The New Irish Government is Backing Off Trans, Moving Toward Evidence-based Policies.

Paddy O'Gorman's Letters from Ireland

Feb 26, 2025

Genspect is delighted to welcome back journalist Paddy O’Gorman to Inspecting Gender with his Letter from Ireland. A celebrated radio and television broadcaster in Ireland, Paddy has earned multiple awards for his work and now brings his distinctive voice to paddyspodcast.ie.

New Government Cooling on Trans Issues

When Simon Harris became Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) in April 2024, we noted at the time that he was the first person to have ever assumed that office to have pronouns in his social media profile. In the new Irish government, recently formed, Harris is now Tánaiste (deputy prime minister). Harris has removed the he/him from his page on Linked In. The change is significant. The incoming government is not greatly different in make-up from the last government; it is once again a coalition built around the two main centre-right parties. But the new government has radically reversed its predecessor’s support for the trans agenda.

The 2020 programme for government looked like it had been written by trans activists. It pledged to “create and implement a general health policy for Trans people, based on a best-practice model for care, in line with the World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare (WPATH).” Simon Harris, as Health Minister, appointed a trans activist (a trans-identified woman) to the Health Service Executive steering committee for the development of transgender health services. Harris then wrote to that committee to express his “expectation” that it would “ensure (that) compliance with WPATH is happening in practice.” When it came to healthcare for gender-questioning young people, whatever the clinicians might decide, the government believed it knew best.

The HSE did as the government told it to and, accordingly, gender-questioning children and young people were referred to Crumlin Children’s Hospital in Dublin for gender-affirming treatment and thence, in some cases, on to the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This caused the two leading clinicians involved in transgender healthcare in Ireland, Professor Donal O’Shea, and psychiatrist Dr Paul Moran of the National Gender Service, to publicly challenge the HSE which, they said, was “in thrall to the gender-affirming Model of Care promoted by transgender activists”. This HSE approach, said O’Shea and Moran, can damage children and can lead to inappropriate medical treatment for patients presenting with gender identity issues. The HSE rejected the views of the two clinicians.

But now the new government has backed down and has, in effect, conceded the clinicians were right. In the Programme for Government 2025, the endorsement of WPATH by the previous government has been dropped and been replaced by a commitment to a “gender healthcare service that is based on clinical evidence, respect, inclusiveness and compassion.” Dr Paul Moran tells us that he “welcome(s) that the Programme for Government reflects the step back from a radical approach to gender care that is happening around the globe. It is more complicated than the activists would lead you to believe, so we welcome the commitment to evidence-based care. The WPATH model of care was not evidence-based and that has been shown by the Hilary Cass report.” I think all of us in the gender critical movement will join with Dr Moran in welcoming the government’s retreat from its previous support for WPATH and “affirmative” transgender healthcare.

The government has dropped its 2020 commitment to make it easier for children to legally change their sex. In Ireland, since 2015, it has been possible for a person over 18 to get a gender recognition certificate (GRC) by simply declaring a “solemn intention to live in the preferred gender”. Currently, for people aged 16 to 18 it is necessary to first get two specialist reports before a GRC is granted. The 2020 programme for government said this restriction on the granting of GRCs to teenagers would be dropped and that, furthermore, the government would “examine (GRC) arrangements for children under 16”. Now this madness is over. Easier access to GRCs for children and teenagers has gone from the incoming government’s stated plans.

The pronouns and the non-binary stuff are gone, too. In 2020 there was a promise to “take positive steps, including the use of correct pronouns and, where possible, making improvements on official forms, to assist non-binary people”. Whatever that meant, it is gone now. And the commitment to get civil servants to use preferred pronouns has also vanished.

The only remnant of the government’s trans agenda of 2020 is the commitment to “advance legislation to ban conversion practices”. What this actually means remains as vague as ever. If they want to ban quack “cures” for homosexuality let them do it, but no-one can find any evidence of this type of quackery actually being practised in Ireland; the most they can ever come up with is stories about prayer meetings being held by immigrant families asking God to make their son or daughter stop being gay. Since you can’t make it illegal for people to pray, what is this conversion therapy ban really about? The trans lobby, in a trojan-horse-tactic of the sort that we have become used to, slips in “gender identity” along with sexual orientation when describing what types of conversion should be banned. This could mean, in effect, that any clinician who may not immediately endorse a gender-confused person’s wish to have healthy body parts cut off could be deemed guilty of practising conversion therapy. But I do not think the government wants to have that fight. I expect they will do nothing about banning conversion therapy, in the same way they did nothing about it during the last five years in which they were in power. Most likely they will duck the issue again and, if challenged, will crawl into the cracks of their own verbal ambiguity about what they have actually been promising.

The Opposition Back-pedals on Trans

We can also be confident that the opposition will not be holding the new government to account for its broken promises. Sinn Fein, the main opposition party, has been abandoning its trans promises as quickly as the government parties. In Northern Ireland, in 2024, the party abruptly changed its previous position of supporting the use of puberty blockers. When the British Government banned these drugs in response to the Cass review, the devolved government in Northern Ireland banned them too, much to the dismay of trans activists who had, until then, been Sinn Fein supporters.

Sinn Fein once unreservedly endorsed the most extreme trans demands. A policy document from 2018 stated, “legal gender recognition for persons under 16 should not be conditional upon medical consent.” That document is now gone from the party website. They have also deleted a document calling for transgender surgery to not be deemed “elective;” in other words, Sinn Fein wanted this surgery to be available free of charge. Sinn Fein do not want to talk about trans rights anymore.

The Troubling Women Trans Allies in Government

What worries me most about the new government is the women. For some reason I cannot explain, it was the female politicians in the last government who were the most vocal in support of trans demands and those women are all present again in the new government.

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill was a junior minister in the last government. She dismissed concerns about how the granting of GRCs might affect women’s safety with 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 to MacNeill to suggest her view might change if she made the acquaintance of women who have been in prison or homeless hostels where they have experienced violence and sexual assault from trans-identified men. She ignored me. Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has been elevated to the post of Minister for Health in the new government.

When Norma Foley was Minister for Education in the last government, children in Irish schools got to learn that their sex was assigned at birth and that men can become pregnant. Foley scornfully dismissed the concerns expressed by parents about this type of disinformation being inflicted upon their kids. Norma Foley is Minister for Children in the new government.

When Helen McEntee was Justice Minister in the last government, she repeatedly made much of her commitment to combat what she called gendered violence, that is man-on-woman violence, through the provision of safe refuges for women. I wrote to McEntee more than once to ask her if she would keep trans-ID men out of these refuges. (I have written previously on Inspecting Gender about the violence and intimidation that women suffer from such men in homeless hostels.) McEntee ignored me. Helen McEntee is Minister for Education in the new government.

In 2018 as a backbench TD (member of the Irish parliament), Mary Butler, brought forward a private member’s bill which would have made it illegal to give a tattoo to anyone under the age of 18 (the bill would fail 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, albeit only a skin-deep one. I think Butler was right about tattoos; I have done plenty of television and radio work in my time about the regret that people have in later life over a tattoo they got when they were young and foolish. So, imagine my puzzlement, and dismay, when Butler emerged in recent years as a champion of trans demands, including the provision of body-altering procedures that go far beyond what is only skin-deep. It turns out that Butler has a trans-identified teenage daughter, or, as she puts it, a trans son. Butler is calling for more “support” for kids who say they are trans and says we “damage” such children when we do not use the pronouns that they want. In the new government, Mary Butler is the minister with responsibility for mental health services.

Of those four women ministers and junior ministers I have mentioned, I think the commitment of MacNeill, Foley and McEntee to supporting trans demands will prove to be just as expendable as it has proven to be for their male colleagues; as the wind of public opinion changes, they will change too. Mary Butler, I suspect, will be different. Butler sincerely believes what she is saying, and I can only hope that she will come to reflect upon where she stands and will change her mind.

Trans Agenda in Reverse in Ireland and World-wide

So, what has made government and opposition in Ireland shift against the trans agenda? It is because the politicians are learning that endorsing trans demands has consequences and the public are waking up to what those consequences are. The election of Donald Trump in the USA has taught a lesson to politicians everywhere. The USA’s Democratic Party had allowed itself to become captured by trans ideology; it was all about being kind and inclusive, those trojan horses that we mentioned earlier. But when people saw men in women’s sports and in women’s public toilets, the most conspicuous examples of what was happening, they saw the trans insanity for what it is. Trump used the public’s disquiet to devastating effect in getting himself elected. President Trump’s fightback against trans demands is popular in the USA and beyond. There has long been a sense of attachment to the USA’s Democratic Party; President John F Kennedy is still widely remembered with love. Talk to Irish people now and they are backing Trump on trans.

And the good news keeps coming. As we noted in the last letter I wrote to you from Ireland, the main difference between the new Irish government and the one it has replaced is that the Green Party is no longer part of that government. The Greens were sincerely attached to the trans agenda. The demise of the Greens has made it easier for the two centre-right parties in government to shake off that agenda which, as they are now showing, they were never attached to in the first place. In the new coalition, the Greens have been replaced as the third element of government by a loose alliance of a dozen or so independent TDs who are of rural and farming backgrounds. We expected this to be good news for us in the gender-critical movement, and signs are that this is the case.

One of those Independent TDs is Carol Nolan who represents the constituency of Offaly in the Irish midlands. Deputy Nolan has expressed her support for President Trump’s Executive Order banning men from women’s sports in the USA and she has called for the same thing to be done in Ireland. Nolan says Ireland “must have the courage to point out the blatantly obvious; allowing full grown biological men to compete with young women or girls is nothing short of ludicrous.”

That sounds so good, to hear the blatantly obvious spoken aloud. It is like we are finally waking up from a bad dream.

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