has now partitioned itself on transgender healthcare; it supports a puberty blocker ban in Northern Ireland but not in the Republic of Ireland.

Just months after its puberty-blocker debacle, Sinn Féin was faced with another dilemma arising from a development in Britain. In April of 2025, the British Supreme Court ruled that men can’t turn into women. Sinn Féin knew that most Irish people, in both states in Ireland, would agree with the British Supreme Court on this, rather than with Irish law (which Sinn Féin supports), which says that a man turns into a woman if he says he is one. The party’s conundrum was compounded when, a few hours after the British Supreme Court ruling was issued, Sinn Féin’s Health Spokesman, Deputy David Cullinane, on a solo run, took to X (Twitter) to say that the British court’s “ruling on the legal meaning of woman is a common-sense judgment”. We can only imagine the phone call Cullinane got from his aghast party leader after that. Within hours, Cullinane had deleted his comment and, in words no doubt dictated to him from party headquarters, he profusely apologised on X for the “hurt” he had caused to the trans community.

But the damage was done. The trans activists disinvited Sinn Féin from their upcoming Pride celebrations. Sinn Féin could live with that. For Sinn Féin, taking a pro-trans stance was all very well when it seemed like a low-cost way to augment their traditional, working-class voter base with a new, young, well-educated, middle-class one, but they were never going to abandon the former for the latter. They had shown this the previous year when they ruthlessly sidelined their trans supporters when the party judged it to be politically expedient to do a policy pivot on puberty blockers. But the longer-term problem for Sinn Féin is that the Left-wing parties, with whose support they aspire to one day form a government in the Republic of Ireland, are, unlike Sinn Féin, committed to the trans agenda in dead earnest.

With this in mind, at the beginning of this year, 2026, the Sinn Féin leader, Mary Lou McDonald, gave an interview, ostensibly to clarify where her party stands on the transgender issue, in which she uses all her powers of verbal ambiguity to clarify as little as she possibly can.

McDonald calls for “calm, cop on and common sense”, which I’m sure no-one could disagree with, whatever it’s supposed to mean. Party policy on puberty blockers is, she says, to listen to medical advice, but she doesn’t explain how, having listened to that advice, the party supports a ban on these drugs in one of the states in Ireland but not in the other.

On letting men into what were once women-only spaces, such as women’s prisons, public toilets, and so on, McDonald says we should “come through that prism on a case-by-case basis”. So if we are to take McDonald seriously, women are expected to argue, on a case-by-case basis, what it might be about any particular man who wants to get into their changing room that would make them want to keep him out.

McDonald lashes out at those who, she says, seek to “divide, to demonise and marginalise… using rhetoric which has sparked a growing sense of fear within Ireland’s LGBTQ+ community”. McDonald is in her comfort zone here. Demonising us gender-critical types is easy. It commits her to nothing, and it will go down well with the trans activists. But it’s not going to fool them. Those activists know that Sinn Féin is not the ally they once believed it to be. And it’s not going to impress the Left-wing parties who expect more from Sinn Féin than just rhetoric if they are to support them in getting into government.

McDonald says this about her trans-identified brother: “On the gender issue, with my own sister, of course, we’ve had conversations. We don’t have public policy discussions, but, like anyone else, your lived experience matters.” So Mary Lou McDonald is no Mary Butler. Butler, you will recall, tells us of her trans-identified family member, that “there is no replacing lived and living experience in the crafting of good policy”. McDonald says her brother’s “lived experience” doesn’t lead her to consult with him on party policy. I believe McDonald. If McDonald’s brother feels aggrieved over not being allowed into women’s toilets, or over whatever rights he feels he is currently being denied, that’s not going to unduly trouble Sinn Féin. That’s not what Sinn Féin is about.

Reminding Sinn Féin what they are really about is, I think, what Mary Lou McDonald is doing when she says people need to “cop on” about the trans issue. The “people” she is addressing are her own party members. They need to cop on that trans is something the party needs only ever pretend to care about when it seems to be to their political advantage to do so, but it must never be allowed to hinder the path of Sinn Féin into government, which is what the party is really about.

I don’t think this duplicity from Sinn Féin is going to work. The Left-wing alliance they hope to lead is doomed because the Left no longer believes what Sinn Féin says about trans. Here’s what one Left-wing TD, Ruth Coppinger, had to say, when speaking in the Dáil in December of 2025: “…on trans healthcare… I heard Sinn Féin Deputies talking in riddles…. I say to the Sinn Féin Members not to wait for clinicians. It is trans people themselves who understand their needs.”

What Coppinger is calling for here describes the reckless and barbaric approach of medicating gender-confused teenagers on demand that was Sinn Féin policy until quite recently. But now that Sinn Féin, for electoral reasons, has backed away from that position and resorted instead to talking in riddles, it will never again be able to satisfy the demands of trans zealots like Coppinger.

And it’s not just in healthcare that the Left’s trans demands have grown insatiable. Women will not be allowed women-only spaces of any sort if the Left-wing parties have their way. When, in 2022, I started podcasting the voices of women who have been physically and sexually assaulted by trans-ID men in women’s spaces, the above-mentioned Ruth Coppinger took to social media to tell her followers that I was “spreading hate”. No, Deputy Coppinger. I am giving voice to women who would remain silenced if you had your way. If you think it is “spreading hate” to want to protect women from gendered violence, then you have lost the ability to tell right from wrong.

The next general election in the Republic of Ireland is due to take place by the year 2029 at the latest. My own view is that if Sinn Féin should then succeed in getting into government, it will be through forming a coalition not with the Left but with one of the centre-right parties currently in government (that would be with Fianna Fáil rather than with Fine Gael, for reasons dating back to the Irish Civil War of 1922/1923).

If Sinn Féin persists in courting the trans-obsessed Left, it will remain a party in opposition.

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