{"id":94743,"date":"2025-09-30T13:20:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T13:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/94743\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T13:20:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T13:20:10","slug":"ryan-casey-presidential-debate-infuriating-to-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/94743\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Casey: Presidential debate \u2018infuriating to watch’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ryan Casey, the boyfriend of murdered school teacher and musician, Ashling Murphy, has hit out at the first presidential debate as \u201cutterly embarrassing and infuriating to watch.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Casey, who settled a defamation case against the BBC in July over comments made about his victim impact statement, said that \u201cspoiling your vote is far more powerful than not voting at all\u201d in the wake of the debate, broadcast last night on Virgin Media.<\/p>\n

In his victim impact statement,<\/a><\/strong> the partner of the well-known and highly-regarded traditional musician who was killed in Tullamore in January 2022, said: \u201cIt just sickens me to the core that someone can come to this country, be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over 10 years \u2013 over 10 years \u2013 never hold down a legitimate job and never once contribute to society in any way shape or form [and] can commit such a horrendous, evil act of incomprehensible violence on such a beautiful, loving and talented person who in fact, worked for the State, educating the next generation and represented everything that is good about Irish society.\u201d<\/p>\n

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He also said: \u201cI feel like this country is no longer the country that Ashling and I grew up in and has officially lost its innocence when a crime of this magnitude can be perpetrated in broad daylight. This country needs to wake up, this time things have got to change, we have to once and for all start putting the safety of not only Irish people but everybody in this country who works hard, pays taxes, raises families and overall contributes to society first.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Taking to social media last night, Mr Casey described the presidential election \u2013 which has just three candidates on the ballot, the smallest field in a presidential election since 1990 \u2013 as \u201cundemocratic,\u201d and \u201cnot what the people of Ireland deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a young Irish citizen and taxpayer, tonight was utterly embarrassing and infuriating to watch,\u201d he said, criticising the lack of an independent candidate on the ballot.<\/p>\n

\u2018UNRELATABLE, SHALLOW, PUPPET CANDIDATES\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u201cThis is why Fianna F\u00e1il, Fine Gael, and so many of our TDs and local county councillors undemocratically blocked highly popular presidential candidates like Nick Delehanty and Maria Steen from getting on the ballot, as they would have ripped these three utterly incompetent, unrelatable, shallow, puppet candidates to shreds with their common sense, wit, intelligence, relatability and willingness to bring to light in the correct manner what challenges we are truly facing as a country and what we can do about it. Unlike these three, they would have coherently answered the questions being asked.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI wholeheartedly urge everyone who still believes in true democracy, true freedom and the right to have your voices heard to turn up to your local polling stations in huge numbers on October 24th and spoil your vote as a protest to government for undemocratically blocking candidates that they feared would win,\u201d Mr Casey wrote.<\/p>\n

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He continued: \u201cThe brave men and women who fought and gave their lives for us to have the right to vote for who we want to lead our country are turning in their graves right now looking at what our current government has done to our Presidential election. It is insane, it is out of control and it is only going to get worse.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Urging people to \u201cjust ask yourself simple questions,\u201d Mr Casey added: \u201cDo we have a housing crisis? Do we have a health care system crisis? Are our hospitals and GP\u2019s overloaded? Do we have enough hospital beds?<\/p>\n

\u201cAre our most vulnerable children getting the health care treatment they need in time? Are our schools bursting at the seams? Are you happy with mass unvetted immigration? Are you happy that we have over 15,000 homeless people in Ireland?<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you happy that over 5,000 of them are children? Have we a cost of living crisis?<\/p>\n

Does Ireland feel as safe as it did 10\/15 years ago? Are you happy with the new primary school education plan? Are you happy with how our government have spent and are continuing to spend our money?<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you happy with the level of work your local councillors and elected TD\u2019s are doing for you and your local community? Are you happy with the overall current direction our country is heading? If not, we have to start somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cTo spoil your vote, simply write the name of who you really wanted to vote for on the ballot and place a tick beside their name, leaving the others blank. In 2018, there were over 18,000 spoiled votes, let\u2019s make that number seem small.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpoiling your vote is far more powerful than not voting at all. Inform your friends, family members and anyone you can as this can truly be a statement to government that this year\u2019s presidential election is undemocratic and not what the people of Ireland deserve.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cPlease share this post and start the conversation,\u201d Mr Casey added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ryan Casey, the boyfriend of murdered school teacher and musician, Ashling Murphy, has hit out at the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[22056,61182,9,10,18,13,14,6,19,56,17,11,12,15,16,5,790,60442,61183,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-94743","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-aras","9":"tag-ashling-murphy","10":"tag-breaking-news","11":"tag-breakingnews","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-featured-news","14":"tag-featurednews","15":"tag-headlines","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-immigration","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-latest-news","20":"tag-latestnews","21":"tag-main-news","22":"tag-mainnews","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-politics","25":"tag-presidential-debate","26":"tag-ryan-casey","27":"tag-top-stories","28":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}