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 removin.
